After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.

The underlying problem throughout the period was population: stagnation, worsened by the effects of war, in the seventeenth century; slow expansion after 1700. Deprived of the extra demand generated by a rising population, trade languished.

Above all, there can be no doubt that imperial Russia played a crucial role alongside the Western maritime states in securing the European domination of Eurasia in the nineteenth century: helping to encircle the Islamic realm, sapping the political fabric of the main Islamic states, and assisting in the demolition of the old China-centred world ord

China assembled the basic components of a market economy earlier, and on a much larger scale, than any other part of Eurasia.

By 1400 a new Europe had been made: a loose confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, broadly similar social and political institutions, and a developed inter-regional economy.

By AD 1000 this seigneurial system had hardened into an elaborate structure of obligations and overlordship, and had become a powerful engine for exploiting land and labour to produce military power – in the characteristic form of the mounted knight.

While Spain at the western end of the Mediterranean was establishing its dominion in the Americas, the Ottomans had carved out, against much tougher opponents and on a far grander scale, a vast tri-continental empire, assembling in Busbecq’s awed phrase ‘the might of the whole East’.

What made the Aztec Empire so vulnerable to Spanish attack, it has been argued, was the inability of its high command to grasp the origins, aims and motives of their European enemy or to imagine the reasons for its sudden appearance. The result was paralysing mental disorientation which destroyed the Aztec emperor’s capacity to resist.

Later Ming rulers thus chose to uphold China’s place in East Asia by stressing its cultural unity and rejecting foreign commercial relations. That meant a deliberate withdrawal from Inner Asian politics, in which the Yuan had exerted a definite influence.