What do you think?
Rate this book
592 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
The study of the past 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 is an updated version of that same idea, integrating new perspectives only recently absorbed into Anglophone scholarship (not least that of China), to trace the timeless question asked by books like Guns, Germs and Steel: how did the West win? But Darwin wants to look at the question from the equal perspective of all the civilisations of what he calls the Eurasian "world island", following Mackinder
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;As the title implies, the book opens after the death of the last conqueror to try unite the world-island under one empire. Like Alexander the Great, Timur conquered pretty much all the territory known to his time, and after his death his empire split into smaller pieces. This is an insanely ambitious global history, jumping between the Mughal emperor Akbar I's attempt to fuse Hinduism and Islam and the military campaigns of Qajar Persia, between the "Manchu raj" of the Qing dynasty and the modernisation that followed the Tokugawa Shogunate. Nonetheless, Darwin is a Western writer with Western expertise (most of his career was spent as Beit Lecturer in Commonwealth History at Oxford), and the bulk of the book is about its last two centuries, about colonialism and empire (Clive of India, Gordon of Khartoum, Lawrence of Arabia...) In fact I felt the book would have been stronger had it focused on a smaller time period - each section is too short to get into much depth.
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.