After Tamerlane: The Global History Of Empire Since 1405 (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
Covering, to a degree, the timeframe and several themes popularly traversed by Paul Kennedy back in the mid-eighties with The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, John Darwin has put together what is, in my opinion, one of the best Big Picture histories that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Clocking in a five-hundred-and-six pages of thick text, with the notes and chapter bibliographies to suitably awe the reader with the massive erudition and encompassing knowledge the British academic possesses, the book feels even longer, as Darwin covers an extraordinary range of narratives and timelines with just the right amount of detail to impart his thematic structures with a clarity and meticulousness that I found superb.The author is exploring the history of empire within a global context, treading territory in between that of belief in an unstoppable European exceptionalism that inevitably catapulted its meritorious western exemplars to their dominant imperial position by the end of the nineteenth century, and the more recent school that holds such paramountcy was achieved both by lucky endowments of a geographic nature and an exploitation and oppression greedily and ignorantly enacted upon rich cultures that were continually the victims of aggressive violence, bad faith, and the misfortune of being located at a remove from a select portion of nature's bounty. Darwin's approach wields a broad outline that suggests there was a measure of global interconnectedness starting from the fifteenth century; that Europe must be considered as a geographic entity that includes not only its eastern realms and, more importantly, Russia, but - during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least - the North (and, to a degree, South) American nations erected upon a framework constructed by European settlers, culture and thought; that, in many ways, human history is the history of empire; that the progress of European imperialism and supremacy was a fitful one of many regressions, false starts, impediments, achievements, and fortunate circumstances - neither historically determined nor linearly progressive; and that the Asian empires - in particular, those of Eastern Asia (China and Japan) - proved far more resistant and impervious to European domination and penetration than is commonly held - that Asia itself has shown throughout history a marked disinclination to existence under one central unifying authority.The launching point is the meeting between the Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun and the Mongol-Turkic conqueror general Tamerlane prior to the latter's long-contemplated campaign against China. With his death - and the dissolution of his vast Central Asian empire - also died the supremacy of the steppe over the city, and of Central Asia over the Eurasian landmass. From this point onwards we see not only the spread of both marine exploration by Europe and tentative Asian expansion by Muscovy/Russia, but also a consolidation of the East Asian imperial realms of China and Japan. Central Asia, a muslim land, saw the rise of a new imperial superstructure, that of the tribal or clan chieftain and his army of slave convert - Mamluk - warriors loyal only to their master, establishing temporary and continually shifting imperial constructs over both steppe and settlement. Ruling over empires with a considerable population of nomads and muslim citizens with no inherent loyalty to their state, the central Asian Islamic empires would progress in a much different manner from the dynastic types that prevailed to the east and west.Within this basic framework, Darwin covers the overthrow of the Aztec and Incan empires by a handful of adventurers - an archetype for the European seaborne method of subsuming the Asian and African coasts and, in the case of the latter, actually establishing vast states by exploiting ethnic and caste conflicts. With the initial contacts between European ships and east and southeast Asian ports, the Europeans took the first steps towards their eventual dominant position in continental trade, and it's wonderful how Darwin works over this historical era. Showing how the discovery of silver and gold in the Americas funded the European merchants in greatly expanding trade with Asia, he also examines the Ming dynasty and Tokugawa Shogunate to determine both how they were solidifying and strengthening their realms, while at the same time following paths that led away from any means of enacting an industrial revolution comparable to that which would propel the Europeans into the first tier globally. The Ottoman Empire is laid out, both as the terrifying Islamic aggressor it was at the time, and the surprisingly endurable and culturally powerful entity it would prove to be. The formation of the Mughal Empire in India and the interplay between Muslim and Hindu cultures in the subcontinent, and how these strains - local, linguistic, historical, ethnic, etc. - were important, are sifted through to find the answer to why India proved so amenable to control by Britain, first by the British East India Company, then by the Raj. The porous nature of the Iranian landscape reveals itself in the outline of the rise, reformations, mistakes and farseeing initiatives of the Safavid dynasty and its efforts to rid itself of the Mamluk structure that proved such a curse to stability in Central Asia. Meanwhile, Muscovy becomes Tsarist Russia, absorbing Western culture and ideas at an increasing rate while expanding, steadily and remorselessly, across the vast central Asian interior, crushing or diplomatically isolating the remnant Turkic khanates of the steppes and annexing the endless taiga forests of Siberia as far as the Pacific Ocean. Darwin stresses throughout this period the slow and unsure manner in which the New