Manchu adeptness in steppe diplomacy helped to turn Inner Mongolia into a buffer zone, and to drive China’s imperial power deep into Inner Asia. The northern inland threat to China’s stability was efficiently neutralized. With a once-disruptive Japan now safety withdrawn into neo-Confucian seclusion, and Confucianism firmly in command in Korea and

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From road building to the grafting of vines and fruit trees, Western Europe ceased employing many techniques that had once been well known and practiced to a high standard. Even so ancient a device as the potter’s wheel disappeared in many places. Mining operations contracted. Metallurgy receded. Irrigation works in the Mediterranean region disinte

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Eighteenth-century China saw the end of serfdom, abolished by the Yung-cheng emperor,93 and a new freedom to buy and sell land. The number of market towns rose steadily. In the Kiangnan region on the lower Yangtze, where water communications had favoured the growth of large commercial cities, cotton cloth was manufactured on a large scale by villag

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But the commodities that circulated in this new global exchange were not staples but luxuries; their volume was tiny. In the sixteenth century, an average of fifty to seventy ships departed annually for the East from Lisbon;123 and the traffic in manufactures like porcelain or textiles flowed mainly westward towards Europe and not the other way rou

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