The past 500 years of global history have been characterised by changing patterns of global dominance. In the late sixteenth century, China accounted for around 30 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), compared with a share of around 20 per cent for Western Europe and less than 5 per cent for Japan; at that time, North America barely featured as a production base (Dahlman and Aubert 2001).
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western Europe in general (and the UK in particular) grew to dominate the global economy, with their role being supplanted.
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