Chapter 19
China was among the countries that confronted an aggressive and industrializing West while maintaining its formal independence. They shared their colonized counterparts with four dimensions of the European moment in world history. First they faced that the military might have political ambitions of rival European states. Second they became enmeshed in networks of trade, investment, and sometimes migration that arose from an industrializing and capitalist. Third they were touched by various aspects of traditional European cultures. Some of them learned French, English, German, and studied European literature and philosophy. Population growth and peasant rebellion wracked China. In 1793, the Chinese rejected the request of Britain for open trade. In many ways China was the victim of its own earlier success. The economy and the American food crops had enabled substantial population growth, from a bout 100 million people in 1685 to some 430 million in 1853. In Europe, the population was similar. There wasn't any Industrial Revolution. And Chinas expansion to the West and South generated anything like the wealth and resources that derived from Europe's overseas empires. Chinas famed centralized and bureaucratic state didn't enlarge itself to keep pace with the growing population. Like China, the Islamic world was a really successful civilization. Islamic civilization had been near neighbor to Europe for 1,000 years. The Ottoman Empire had governed some parts of Balkans and posed a clear military and religious threat to Europe in the 16th and 17th century.