Authors: John Darwin
After Tamerlane
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Britain, Egypt and the Middle East:
Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War 1918â1922
Britain and Decolonization:
The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World
The End of the British Empire:
The Historical Debate
JOHN DARWIN
After Tamerlane
The Global History of Empire since 1405
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
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First published
2007
1
Copyright © John Darwin, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EISBN: 978â0â141â90468â9
For Caroline, Claire, Charlotte and Helen
2. Eurasia and the Age of Discovery
3. The Early Modern Equilibrium
7. Towards the Crisis of the World, 1914â1942
Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.
1. A re-creation of the world map of Ptolemy (Corbis)
2. Constantinople, in the mid-sixteenth century (Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage Images)
3. The harbour at Batavia, Dutch East Indies (Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage Images)
4. Engraving portraying the defeat of Tipu Sultan (Corbis)
5. Commodore Matthew Perry's entry into Tokyo harbour (Corbis)
6. French soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion (Corbis)
7. Mahatma Gandhi on the âsalt march', India 1930 (Corbis)
8. Nuclear test, Marshall Islands, 1952
9. Flags on Tiananmen Square (Corbis)
3. The Portuguese empire in Asia
4. Russian expansion, 1462â1600
9. Britain and France in North America,
c.
1750
12. America in 1860, showing main railway lines
15. Egypt's expansion, 1821â1879
16. The opening of Africa after 1870
17. Stations and bases of the British Navy
20. The crisis of the War, 1918
21. The Middle East after 1918
22. Japan's advance into China
23. The limits of Nazi power in 1942
The death of Tamerlane in 1405 was a turning point in world history. Tamerlane was the last of the series of âworld-conquerors' in the tradition of Attila and Genghis Khan, who strove to bring the whole of Eurasia â the âworld island' â under the rule of a single vast empire. Within fifty years of his death, the maritime states 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 âWest' â 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 â 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 âglobal' 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. âThe study of the past', remarked Frederick Teggart in his
Rome and China
(Berkeley, 1939), âcan 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.'
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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 âglobalization' has been one of the reasons. But perhaps just as important have been the effects of diasporas and migrations (creating a mobile, âanti-national' historical tradition) and the partial liberalization of many regimes (the greatest example being China) where âhistory' 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 â 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.
My debts to the work of other historians will be obvious from the notes that accompany each chapter. My first introduction to the fascination of viewing world history as a connected whole came as a pupil of the late Jack Gallagher, whose historical imagination was boundless. I have learned an enormous amount from my colleagues in imperial and global history in Oxford â Judith Brown, David
Washbrook, Georg Deutsch and Peter Carey â and have benefited from the expert knowledge of many other colleagues in the university and beyond, whose words of wisdom I have tried to remember. My thinking about the economic issues has been much improved by acquaintance with the Global Economic History Network, created by Patrick O'Brien as a forum for discussing the divergent paths of economic change in different parts of the world. Some of the ideas to be found in this book were prompted by arguments with James Belich and Phillip Buckner in several âtravelling seminars'. The stimulus of teaching so many talented students has been indispensable, and my historical education has been hugely extended by the supervision of many doctoral theses over the last twenty years. I am especially grateful to those friends and colleagues who commented on earlier versions of the chapters that follow: Richard Bonney, Ian Phimister, Robert Holland, Martin Ceadel and Andrew Hurrell. The errors and omissions I claim for myself.
I prepared draft maps using as a base the âMapinfo' program produced by Collins Bartholomew. I could not have done so without the instruction, advice and patient assistance of Nigel James of the Bodleian map department: it is a pleasure to acknowledge his help. The finished maps were drawn by Jeff Edwards. I am greatly indebted to Bob Davenport for his meticulous care in the copy-editing of the text.
The task of writing this book would have been much harder without the interest and encouragement of Simon Winder of Penguin. Faced with Simon's enthusiasm, no author could allow his efforts to flag. For this, and for his shrewd and timely advice at certain critical times, I am most grateful.
Lastly, writing this book over an extended period amid many other activities has largely been possible because of the extraordinary resources of Oxford's university libraries â embattled but unbowed â and because of the unrivalled facilities for research and writing that Nuffield College provides for its fellows.
Writing a book that ranges widely over time and space raises some awkward issues about the language of names and places. Not only do names change, but the changes reflect shifts of perception, status and often control. In many parts of the world, changing the names of cities, towns and streets â and even of countries â has been a way of symbolizing the end of the old (usually colonial) order and the reassertion of an indigenous culture and identity.
My practice has been to use the name most likely to be familiar to a predominantly Western and Anglophone readership, while drawing attention when appropriate to the alternative version. Sometimes this has meant using the name that gave a special contemporary meaning to a particular place. Thus I have used âConstantinople' and not âIstanbul' to denote the Ottoman capital. This was standard usage in the West long after the city was conquered by the Turks in 1453. I have retained it to signify its role as an imperial capital (quite different from modern Istanbul) and also its contested status as (in the eyes of many Europeans) an occupied Christian city that would one day be âliberated'. This belief lasted until the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Three issues deserve particular mention. Firstly, the romanization of Islamic names has always been somewhat arbitrary â perhaps inevitably so. When Europeans attempted to render the sound of Islamic names, they produced over the centuries extraordinary variations in spelling, some of which seem bizarre today. To complicate matters, some of these variations reflected the differences between spoken versions of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the three main languages of Islamic Middle Eurasia. The most familiar of Muslim names can be found as Mahomet, Mehmet, Mohamed and Muhammad. Feisal can be found as Faisal or Faysal. I have used versions that I hope will be familiar and comprehensible, rather than those that might be more scholastically âcorrect'.
Secondly there is the case of Iran. Until 1935 Iran was officially called Persia, the name by which the country was usually known in the West. âIran' was, however, the commoner usage in the country and the region, and I have chosen, for simplicity,
to use it as the standard designation for the territorial unit and its people throughout the period covered by the book. But it is important to remember that âPersian' (a word derived from âFarsi') was the predominant language and culture, as well as describing the largest ethnic group in a land of several ethnicities.
Thirdly there is China. The Pinyin system is now widely used to romanize Chinese. However, since most of the references in this book are to Chinese persons and places, I have retained the forms most likely to be familiar to Western readers, following the older WadeâGiles system. The most obvious examples are as follows:
Ch'ing
not
Qing
Peking
not
Beijing (until Chapter 8)
Nanking
not
Nanjing
Canton
not
Guangzhou
Kiangnan
not
Jiangnan
Sinkiang
not
Xinjiang