To see how China is managing its growing clout over trade and investment around the world, it might help to take a look at how an economic hegemon evolved in the past – Britain’s colonists in eighteenth and nineteenth-century India.

The first hundred years of Britain’s colonial rule over the subcontinent was in essence contracted out to the East India Company, an outfit of hungry merchant-adventurers with an eye for enriching the company and themselves but not much truck with ideology. Only when the British Crown took over in the nineteenth century did the official doctrines of racial hierarchy and imperial domination come to the fore.

It is tempting to regard China as a commercial hegemon with an official doctrine to match – a “Beijing consensus” of state-directed economic development to challenge the “Washington consensus” of liberal capitalism traditionally promulgated by the US and its satraps, the IMF and World Bank.