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

Thus much of the intellectual and political energy of sixteenth-century Europe was consumed by the religious and dynastic warfare that racked the continent until the peace of exhaustion at the end of the century. Set against this background, it is easy to see why European expansion was a meagre threat to the Islamic empires or the great states in E

There was no imperial ‘grand strategy’ to make Spain the centre of a world economy: indeed, such a plan would have been futile. Instead, Philip II devoted the ‘royal fifth’ – the monarchy’s share of the silver stream – to the struggle to uphold Spain’s pre-eminence in Europe against rivals and rebels.

In the two centuries that followed the death of Tamerlane, Eurasia remained divided between the three civilized worlds we have explored so far, and a number of others, Buddhist and Hindu, that we have passed over in silence. There was little to show that their cultural differences were narrowing. If anything, the energetic state-building that was t

With its territorial core on the upper Volga, Muscovy became the hinge between the vast forest empire to the north and east (eventually reaching the Pacific coast of Asia) and the hard-won steppe empire of the Caspian and southern Urals.

So long as the scholar-gentry aspired to bureaucratic advancement through the examination system, with its classical syllabus and Confucian ideology, and while China was governed from walled cities with an ultra-loyal Manchu army in reserve, rebellion was unlikely to spread far or last long. The early emperors also insisted upon frugal expenditure

Westerners, like the Jesuits, were welcome to come. But they had to stay and adapt themselves to Confucian ethics: they could not expect to come and go as they pleased.

It was the astonishing recovery of the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century, and the gradual consolidation of a feudal order in Western Europe in the eleventh, that marked the beginnings of Europe’s emergence as a viable, separate world civilization.

What excited Europeans was the belief that they had both the right and the means to ‘make’ or remake America in Europe’s image, or even as an improved version of the old continent.

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’.