World and the north-central Asian interior was opened and settled, and how the Asian empires, in most cases allowing the European merchants considerable leeway shoreside, usually managed to prevent any manner of penetration of their interior lands where the masses lived, indifferent to these aggressive and far-traveling oceanic visitors and their strange ways and Christian-influenced ideas.With what Darwin calls the long nineteenth century - 1789 to 1914 - we finally see Europe starting to pull away from the pack. Industrialized, entrepreneurial, militarily strong, scientifically bounding, culturally and philosophically assured, nationally secure in a flexible liberalism that freed the mind, body, and capital for the energetic furtherance of expansionist ends, the (West) Europeans first establish a lasting peace between their home nations before setting out to colonize the world. Dividing virtually the entirety of Africa - save Abyssinia - between the major European states, they also batter the Ottoman Empire (but don't partition it), harass Qing China (but cannot make much headway past the mandarin elites into the vast interior agrarian provinces), force Japan to open its ports (but don't add it to the list of imperial conquests, and soon come to respect its stunningly rapid rise to the status of regional power), and establish protectorates over Iran and parts of Arabia, without seriously displacing the Islamic culture that permeates its citizenry. All the while Darwin explores why and how the Europeans were able to seemingly so effortlessly achieve global paramountcy, the personalities involved, the economic, geopolitical, and cultural legacies and systems and trends that had come to arise at this particular period, and how Imperial Europe was often not in as dominant, or as sure, a position as was then commonly believed; how even in hapless imperial realms like China and Osmanli Turkey, the scornful dismissal of them as ossified and corrupt entities belied a select dynamism, reforms and cultural buttresses, that allowed them to survive far past their best before dates.Then, in 1914, it all went up in flames. In many ways, Darwin's analysis and detailing of the short twentieth century is the best part of this immensely impressive work. The effects and aftereffects of the First World War; the retreat from a globally integrated economy in the uncertain decade of the twenties and the depression-riddled thirties that followed; the rise of the new imperialism created as an answer, or antidote, to liberal capitalist democracy - Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan - and the quick and brutal method with which they set out to impose their new order upon a conflicted and suddenly doubting world; the triumph of American-backed liberalism allied with communism against the virulent Axis strains of domination, and the quick collapse of China into the unsuspecting hands of communist rule, along with the unexpectedly rapid rebirth of Germany and Japan within the fold of the American flock - it is covered in depth and convincingly. Darwin's knowledge of the British Empire, in particular, is incredible, and his outline of the rise of Indian nationalism, the British responses, the de-colonization after the Second World War, and the lingering dreams of an imperial role that Britain entertained before having them brutally snuffed out in the Suez debacle is just masterful. After laying out the histories of the various imperial structures and forms prior to the modern age, Darwin offers up the Soviet Union and postwar America as two exemplars of the newest imperial styling, one wherein overwhelming military, economic, cultural, and political power - and both the attractiveness and overweening influence of this global presence - replaces the older imperial structures with their emphasis on physical conquest or overlordship of colonial areas. Can any deny that this postmodern, electric-powered, nuclear-wielding type of bifurcated empire extended its cold war tentacles into the furthest reaches of the globe? And then, in 1991, the Soviet Union utterly disappeared, and America sits, alone and exposed, on the uppermost tier. From all that we have learned - and know - of empire, however, who would have the confidence to state with any certainty that this American supremacy will prove itself more permanent or enduring than the parade of imperial configurations that have had their brief-but-shining moments in the sun?Once again, I've written up a lengthy review that barely scratches the surface of the wealth of erudition and analysis - and just plain lovely writing - that comprises After Tamerlane. This is by no means an easy read, and many passages require more than one attempt to be ingested in their entirety. What's more, Darwin commonly will explain his thematic intentions with four or five part examples that can run to several pages, by the end of which the reader can find himself struggling to remember exactly what is being delineated. There are also minor omissions - like the relatively scant attention paid to philosophic systems and schools of thought and their effect upon the different Eurasian cultures - and minor annoyances - like Darwin's arbitrary decision to render all Chinese spellings in the older Wade-Giles system, rather than the newer (and IMO more aesthetic and accurate) Pinyin format. However, these really are barely worth a mention, because this is just such an incredibly detailed, subtle, nuanced, impartial, and deeply impressive undertaking. Big Picture history has always been one of my favorite non-fictional genres, and I can honestly state that After Tamerlane is amongst the finest examples of this type I have ever come across - enjoyable, informative, and educational in the best of ways, and always imparting clarity and thoughtful interpretation to whatever subject falls under its far-ranging and perceptive lens. Absolutely the highest recommendation.
