It is national sovereignty that has given China and India their edge

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1572100,00.html

Until 1945, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and large tracts of east Asia were ruled from Europe: China was the only large exception, though for many decades parts of it were also under foreign rule, mainly Japanese. The nation-state, which the west takes utterly for granted as part of its birthright, did not lie within the compass of experience of most peoples and cultures. We forget what a novel experience the nation-state is for the majority of the world. After 1945, with the collapse of the European empires, the number of nation-states tripled. That is not much more than half a century ago; in terms of the history of western Europe, it is little more than yesterday.

It was rightly argued by another columnist on these pages that the transformation of India and China offers the most remarkable possibilities in the modern world; however, he attributed this simply to the collapse of communism and their joint embrace of the market. There are two problems with this argument. First, it writes off several decades of postwar history when both these countries made serious economic advances, which helped to lay the basis for their more recent accelerated growth rates; this is certainly true of China, for example, between 1949 and 1978. Second, and rather more fundamentally, it turns a blind eye to the colonial experience.

Before 1950 such an economic transformation - any kind of economic transformation - was impossible. Colonial rule involved the subjugation of the interests of the colony to those of the imperial power. The last thing that the European powers wanted was to allow their colonies to develop an industrial capacity and, as a consequence, become competitors for their own domestic producers. That is why industrial development in so many of Europe's colonies was so sparse and so stunted.

As CA Bayly points out in The Birth of the Modern World, the urban population in the British and French empires in Asia and Africa remained stuck at around 10% of the total in 1900, more or less the same as it had been in the pre-colonial period, a reflection of their frozen economic development. He also suggests living standards in these colonies may have fallen over the course of the 19th century. In other words, national independence was a precondition for the economic development of the former colonies. Without it, virtually nothing was possible. Imagine what India would be like today if it were still under the British Raj; or China, indeed, if a large slice of its territory was still occupied by the Japanese, and the western powers controlled most of its big cities. The most important factor that constrained the development of vast tracts of the planet was colonialism. By the same token the most important factor in transforming their possibilities was freedom from colonial rule.