Vries sees many reasons why this was unlikely. Consider the four features that made England take off: they are all reversed in the case of China. China’s labor was cheap, energy and money were expensive. Chinese government was weak, paternalistic and unable to collect taxes. China had no army to speak about and was not engaged in military operations beyond its borders
1. Capitalist emergence as a dynamic of accumulation that creates a self-sustaining, integrated national economy (Wood);
2. Capitalist emergence as a dynamic of accumulation that creates an expanding world economy (Braudel et al.);
3. Anievas and N?sancioglu’s geo-political model where the dynamic of capitalism figures less as ‘many capitals’ than in the transmuted form of ‘many states’; and finally,
4. Beckert’s recent global history of the cotton textile industry.
Liberals often brush aside the history of colonialism as if it had nothing to do with their ideals. But without the intrinsic connection between the utopia of commercial society and liberalism’s civilizing mission, we fail to understand why even progressive liberals like Mill and Tocqueville (who did not necessarily condone capitalism) are committed to exterminating barbarians