Central Asia and the Major Colonial Powers in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The eighteenth-century world underwent vast changes due to the impact of industrialization, a rise in trade and rivalry among the major powers. Large factories and plants in the industrial countries began producing a wide range of products at increasingly competitive prices. Many goods that had traditionally been imported to Europe, such as textiles, began to be machine-produced in Europe, thus undermining small-scale manufacturing in Asia and the Middle East. Many formerly prosperous manufacturing centers across the Chinese, Mogul, Persian and Ottoman empires experienced a deep economic recession. This in turn led to increasing poverty in many of those places.