Russia emerged in the eighteenth century as Eurasia’s vast land empire of the north, seen in figure 6.6. As the inheritor of the Mongol and Timurid empires, Russia became history’s second largest contiguous empire by size, 22 million km2 at its peak in 1895, second only to the Mongol empire’s 23 million km2 at its maximum extent in 1270. Only the

It was also by way of the Mongolian trading network that the Black Death reached Sicily from the Black Sea in 1347, eventually killing up to a quarter of the European population. Yet the Pax Mongolica that extended over the vast part of Eurasia also ushered in a massive expansion of east-west trade that connected Western Europe and East Asia.

Throughout history, it has been important to understand the threats arising from globalization (disease, conquest, war, financial crises, and others) and to face them head on, not by ending the benefits of globalization, but by using the means of international cooperation to control the negative consequences of global-scale interconnectedness.

The situation in the Americas was even more dramatic. Most domesticated animals reached the New World only upon the Columbian exchange of flora and fauna between the Old World and New World after 1492, when the Old World farm animals arrived with European conquerors. The hunter-gatherers of North America killed off the wild horse (Equus

If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap. Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers got a boost from farming. Instead of eating

Data are for GDP per capita at 2011 international dollars.

This new age of globalization, like the past ages, will create new patterns of global economic activity, jobs, lifestyles, and geopolitics. This new age arrives together with another fundamental development: a human-caused ecological crisis hitting the planet. The dramatic successes of globalization during the past two centuries have sown the seeds

The incursion of the European imperialists put China into an economic tailspin from which it would not recover for more than a century. With the Qing Dynasty humiliated and weakened by the losses of the First Opium War, an internal rebellion broke out between 1850 and 1864. Known as the Taiping Rebellion, it pitted the Qing Dynasty against the

Economic development is limited by the availability of energy for work, including for industry (e.g., metallurgy), farm production (e.g., plowing), transport, and communications. Primary energy resources include biomass, fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), wind, water, solar, geothermal, nuclear (uranium), and ocean power. The ability to tap