Hobson’s prescience is worth savouring: ‘China, passing more quickly than other “lower races” through the period of dependence on Western science and Western capital, and quickly assimilating what they have to give, may re-establish her own economic independence finding out of her own resources the capital and organising skill required for the machine industries and . . . may quickly launch herself upon the world-market as the biggest and most effective competitor, taking to herself first the trade of Asia and the Pacific, and then swamping the free markets of the West, and driving the closed
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