Savyasachee's Reviews > After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

John Darwin's book concludes on a poetic premise. We're still living in the shadow of Tamerlane. More precisely, the shadow of his failure. This poetic conclusion by a serious historian, after nearly five hundred pages of tracing Eurasian history over more than six hundred years seems to be the perfect way of describing the beauty of the words within.

After Tamerlane is extremely deterministic in nature. Explicitly rejecting the very arguments of cultural superiority, Darwin weaves threads of geographic boundaries and historical events. The rise of the West was not obvious at the start of the fifteenth century. In fact, argues Darwin, a rational person given all the facts up to that time might reasonably believe that the next millennium would be either Islamic or Chinese, maybe even a mixture of both. European dominance? Pish-posh. Stop talking nonsense.

Of course, all of history is witness to how this imaginary rational person would be dead wrong. The vast agrarian empires of Asia were out-maneuvered by the commercial empires of North Western Europe. Control of sea trade, American silver and most importantly, being the home of the industrial revolution all contributed to this domination. And why did all these things happen in Europe and not Asia? Because Europe, being the archipelago of archipelagos was uniquely placed for such an event. The absence of a vast hinterland as present in Asia, the absence of world conquerors duly coming and wrecking established societies from the steppes, the inability of any one state to dominate over the others, the particular nature of Christianity allowing there to be a very definite relationship between the church and the state all led to Europe having very particular circumstances and a peculiarly insecure culture: one which ended up dominating the whole world.

Darwin's elegance is in making this argument so detailed and fluid that it adapts itself to every circumstance. His undertaking is ambitious: he covers nearly six hundred years, but the threads he weaves form a fabric sublime in its logic and awe-inducing in its reasoning. His greatest achievement in doing so is forming relationships between regions and explaining how the histories of every region interact. It's humbling to realise just how much India was affected by the Seljuk Turks, or how great the impact of Russian fur traders was on Imperial China and Iran. For all that we view the histories of disparate regions as unconnected, the lines of trade cris-crossing the supercontinent and the volcanic eruption of conquerors from central asia in periodic intervals made sure that every political entity in the world could feel the impact of every other, even in ways they didn't understand.

In my opinion, it's extremely important to see history in this way. We feel ourselves to be special, our histories to be separate from everything else in the world. That is not so. The world is a smaller place than it was a few hundred years ago, but that merely means it took longer for the echoes of power to be felt across the continent. The same connections that existed back then exist today, and unless we don't understand and study them, we'll lose out on why our world is the way it is.

The writing is very easily understood and well-sourced. It's admirable when a historian manages to connect British jitteriness in 1919 (which led to the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre) with events in the Arabic world, manages to source it well, and explain it in a matter-of fact way which leads to one scratching one's head and wondering how he'd never heard of it before.

5/5 for a book which does precisely what it intended to do. Describe a world after Tamerlane, and do it well.