Abstract: Europe’s political contact with the civilizations of India and China began with trade. Dutch merchants opened up trade with the coastal Indian states and then China, and the trade that followed fed a growing European fascination with Asian cultures and aesthetics. From India, European merchants brought textiles, ivory and wooden furniture. From the Middle Kingdom, the blue and white porcelain so ubiquitous in seventeenth century Europe that it became known – and is still known – simply as China. Four hundred years ago India and China accounted for half of the world’s economic output. They remained the two largest economies in the world until the nineteenth century. From an historical perspective, the economic rise of India and China looks more like the reassertion of an older and deeper economic order briefly interrupted by the colonial period, Cold War and economic autarky in the twentieth century. From the perspective of a human lifetime – which is the only perspective that matters in politics – it is nevertheless part of a seismic shift in the global economic architecture and one that will have profound political consequences. We live in an economically multipolar world and global politics will soon reflect this much more explicitly.