Add to ORKGWill this be the Asian century? The economic history of the twentieth century is marked by two important processes. The first is the sheer unstoppable advance of global capitalism. The second is the emergence, or rather, re-emergence of Asia after circa four-hundred years of near-complete submission to Europe and its colonial outposts in North America and Australasia. The phenomenal recovery of postwar Japan along with Southeast Asia’s long economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of first China and then India over the past three decades have lastingly reconfigured the global balance of power. It is in the larger context of these shifting economic and political structures that the question of whether the twenty-first century will ...