John Darwin offers a wide-angle view of "the history of global empire since 1405" in clear prose and enough detail to orient but not overwhelm. Backing up far enough to see Eurasia (instead of Europe and Asia) and its three cultural areas - west, east and south - as whole units, Darwin assembles the scholarship of the last generation or so of historians into a narrative exploring three themes: the growth of globalization, the growth of empire, and the resilience of states and cultures pressed by empires. The result is a history unavailable to the high-school curricula of those of us in mid-life or older. From the book:"The globalized world of the late twentieth century was not the predictable outcome of a global free market. Nor could we deduce it from the state of the world five centuries ago. It was the product of a long, confused and often violent history, of sudden reversals of fortune and unexpected defeats. Its roots stretch back ... to the death of Tamerlane. ... Among the first to imagine a globalized world were the British free-traders of the 1830s and '40s, who drew their inspiration from Adam Smith. Worldwide free trade, so they reasoned, would make war unthinkable. ... This cheerful account of how enlightened self-interest would remake the world to the profit of all was punctured by Karl Marx [who] insisted that, sooner or later ..., industrial capitalism would drown its markets in goods. It could survive for a while by cutting its costs, driving wages below the cost of subsistence. But ... capitalism would implode... For much of the twentieth century, this pessimistic view of the motives and meaning of globalization ... was more than a match for the claims of the optimists who saw the result of a fully global economy as being 'modernization'... Before the Second World War, the young Dutch historian J. C. van Leur ... dismissed the idea that the arrival of Europeans by sea in the sixteenth century had transformed Asia's trading economy. Instead, Europeans were latecomers in a huge maritime commerce, pioneered by Asians, linking China, Japan, South East Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa. ... In the last twenty years, van Leur's original insight has been widened much further. ... A new global history has grown up... Its units of study are regions or oceans, long-distance trades, networks of merchants, the tracks of wandering scholars, the traffic of cults and beliefs between cultures and continents. Viewed from this level, ... [g]eographical location in Asia or Europe begins to look much less important for social and cultural change than a position astride Eurasia's trunk lines of trade, or in the arid belt where long-distance travellers did not have to toil through forest, jungle or marsh. ... A dense mercantile network already linked ports and producers between the coast of East Africa and the South China Sea. ... In different parts of Asia, there were market economies where the division of labour, specialized trades and urban development (the hallmarks of growth as Adam Smith had described it) looked very similar to those found in Europe. ... Indeed, before 1800, what really stood out was not the sharp economic contrast between Europe and Asia, but, on the contrary, a Eurasian world of 'surprising resemblances' in which a number of regions, European and Asian, were at least theoretically capable of the great leap forward into the industrial age. ... Four basic assumptions have shaped the arguments advanced in this book. The first is that we should reject the idea of a linear change in ... history... It is more productive to think in terms of 'conjunctures,' periods of time when certain general conditions in different parts of the world coincided to encourage (or check) the enlargement of trade, the expansion of empires, the exchange of ideas or the movement of people. ... The second ... is that we must ... [recognize] the central importance of Europe's connections with ... Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. ... The third ... is that we need to think out very carefully what that 'Europe' was. ... Between the Old Northeast [of the United States] and North West Europe, the traffic of goods, technology, ideas and people was extremely dense. In culture and technology it was a two-way movement, with a strong mutual influence. By fits and starts, with retreats and advances, Old Europe and New Europe were being subsumed into a larger formation, the 'West.' ... The fourth assumption concerns our understanding of empire. ... It was a human characteristic, remarked Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), to want to 'truck, barter and exchange.' Smith was thinking of material goods ... [b]ut he might well have extended his philosophical insight to the parallel world of information and ideas. ... [A]t all times in history the exchange of goods and ideas has upset the cohesion of some societies much more than others, making them vulnerable to internal breakdown, and to takeover by outsiders. So a second propensity in human communities has been the accumulation of power on an extensive scale: the building of empires. Indeed, the difficulty of forming autonomous states on an ethnic basis, against the gravitational pull of cultural or economic attraction (as well as disparities of military force), has been so great that empire (where different ethnic communities fall under a common ruler) has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history. ... (pp. 8-23)Why Tamerlane? "Tamerlane was a transitional figure in Eurasian history. His conquests were an echo of the great Mongol empire forged by Genghis Khan and his sons. That empire had extended from modern Iran to China, and as far north as Moscow. It had encouraged a remarkable movement of people, trade and ideas around the waist of Eurasia, along the great grassy corridor of steppe, and Mongol rule may have served as the catalyst for commercial and intellectual change in an age of general economic expansion. ... But by the early fourteenth century the effort to preserve a grand imperial confederation had all but collapsed. The internecine wars between the 'Ilkhanate' rulers in Iran, the Golden Horde and the Chagatai, and the fall of the Yuan in China (by 1368), marked the end of the Mongol experiment with Eurasian empire. Tamerlane's conquests were partly an effort to retrieve this lost empire. But his methods were different. Much of his warfare seemed mainly designed to wreck any rivals for control of the great trunk road of Eurasian commerce, on whose profits his empire was built. ... But, despite his ferocity, his military genius and his shrewd adaptation of tribal politics to his imperial purpose, Tamerlane's system fell apart at his death. As he himself may have grasped intuitively, it was no longer possible to ... build a Eurasian empire on the old foundations of Mongol military power. ... Indeed Tamerlane's death marked in several ways the end of a long phase in global history. His empire was the last real attempt to challenge the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West, Islamic Middle Eurasia and Confucian East Asia. ... [P]ower had begun to shift back decisively from the nomad empires to the settled states. ... [T]he collateral damage that Tamerlane inflicted on Middle Eurasia ... helped (if only gradually) to tilt the Old World's balance in favour of the Far East and Far West, at the expense of the centre. ... Within a few decades of his death, the idea of a world empire ruled from Samarkand had become fantastic. The discovery of the sea as a global commons ... transformed the economics and geopolitics of empire." (p. 4-6)Darwin takes the very long arc of history from 1405 to today and puts it into this larger context. As a result, familiar material from high school or college looks very different (to those of us over 40). Together with other recent histories - Jack Weatherford's "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World," Arthur Herman's "To Rule the Waves," William Rosen's "Justinian's Flea," Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought," among others - it provokes reflection and deepens understanding of our globalized world.(One wonders if President George W. Bush's famous utterance - "We have an empire now." - was influenced, however indirectly, by some historian's assertion that "empire ... has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history." If so, could this be called Darwinism?)
What do You think about After Tamerlane: The Global History Of Empire Since 1405 (2008)?
