Naval vessels were extremely expensive items of capital equipment whose value deteriorated rapidly in adverse conditions. Naval warfare too was dominated by caution and manoeuvre. The stakes were high: outright defeat might mean invasion or the destruction of the merchant fleet. Hence navies were usually kept close to home.

This was a gentry culture that propagated the values and traditions of the Confucian classics: the search for harmony within society and with nature; the importance of hierarchy (especially between generations) and ritual or codes of behaviour for preserving social order and cohesion; the need for self-control and the subordination of personal

Above all, there can be no doubt that imperial Russia played a crucial role alongside the Western maritime states in securing the European domination of Eurasia in the nineteenth century: helping to encircle the Islamic realm, sapping the political fabric of the main Islamic states, and assisting in the demolition of the old China-centred world

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

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

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

An agrarian surplus sustained urban elites and their elaborate high culture. In the towns, an artisan class of legendary skill had sprung up to cater for these elites’ material demands.

South of Morocco, no important state had the will or the means to contest Portugal’s use of African coastal waters. Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets.

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