The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Europe’s expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe’s modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.

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

Europeans saw themselves as embattled against a triumphant Islam even while they plundered the New World and invaded the Indian Ocean. Their own achievements in political, military and commercial organization were matched or overshadowed by those of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Ming or Tokugawa. State-building and cultural innovation were strik

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.