Sublime

China’s communications, as well as the managing of its fragile environment – dependent on water, threatened by floods – required an unusual degree of bureaucratic liaison between centre, province and district.

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 toward

Manchu adeptness in steppe diplomacy helped to turn Inner Mongolia into a buffer zone, and to drive China’s imperial power deep into Inner Asia. The northern inland threat to China’s stability was efficiently neutralized. With a once-disruptive Japan now safety withdrawn into neo-Confucian seclusion, and Confucianism firmly in command in Korea and

In the Americas, the human cost of Europe’s maritime imperialism was largely borne by the indigenous Amerindians and imported slaves. Overland expansion in the Old World faced tougher resistance and a harsher environment. So here the price of the Occidental breakout was a domestic regime of deepening social and political oppression, whose effects w

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.

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 subseq

This was a sophisticated mercantile economy in which paper money was supplied by private enterprise and credit was based on the sale of contracts for the future supply of salt to the government – a commodity for which demand was exceptionally stable.

In the two centuries that followed the death of Tamerlane, Eurasia remained divided between the three civilized worlds we have explored so far, and a number of others, Buddhist and Hindu, that we have passed over in silence. There was little to show that their cultural differences were narrowing. If anything, the energetic state-building that was t

If every country depended upon foreign suppliers and customers, the web of mutual dependence would be too strong to break.