europe was a mutant civilisation in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology. Described sometimes as a small promontory of Asia, in its formative stages it borrowed ideas through Islam from as far afield as India and China. In Europe, within even the advanced quadrant of the north-west, the resultant growth was admittedly regionalised; but unlike Asia there was, in essentials, one technological community, a system where change in one cell tended to communicate to the remainder. Cultural connections and the competitive nature of the states system encouraged continual borrowing and the ‘stimulus diffusion’ which meant that if a problem were solved in one country it was assumed it could be solved in another.

Nothing is clearer than that the fires of modernisation and industrialisation, once lighted in Britain and Belgium and the Rhineland, burned quickly to the fringes of this European system. Even Russia and the Christian colonies of the Ottoman empire smouldered. But at the asbestos edge of the Muslim sphere the fires abruptly died. They never took light over most of the non-European world, Europe's overseas annexes excepted. Deliberate European policies, such as the unequal tariffs of the Anglo-Ottoman treaties of 1818 and 1838, sometimes helped to dowse the flames, but this is far from being the whole explanation. Areas unaffected by Europe showed no sign of responding or of spontaneous combustion. Japan was the only successful non-European industrialiser.