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

The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c.1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe.

Unlike the great offshore land masses of Greenland and Newfoundland, these islands were hospitable, colonizable and readily accessible to seaborne invaders. They could be conquered piecemeal and quickly reinforced from Europe. Their indigenous populations lacked adequate military organization and were tragically vulnerable to Old World diseases. Cr

By the fourteenth century, Europe had reached broad economic and technological parity with China and the Islamic Near East. Between AD 1000 and c.1350 there was a long phase of economic growth. The population increased. Waste lands were colonized. Technical improvements like the mould-board plough (which opened up heavier lands) and the watermill i

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

Turning their back on a maritime future may have been a concession to their gentry officials (who disliked eunuch influence), but it was also a bow to financial constraints and the supreme priority of dynastic survival.

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

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.

Apart from a very limited amount of state sponsorship, it was usually the prospect of commercial gain or of new lands for settlement which funded exploration – a misleading term, which usually signified the ‘mapping’ of existing trade paths through local informants. But the propulsion of economic or demographic need was spasmodic at best.

This great southward expansion, absorbing new land and people into the Chinese world, was the crucial stage in the ‘making’ of China. It added the hugely productive rice-growing region (where double and triple cropping was possible) to the agrarian economy. It brought new crops and commodities from the sub-tropical south to stimulate a rise in dome

territorial acquisitions swelled the taxable resources of the empire, allowing Peter to triple his revenues, while adding the Estland and the Ukraine to Muscovite Russia almost doubled its productive capacity.71 Like the Spanish conquistas in the New World, therefore, Russian expansion fed on itself, fuelled by the windfall gains of conquest.