Sublime

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

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.

China grew quantitatively, not qualitatively. Part of the reason, Elvin argued, was the inward turn we have noticed already: the shrinking of China’s external contacts as the Ming abandoned the sea.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

By one calculation, Russia’s land surface increased from 2.1 million square miles in 1600 to some 5.9 million a century later.

But the crucial fact of the equilibrium age was that no power in Europe was strong enough to dominate the others completely, or to embark upon a career of overseas conquest safe from the challenge of its European rivals.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further

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