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Reviewed by Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy
For most of the last 2,000 years, the great Chinese and Indian empires were the center of world trade and home to the most sophisticated civilizations. Their growing influence in the world today is the rectification of the anomaly that arose in the 1700s as a result of the yawning divergence in per capita income between “the West” and “the rest.” Successive industrial revolutions and waves of colonial conquest created a world in which economic and military power was radically misaligned with population.
Not for nothing, 1900 was the high point of Western racial thought. Although Western public consciousness may have since sought to rid itself of overt racist tropes, it continued to take for granted the anomalous imbalance in economic power between the West and the rest of the world that shaped that thought.
If the economic recovery of China and India was the great shock of the first quarter of the 21st century, the next decades have another revolution in store for us: the astonishing demographic transformation of Africa.
...it is unlikely that Africa will not reach 2.2 billion to 2.5 billion inhabitants by 2050. That means, at midcentury, Africa will likely account for just shy of 25 percent of the global population, more than three times its share in 1914... if we take the United Nations’ central forecast as our collective best guess, we should expect the population of Africa by 2100 to exceed 4.2 billion, at which point Africans will constitute as much as 40 percent of the world’s population.
We talk about the end of globalization because the great surge in trade between Asia and the West may have plateaued, but Africa’s integration into trade and global communications has only just begun. When Nigeria has a population of over 300 million its fortunes matter on the global scale. That population is not confined to the countryside but is increasingly urbanized.