Although he stresses accidents, Pomeranz does not reject large-scale explanations. Instead it was the unintended consequences of New World colonization that mobilized them to solve Europe's ecological crisis, and European chartered trade companies were the Panda's Thumbs that collected these resources. Created not for accumulating capital, but for conquest, these quasi-private entities were given free reign to engage in the piracy and commerce needed to compete with more experienced and efficient Asian traders and run Caribbean plantations. Only much later did this organizational form, transmuted into the corporation, become the most efficient method of mobilizing capital for large industrial enterprises. These trading companies projected European interstate rivalries overseas, connecting the European state system to global economic dominance.
Military competition is universal, and China was no pacifist empire either.
Where Europeans stood out was in the active protection of their commercial representatives abroad. China, by contrast, did not use its vast state power to protect merchants who settled in Southeast Asia, even when they were massacred by rivals. Here geopolitical strategy enters the economic story. Chinese dynasties from the fifteenth century on focused nearly all their military attention on Central Eurasia, where the nomadic warrior was the main threat. Other merchants had little strategic importance.