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

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

What excited Europeans was the belief that they had both the right and the means to ‘make’ or remake America in Europe’s image, or even as an improved version of the old continent.

Through literature and art, and the state’s provision of official ‘cults’ and sacrifices as a focus for local popular religion, the influence of Confucian culture was diffused more widely and deeply than ever before.99 China’s political and economic integration was thus matched by a growing cultural unity achieved in the last era before the more in

There was no imperial ‘grand strategy’ to make Spain the centre of a world economy: indeed, such a plan would have been futile. Instead, Philip II devoted the ‘royal fifth’ – the monarchy’s share of the silver stream – to the struggle to uphold Spain’s pre-eminence in Europe against rivals and rebels.

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

While Spain at the western end of the Mediterranean was establishing its dominion in the Americas, the Ottomans had carved out, against much tougher opponents and on a far grander scale, a vast tri-continental empire, assembling in Busbecq’s awed phrase ‘the might of the whole East’.

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.

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

The balance of rights and prerogatives in every state (and every unit) depended upon local custom and precedent, inherited and defended by local interests. This way of thinking had been taken by Spanish and English settlers to the American colonies, and helped to explain the difficulties that faced every attempt to assert the authority of the imper