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The Era of Chinese Predominance,
1000–1500
Remarkable changes came to
Chinese industry and armaments after about A.D. 1000, anticipating
European achievements by several hundred years. Yet new patterns of
production, even when they had attained massive scale, eventually
broke up as remarkably as they had arisen. Government policy
altered, and the social context that first fostered change subsequently
resisted or at least failed to encourage, further innovation. China
therefore lost its leading place in industry, power politics, and war.
Previously marginal, half-barbarous lands—Japan to the east and
Europe far to the west—supplanted the Mongol rulers of China as the
most formidable wielders of weapons in the world.
Yet before China’s preeminence over other civilizations faded, a
new and powerful wind of change began to blow across the southern
seas that connected the Far East with India and the Middle East. I refer
to an intensified flow of goods and movement of persons responding
mainly to market opportunities. In seeking riches or a mere liveli
hood, a growing swarm of merchants and peddlers introduced into
human affairs far more pervasive changeability than earlier centuries
had ever known.
China’s remarkable growth in wealth and technology was based
upon a massive commercialization of Chinese society itself. It there
fore seems plausible to suggest that the upsurge of market-related
behavior that ranged from the sea of Japan and the south China seas to
the Indian Ocean and all the waters that bathe the coasts of Europe
took decisive impetus from what happened in China. In this fashion,
one hundred million people,^1 increasingly caught up within a com-
- This is the population total suggested by Ping-ti Ho, “An Estimate of the Total
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