The century the earth stood still

ONE summer morning this year, the streets of London were thronged with witnesses to a royal procession. Many of them would have seen the queen, dressed in black to mark an untimely death. Elsewhere in the world, the Russian government struggled with economic reforms: having been held back by an inefficient, even barbaric, economic system, Russia had fallen far behind. In the West, Canada and America continued old trade quarrels about fish and timber. And The Economist, in an article on the remarkable growth of China's trade, cautioned that the numbers were incomplete: because so much went through the conduit of Hong Kong, it was hard to tell with whom Chinese commerce was in fact conducted.