In the more early ages of the world, whilst the forest that covered Europe afforded a retreat to a few wandering savages, the inhabitants of Asia were already collected into populous cities, and reduced under extensive empires, the seat of the arts, of luxury, and of despotism.

European overseas imperialism profoundly transformed virtually every corner of the planet from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. European culture, from its creation myths to its musical heritage, sometimes blended with and sometimes overwhelmed the traditions of the rest of the world. The oft- repeated image of black Senegalese children reading aloud in French, "Our ancestors the Gauls had blond hair and blue eyes," effectively captures the spirit of cultural imperialism. An elite class of Indians became, in some respects, more British than the British themselves. Even in countries that escaped formal European rule, European influence was paramount. The Iranian elite educated its children at French lycees, and Japan became quite Westernized in many respects. European forms of government were adopted in areas in which they were difficult, if not impossible, to sustain; European powers attempted to create nation-states in their own image where none had ever existed. Imperialism brought some benefits to the conquered, such as advanced medicine and freedom from some local tyrannies. It also left a legacy of genocide, racial and cultural tensions, unresolved nationalisms, and other problems. For good and for ill, though, the imperial era created the modern world in Europe's image; one cannot discuss contemporary affairs without reference to it.

But why this explosion of European power? The imperialists themselves suggested that it was due to their self-proclaimed racial, religious, and cultural superiority over the peoples they conquered. They were wrong, of course, though it would require many volumes to comprehensively refute those who still believe in hierarchies of race, religion, or culture. For the purposes of this essay, let us simply note that bringing the Inquisition to the Americas hardly constituted an advance into modernity.

No, the basis of European power in the modern era was Europeans' superior command of technologies. To be sure, European armies and bureaucrats established high levels of organization, which contributed to their success; but so have the minions of every imperial power, be they Chinese, Arab, or Incan. The old French saying about God being on the side of the big battalions is true only if the said battalions are of comparable technological and organizational capabilities--in general, these latter factors predominate. It is only because adversaries so frequently rival one another in technology and organization that this essential fact is neglected. A thought experiment may help to clarify the point: if one were permitted to substitute for the American army of World War II some small fraction of the far better equipped American army of half a century later, they would defeat German and Japanese forces with ease (even without the use of weapons of mass destruction). Though Cortes's conquest of the Aztec Empire was remarkable both for its rapidity and for how few Spanish soldiers were employed in the venture, the final outcome of European victory was inevitable. Guns, horses, and smallpox were bound to triumph over Aztec arrows and infantry in time.

Moreover, European rule was able to be sustained over wide areas in no small part due to advanced systems for communication and transportation. With the advent of the telegraph and railroad, forces could be moved rapidly from one area to another, and small, qualitatively superior, imperial forces could control vast territories. Although advanced European technologies for transportation and communication made colonies possible, they also helped to contribute to the demise of imperialism. Enhanced communications within colonies enabled subject peoples to recognize their common grievances against the ruling power, as well as their numerical strength. Both the American colonies and the Indian subcontinent were united in opposition to British rule in this way. Moreover, gradual improvements in transportation and communications made imperialism increasingly uncomfortable for the governed. British settlers in North America, long accustomed to sparse contacts with the mother country, found British rule increasingly untenable as transatlantic voyages became more frequent.

What is perhaps most surprising about the European mastery of technologies is that a great many of them originated outside Europe, particularly in China. Sir Francis Bacon argued that three inventions had contributed to European domination of the world: the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press. All three were first invented in the Chinese Empire. The late Sir Joseph Needham, a British Sinologist, spent a lifetime demonstrating how traditional Chinese society attained a relatively sophisticated scientific and technological repertoire. For the great majority of China's history, it lived up to its sobriquet: it was "the Middle Kingdom" by which all neighbors were measured and which constituted the center of the world. The China which Marco Polo visited was a land of wonders, far more advanced than the Europe he had left. Chinese scholarship and philosophy were emulated throughout Asia, an Asia that largely paid tribute to the Emperor of China. China had efficiently run cities of millions long before Europe or anywhere else; its vast empire was, in good times, efficiently run and relatively peaceful. Contrast this with the endemic warfare experienced by Europe throughout history up until 1945.

Chinese culture was, justifiably, admired and respected for its complexity and insights into human nature. While much of China's greatness in this realm can be attributed to the singular character of Confucius, (just as much of that in the West can be attributed to Plato, Aristotle, Moses, and Jesus), this should not obscure China's many other philosophers, artists, novelists, musicians, and other producers of culture through the millennia. China was a cultural giant, and with the striking exception of Buddhism, its culture was home-grown. China taught the nations around it, making Japan (among others) literate and transferring Confucian ideas throughout East Asia; China learned little from them in turn. Non-Chinese were treated, with some haughtiness, as barbarians. This view is understandable, though not justified, when one considers the relative levels of cultural and material advancement of Chinese civilization compared with those of the rest of the world.

When the Chinese encountered European explorers, missionaries, and traders, they were dismissive of them for several centuries. These hairy, foul-smelling barbarians had evidently traveled a great distance, but Ming-dynasty Chinese ships had sailed as far afield as East Africa. The intruders had a strange faith which they seemed eager to promulgate, but so did the subjugated Muslims of Chinese Turkestan. Their trinkets and gadgets were intriguing, but these were viewed as little more than clever toys. When a British trade mission went to Beijing at the close of the eighteenth century, it was dismissed with some rudeness on the grounds that there was nothing from the external world which China wished to purchase.

