Sublime

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.

it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Homo sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology.5

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.

as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

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 enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s