Throughout the 18th Century, outmoded systems of thought and belief, which had long denied the realities of a changing world, were suddenly and violently challenged by impatient reformers. Hardly restricted to Western Europe, this tendency for explosive change was still best illustrated there. While the profligate spending of the Ch'ien-lung emperor would destabilize China's economy with the same devastation that the French kings inflicted on the finances of France, China's resulting descent into economic subservience to Europe did not have the symbolic intensity of the French Revolution's guillotine.

      Even though Japan and England both experienced pressure to abandon established agricultural social orders, Japan's domestic unrest and gradual governmental policy shifts were not symbolized by the factories and steam engines of the British Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, the sweeping changes that washed across the West in such dissimilar forms as textile mills and the American Declaration of Independence, were ultimately felt as deeply, if less clearly, elsewhere around the globe.