In the middle of the 19th century, a storm struck East Asia. It arose in the West, and came at first mainly from Britain. The role of America was subsidiary, but it grew as the storm went on, and helped to spread it. In the 20th century, America was to have much the greater impact on Asia, and Asia on America. But until about 1900 Europe set the pace.

Europeans and Asians had been in touch with each other for a long time. Herodotus mentions a Greek called Aristeas of Proconnesus who travelled to Central Asia in the 5th century BC and heard about a people called the Hyperboreans ‘who reach to the sea’. If these were the Chinese, it is interesting that, according to Aristeas, each of the peoples he encountered encroached on its neighbour, except the Hyperboreans. There is no written record of any direct contact in classical times. Alexander's career of conquest took him and his armies as far east as Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he seems not to have heard of China. It was the Chinese who made the expeditions to Central Asia that led to the opening of the silk trade, probably in the 1st century BC. The Romans came to love silk, and were willing to pay for it with gold and silver, even when it became clear that this was affecting their own economy. The trade prospered, as did the peoples along the silk route, until some Persian monks of the Nestorian faith (an Asian form of Christianity) smuggled the eggs of the silk worm out of China in the 6th century AD, and silk production began in the Levant. Contact between Europe and Asia seems to have fallen off, especially after the eruption of Islam in the 7th century. The backward remnant of the Roman Empire in the West was left isolated and embattled, but slowly rallied round the Church, and began to fight back. The Crusades led the Papacy to look for allies in Asia, about the time when the conquests of the Mongols, led by Chinggis Khan, were opening Central Asia to Europeans again.