cultural products and social values: it was a difficult relationship to manage successfully. Once Japan began to run short of silver and the domestication

In both English and Spanish America the price of imperial expansion had been de facto colonial autonomy.37 When Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy Virginia planter, led a rebellion against the governor in 1676 (accusing him of being soft on the Pamunkey people) and burned down the colony’s capital at Jamestown, there was little or nothing that London could

Peter’s famous incognito tours of shipyards in Holland were anticipated in the eagerness of earlier tsars to adopt the bureaucratic and diplomatic methods of the grander European monarchies. Russia’s rulers and churchmen drew on ideas of the magnificent and spiritual from the baroque art and architecture of Central Europe, and adapted them to local

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.

But the crucial fact of the equilibrium age was that no power in Europe was strong enough to dominate the others completely, or to embark upon a career of overseas conquest safe from the challenge of its European rivals.

Perhaps any of the great Eurasian states would have enjoyed a similar success: Tamerlane would have made short work of Montezuma. It was the Occident’s good fortune that its geographical position – closest to the Caribbean antechamber of the pre-Columbian empires – gave it a decisive lead in the acquisition of new lands in the Outer World.

Hideyoshi’s supremacy, followed by the systematic repression of daimyo autonomy by Ieyasu (1524–1616), the first Tokugawa shogun, spelled the gradual end of Japan’s ‘Christian century’ and the brief era of openness in overseas trade.

On the larger stage of Eurasian or global economic competition, the maritime sector of the European economy, for all its success in developing the commodity trades across the Atlantic, and in finding customers among the expatriate Europeans in the Americas, was simply too small, too restricted in economic and demographic capacity, to aspire to

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.