WHITTIER COLLEGE'S HISTORIAN of late imperial China, Robert Marks, does less than he promises here – and he does it so well that the reader wishes for more. Offering a “brief history of the origins of the modern world” (p. 1), he gives us an extended essay that perhaps omits too much of the human past to be called a history of origins. At the same time, he convincingly discredits the standard Eurocentric narrative of mainstream historians, replacing it with a balanced story that places Asia at the centre prior to the 1800s and Europe (then, America) at the centre thereafter.

The disciplinary focus of Origins is economic history; the geographical concentrations are China and India in Asia, and England in the Western Hemisphere; chronologically, the work begins in the fifteenth century and ends at 1900. While one sometimes wishes for greater breadth – for a serious look at Japan, for example, or for more on cultural and political history generally – the very concentration makes the work effective in achieving its main goal: showing us the fallacies of the old models and providing a compelling alternative.

Marks begins with a summary of the standard “rise of the West” narrative, which portrays “the West as dynamic, forward looking, progressive, and free, and Asia as stagnating, backward, and despotic” (p. 4). He then develops a five-chapter chronological narrative based on an alternative vision. And he does this in a cogent, accessible style grounded in key historical concepts such as contingency, conjuncture and accident.

The book is particularly effective in portraying the economic dominance of China and India through the 1700s. It shows the Indian Ocean as the “most important crossroads for global exchanges of goods, ideas, and culture” in 1500, when Europe was “a peripheral, marginal player trying desperately to gain access to the sources of wealth generated in Asia” (p. 43). Marks backs up with rich evidence his depiction of traditional China's technological and naval superiority, of the “well-developed market systems” in premodern Asia (during what he calls the “biological old regime”), of the superior quality of Indian cottons and the inability of British textile manufacturers to compete without government protection.