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

Russia was – perhaps after 1700, certainly after 1762 – always one of the five or six great powers of Europe who made up the quarrelsome management committee of the continent’s affairs. It became, after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia, and a colossal colonialist.

By the mid seventeenth century the population of New Spain consisted of some 150,000 white Spanish, 150,000 mestizos, 130,000 mulattos and 80,000 African slaves, as well as perhaps 1 million Amerindians.

The reconquest of Spain from Muslim rulers by the mid thirteenth century had encouraged the opening of a regular sea route between the Mediterranean and the ports of the English Channel and the North Sea. Lisbon, Seville and later Cadiz became the connecting links between the Atlantic and Mediterranean systems. Long before Columbus, Atlantic Iberia

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.

contemporaneous with the triumphs of Vasco da Gama or Albuquerque in the Indian Ocean, or of Cortés and Pizarro in the Americas, were the consolidation of Ming absolutism, the emergence of a new world power in the Ottoman Empire, the reunion of Iran under the Safavids, the rapid expansion of Islam into South East Asia, and the creation of a vast ne

Ancien régime Europe certainly spent heavily on its armies and navies, and their use in war accounted for some 54 per cent of public spending in the European monarchies during the eighteenth century.

To Russian historians of the later nineteenth century, like Solov’ev or Kliuchevskii, the whole history of Russia was bound up with its colonizing endeavour and its heroic transformation into a great imperial state equal to the greatest powers of Central or Western Europe. To many West European observers, on the other hand, Russia often seemed a se

Indeed, the difficulty of forming autonomous states on an ethnic basis, against the gravitational pull of cultural or economic attraction (as well as disparities of military force), has been so great that empire (where different ethnic communities fall under a common ruler) has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of hist

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.