China was awakened from its complacency by the sounds of British gunboats in the first Opium War (1839-1842). Europeans in general, and the British in particular, believed that their swift victory stemmed from the inherent superiority of their civilization--racially, religiously, and culturally. Few recognized that their military successes were due to superior command of naval (and related) technologies and strategies. China had been the first to develop gunpowder, but it was used in fireworks rather than warfare. This was not because China was not interested in strengthening its military capacity, but because the use of explosives in war was, to the extent the possibility was perceived, thought ignoble. China had developed considerable civil-engineering expertise in taming its rivers millennia before, and had constructed great oceangoing vessels, but these skills were not utilized to construct a powerful military machine.

A great factor in this lack of military development was some Chinese cultural disdain for soldiers; the same civilization which had produced Sun Tzu, the greatest military theorist in history, respected pure scholarship far more than developing military or economic strengths. Though this generally prevented the establishment of masses of economically unproductive warriors who would draw the lifeblood from the populace (such as existed in medieval Europe, particularly fourteenth-century France) this also contributed to a lack of military preparedness when organized, technically advanced invaders appeared.

Moreover, the Chinese educational system aimed at fashioning bureaucrats, not innovators or technical experts. Such an educational structure had been adequate when China towered over Asia with its sheer size and antiquity of advanced civilization; but it failed when China encountered more adaptive, technologically capable nations. To stagnate while others advance is to decline, and China did so precipitously for most of the modern era: first technically, then economically, and finally politically.

There is a reason for focusing this study of imperialism on China in the context of this book (aside from my intense personal interest in the country). When European civilization encountered the peoples of the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa, the technical disparity was so great that European triumph was inevitable. The history of most imperial conquests demonstrates that it was Western technologies and skills--military and otherwise--that enabled Europeans to conquer the rest of the world, and not the racial, religious, or cultural factors which those Europeans believed made them victorious. China was different because it was, for most of history, more advanced than Europe. Even when the clash of civilizations came, it had a great deal of advanced technology that it could have marshaled for use in the conflict. China's deficit was not in research and development, but in implementation of what it already knew.

By contrast, some non-European states, starting at much lower technical levels, were able to resist European incursions much more effectively. These states were those which incorporated European technologies and strategies into their military traditions. The Ethiopian army, trained by foreign mercenaries and furnished with European arms, defeated Italian incursions in the 1890s. The most dramatic example of non-European resistance, though, was that of the Empire of Japan, which rapidly matched and even exceeded the West in many areas. Traditionally, Japan had been a backwater of Asia. It attained literacy relatively late, and then only by adopting the Chinese writing system wholesale (with few allowances for the almost total dissimilarity of the two spoken languages). Japanese religious and philosophical traditions were, to a great extent, imported from China, with Confucianism and Buddhism absorbed as complementary elements to the native Japanese Shinto cult. Japanese maritime skills were good, as befits an island nation; but these were strictly coastal, not ocean-going. To perceive Japan as a potential master of Asia would appear as ludicrous in its time as to consider medieval England as the potentially dominant state in Europe.

When Europeans arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century, the reception was at first mixed; but perceiving the menace of external forces and the spread of Christianity, Japan slammed its doors shut to the outside world for two centuries. When the world beyond, in the shape of an American ship, forced its way into the Japanese consciousness once more in 1854, Japan was in no position to resist Western power.

But Japan was a nation which had a great tradition of learning from its neighbor, China, and it rapidly mastered Western strengths in technology. Cultural imitation of the West in some areas helped it to attain a modicum of respect by other powers; but this respect would have had to have been accorded anyway upon the first demonstrations of Japanese strength. Japan's savaging of China in 1894-95 was a preliminary step in this direction, though the decisive one came when Japan defeated a European power, namely Russia, a decade later. Subsequent triumphs over German, British, and American forces during the World Wars sustained and secured Japan's reputation.

Japan's rise befuddled contemporary Westerners, since a nation that was not racially, religiously, or culturally Western had managed to match and even exceed Western nations in just fifty years. The key to Japan's success, as it had been in the case of the Europeans themselves, was advanced technology well-utilized. This technology did not need to be home-grown; the European nations had absorbed technologies from China and elsewhere, as well as from one another. It did, however, need to be incorporated into the national fabric. It is not enough to have a handful of skilled technicians or even scientists for a technology to be effectively utilized for societal benefit. Rather, to achieve this end, mastery of a technology must be dispersed through multiple sectors of a society, and that society must be willing to realistically evaluate the potential costs and benefits of implementing that technology.

A contrast between the experiences of China and Japan is didactic in several ways. It demonstrates the primacy of technical advancement in determining the relative power of states. It makes clear that more than an elite command of technologies is essential for them to be properly implemented. And relative technical levels of states are constantly subject to change.

What, then, has this to do with the price of tea in London or Washington? Self-satisfied nations which view others with disdain, and allow themselves to decline technologically relative to other powers, however good their pure science may be, are subject to vast revisions in their relative economic prowess and political influence. The people of Britain have had this lesson inculcated by the bitter winds of historical change, as their country has been in a state of relative decline for a century and a quarter. I only hope that it does not require a similarly chastening experience for my fellow citizens to develop such a consciousness and to take measures to avoid Britain's fate.