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

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.

Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units

European armies had evolved into highly specialized machines to fight each other – but not to fight military forces whose ‘strategic doctrine’ was radically different. This was painfully apparent in the encounters between British troops and Native Americans in the 1750s.

The repeated cycle of mass military invasion, large-scale destruction, transient unity and imperial breakup gave the Islamic world a ‘medieval’ history starkly different from that of Europe or China.

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

If every country depended upon foreign suppliers and customers, the web of mutual dependence would be too strong to break.

For all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact. It depended heavily upon local circumstance and the gradual evolution of specialized subcultures of contact and conquest. It was not the working-out of an inescapable economic destiny (as some historians have argued), or the inevita

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.

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.