John Darwin's After Tamerlane is a look at empire making from 1400 to pretty much the current day. His beginning idea is that the Timurid state represents the last time that the age-old pattern of a vast Eurasian empire based out of the Iranian plateau played out, and he then goes on to examine the patterns of force that happened in place of this usual pattern of empire.He effectively splits the Eurasian land-mass into four parts: Europe, Middle East, India, China, and examines what was going on in each of these places as the centuries roll on. As he stays pretty much in a chronological frame work, this makes the book handy just as a cross-reference to which periods are contemporaneous. However, those four general regions don't quite add up to all of Eurasia, and he actually says surprisingly little about the region of Iran/Persia (and precious little about southeast Asia and inland central Asia, but that is less surprising).Any book covering from 1400 on is pretty much going to be about the rise of European states to dominant roles in the world, but the emphasis here is on re-balancing the traditional triumphalist narratives that see this as an inevitable result of superior European culture. He very carefully points out just how constrained early European ventures were, and how limited the actual effects of most colonial ventures were. I think he is a little too strident on this at times, pointing out just how limited the initial Portuguese trade around Africa to India was, without really acknowledging that no one else was really able to skip an entire large zone of trade to get at the next one beyond it.If there is a major failing to the book, it is that after Darwin successfully shows the non-empire-building motivations of several earlier eras, in the 20th century he tends to assume most empire-building that was going on had more consistent motives and agendas than they did.In all, this is good big-picture history that tries to remove a lot of Eurocentric bias, and will certainly give the reader plenty to think about.
—Rindis
A wonderful and pleasingly balanced take on the trajectories of world history since the XV century. I am positively impressed with the amount of space he dedicates to non-European states and affairs, making your understanding of global and regional history far more deeper and coherent. Not for nothing the book was a winner of the History Book of the Year. You may however be unimpressed with the lack of "one single reason" explanations for the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. This guy is not after simple answers and sensationalism.
—Dеnnis
"The West" is just an aberration.Many histories profiling the rise of Europe and America in these centuries chart an unbroken accession of power that reaches new heights of progress. But the real story is more uneven and dynamic under the comparative worldview offered by John Darwin in his "After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire Since 1405." Europe's rise to power was an accident of history, while it was no accident that Asia predominated in its many iterations of empire.Darwin begins with the death of Tamerlane, the last Mongol conqueror who by force of arms forged a polity that spanned a continent. His path was no different from his predecessors, the outcome being a vast empire with internal order and massive trade to deliver taxable prosperity. The oceans that Europe mastered in the Renaissance were but watery wastes compared to the richness of Persia, Central Asia, China and India. Spanish and Portuguese voyages led to enclaves perched at Asia's edge, Africa's coast or America's perimeter. The conquerors often lacked the overwhelming force needed to forge their way into the interior. Germs did the work of getting them in--or keeping them out. Aztec Mexico fell to Cortez's tiny band of ruthless conquistadors after smallpox and measles waged war, just as malaria and yellow fever kept his contemporaries out of the equatorial jungles of South America and Africa for several centuries. There was little Europe could do to impose its culture and terms of trade upon far larger Asian polities that practiced massive pre-industrial manufacture. There was nothing Europe made that Asia wanted. The game changer was industrialization. And for one aberrational century, Europe tried to rule the world at the expense of Africa and Asia--with mixed results. The British took India. Russia expanded eastward unchecked. The United States did the same, albeit to the west. Iran and Egypt got repossessed by "foreign lenders". But China managed to keep its culture despite foreign incursion. Turkey got stronger once shorn of its Ottoman empire. Japan caught up to the west very quickly. Nationalism in many smaller colonies made it impossible for European nations to rule much longer after World War II. Europe's self-destruction in two general wars gave the rest of the world enough space to reclaim independence."After Tamerlane" may strike the reader more as an example of Darwin's relativism rather than as a "Darwinian proof" of culture and empire. The author makes his case for there being "many different modernities", but this strikes as cold comfort for many losing nations that lacked the technology to repel European and American invaders. Darwin's sketch of history implies that as things once were, so they shall be again. This is something to ponder in the post-Cold War world, as many nations once choked in the bi-polar world find find again their political voice and reach. No surprise that India and China are regaining their lost heights, while Europe slips into irrelevance and the United States finds out it is no longer the "indispensible nation."
—William
