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

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

By some estimates, China’s population increased threefold between 1723 and 1796 under K’ang-hsi’s successors. There was a large increase in the area under cultivation, which may have doubled between 1650 and 1800.

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.

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

Peter’s ‘symbolic reforms’ were meant to drive home the terrible urgency of political change. After his European tour in 1698, he imposed a ban on beards and personally cut off those of his leading nobles. Russian traditional dress – a loose robe or kaftan – was also outlawed, and ‘German dress’ was imposed.

Indeed, the dynamic behind Russian expansion is not to be found in any single factor, but in the remarkable combination of favourable circumstances in the century after 1613: the consolidation of a social order whose savage discipline reflected the mentality of the ‘armed camp’;74 its receptiveness to cultural innovation from elsewhere in Europe; R

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

We should react sceptically to grand generalizations about stasis and stagnation. Nor should we be too quick to assume that China’s very limited participation in international trade after c.1690 signalled its incorporation into the subordinate ‘periphery’ of a European ‘world system’.76 Indeed, closer inspection may suggest that the reconstruction