The article ponders upon the social science controversy of late industrialization and therefore modernization with concern to imperial nations between the 18th and 20th centuries in an attempt to look for the explanations of why they didn’t fit into both waves of the industrial revolution. The research attempts to consider the case of the states that fell out of the first and second industrial revolutions, but were not the part of the traditionally understood developing world in terms of the difference in capabilities of land-based and naval-based empires. It’s also studied the ability of land-based empires to overcome the modernization challenge and the influence of Eurocentric stereotypes on this discussion. The examples of Habsburg Austria, Romanov Russia, Japan and Turkey are also analyzed. The descriptive comparison points to other factors responsible for relatively laggard modernization of these states.
