The death of Tamerlane in 1405 was a turning point in world history. Tamerlane was the last of the series of ‘world-conquerors’ in the tradition of Attila and Genghis Khan, who strove to bring the whole of Eurasia - the ‘world island’ - under the rule of a single vast empire. Within fifty years of his death, the maritime state of the Eurasian Far West, with Portugal in the van, were exploring the sea routes that became the nerves and arteries of great maritime empires. This is the story of what happened next.
It seems a familiar tale, until we look closer. The rise of the West to global supremacy by the path of empire and economic pre-eminence is one of the keystones of our historical knowledge. It helps us to order our view of the past. In many standard accounts, it appears all but inevitable. It was the high road of history: all the alternatives were byroads or dead ends. When Europe’s empires dissolved, they were replaced by new post-colonial states, just as Europe itself became a part of the ‘West’ - a world-spanning league under American leadership. The aim of this book is partly to show that the passage from Tamerlane’s times to our own has been far more contested, confused and chance-ridden than this legend suggests - an obvious enough point. But it tries to do this by placing Europe (and the West) in a much larger context: amid the empire-, state- and culture-building projects of other parts of Eurasia. Only thus, it is argued, can the course, nature, scale and limits of Europe’s expansion be properly grasped, and the jumbled origins of our contemporary world become a little bit clearer.
This book could not have been written without the huge volume of new writing in the last twenty years both on ‘global’ history and on the histories of the Middle East, India, South East Asia, China and Japan. Of course, it is not only recently that historians have insisted on a global view of the past: that tradition, after all, goes back to Herodotus. Hidden in most histories lies a set of conjectures about what was supposed to have happened in other parts of the world. Systematic inquiry into the linkages between different parts of the world is, however, comparatively recent. ‘The study of the past’, remarked Frederick Teggart in his Rome and China (Berkeley, 1939), ‘can become effective only when it is fully realized that all peoples have histories, that these histories run concurrently and in the same world, and that the act of comparing them is the beginning of knowledge.' This challenge was taken up on a monumental scale in W. H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West (Chicago, 1964), whose title belies its astonishing range and intellectual subtlety. But in recent years the resources committed to global and non-Western history have increased enormously. The economic, political and cultural impact of ‘globalization’ has been one of the reasons. But perhaps just as important have been the effects of diasporas and migrations (creating a mobile, ‘anti-national’ historical tradition) and the partial liberalization of many regimes (the greatest example being China) where ‘history’ was once treated as the private property of the state. New perspectives, new freedoms and new reading publics, wanting new meanings from history, have fuelled a vast outpouring of historical writing. The effect of all this has been to open new vistas on a past that once seemed accessible by only one route - the story of Europe’s expansion. It has made it much easier than a generation ago to see that Europe’s trajectory into the modern world shared many features in common with social and cultural changes elsewhere in Eurasia, and that Europe’s attainment of primacy came later, and was more qualified, than we are often led to believe.