Chapter 11 is the first of two that explains why Britain industrialized and why China and India did not. They provide a non-Eurocentric answer to the famous ‘Needham problem’, which boils down to asking ‘why China (and to an extent India), which had been a pioneer of technological development for over two millennia failed to industrialize whereas Britain, which had been a laggard for several millennia, succeeded? To answer this I bring out surprising resemblances and differences in the ‘developmental architectures’ of the three aforementioned countries, which factors in state-society relations and the modes of: production, empire, warfare, taxation and epistemic construction. In this chapter, I argue that differing global and domestic contexts can account for the ‘second great divergence’ in cotton-textile production. In essence, my solution to the ‘Needham problem’ is two-fold: first, neither China nor India were on a trajectory into a cotton-based industrial capitalism owing to the nature of their developmental architectures, especially the nature of their systems of production and class relations. Second, there was neither a desire nor a need to industrialize partly because there was an absence of imperial- and global-economic pressures and partly because these societies were ‘historical capitalist satisficers’.

Chapter 12 follows on from chapter 11, focussing on the ‘second great divergence’ in iron/steel production. The first comparison focuses on the key differences between Britain and China, the first of which, following Pomeranz, is that Britain had access to cheap coal and invented the steam engine that enabled the mass production of iron and steel. Second, Britain benefited significantly from the economic exploitation of its Atlantic colonies whereas China’s land-based empire yielded no economic benefits. Third, although both Britain and China were embedded in multi-state systems, nevertheless the East/Southeast Asian was largely cooperative thereby keeping China’s military spending to super-low levels. The competitive European state system, by contrast, led to frequent and highly expensive wars between imperial great power rivals. Britain’s super-high military spending, paradoxically, had major economic benefits for industrialization. Finally, the nature of Chinese warfare did not require the industrialization of her iron/steel sectors whereas Britain’s did. The second half compares Mysore in India (South Asia) with Britain, arguing that the former spent much lower amounts on warfare, that Mysore was unable to use coal, that Mysorean state intervention undermined the prospects for industrialization and that, overall, unlike Britain’s, Mysore’s developmental architecture was primed for historical capitalism.