Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. Some words have been highlighted for your attention.

Only in international politics had there been an apparently wholesale and virtually unqualified revolution. The world of the 1840s was completely dominated by the European powers, political and economic, supplemented by the growing USA. The Opium War of 1839-42 had demonstrated that the only surviving non-European great power, the Chinese Empire, was helpless in the face of western military and economic aggression. Nothing, it seemed, could henceforth stand in the way of a few western gunboats or regiments bringing with them trade and bibles. And within this general western domination, Britain was supreme, thanks to her possession of more gunboats, trade and bibles than anyone else. So absolute was this British supremacy that it hardly needed political control to operate.

There were no other colonial powers left, except by the grace of the British, and consequently no rivals. The French empire was reduced to a few scattered islands and trading posts, though in the process of reviving itself across the Mediterranean in Algeria. The Dutch, restored in Indonesia under the watchful eye of the new British entrepot of Singapore, no longer competed; the Spaniards retained Cuba, the Philippines and a few vague claims in Africa; the Portuguese colonies were rightly forgotten. British trade dominated the independent Argentine, Brazil and the Southern USA as much as the Spanish colony of Cuba or the British ones in India. British investments had their powerful stake in the Northern USA, and indeed wherever economic development took place. Never in the entire history of the world has a single power exercised a world hegemony like that of the British in the middle of the nineteenth century, for even the greatest empires or hegemonies of the past had been merely regional—the Chinese, the Mohammedan, the Roman. Never since then has any single power succeeded in re-establishing a comparable hegemony, nor indeed is anyone likely to in the foreseeable future; for no power has since been able to claim the exclusive status of the 'workshop of the world'.