Sublime

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 With a once-disruptive Japan now safety withdrawn into neo-Confucian seclusion, and Confucianism firmly in command in Korea and

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.

Islamic law and theology, and the cultural aspirations of rulers in Egypt, Iran and the Fertile Crescent, had permitted a remarkable flowering of literature, art (especially architecture), science and philosophy. Islam’s cosmopolitan individualism and the wide dissemination of its legal traditions also favoured the growth of a far-flung commercial

AT THE DAWN of the eighteenth century, around the time Europe was beginning to take notice of the vast natural resources waiting to be tapped across the Mediterranean, the sacred land that had given birth to Islam and reared it in its infancy fell under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, though the Caliph allowed the Sharif of Mecca—a de

So long as the scholar-gentry aspired to bureaucratic advancement through the examination system, with its classical syllabus and Confucian ideology, and while China was governed from walled cities with an ultra-loyal Manchu army in reserve, rebellion was unlikely to spread far or last long. The early emperors also insisted upon frugal expenditure

Shravasti: This was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kaushala.

Sher Shah Suri’s reign as Emperor of the Sur Empire marked something of a watershed in Indian history. While he was clearly a successful military leader, he was probably better known for his many administrative reforms. One of his first acts, to mark his reign, was to introduce a new form of coinage. His silver coin was to be the first Indian rupee

In the nineteenth century a particularly rich inhumation cemetery was partially excavated just east of the village of Sarre in the Isle of Thanet, in east Kent. The Wantsum Channel, which separated Thanet from the mainland until the end of the Middle Ages was, in Bede’s day, traversable on foot in just two places.39 Sarre (from the Brythonic word s

What singled out the two great pre-Columbian empires was the very sophistication of their centralized political systems, pivoted upon an omnipotent, godlike emperor whose sudden capture disabled the whole imperial mechanism.