After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405
by John Darwin
Book Summary Information
Author: John DarwinEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-05
ISBN: 1596913932
Number of pages: 592
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Book Reviews of After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405
Book Review: Good Narrative; Analysis So-So
Summary: 3 Stars
This book is an effort to produce an overview of Eurasian history over the last 6 centuries. Darwin is particularly concerned with moving the focus from a "Eurocentric" history emphasizing the importance of Europe, and western Europe in particular, to a broader "Eurasian" perspective examining events across the whole continent. Darwin begins with the collapse of Tamerlane's effort to produce an Inner Asian based empire dominating the steppe core of Eurasia and with control of surrounding sedentary regions. In Darwin's view, this is the last time the Inner Asian steppe plays a decisive role in Eurasian history and is followed by the emergence of the modern pattern of powerful sedentary states across the whole continent. Darwin then describes the emergence of substantial polities across Eurasian in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Safavids, and China. These states grow, achieve a kind of rough equilibrium by the 18th century. Then everything changes with what Darwin calls the Eurasian Revolution in which European states extend across the globe producing intregrated political and particularly economic systems. Darwin charts this process in the late 18th and 19th centuries, then its decline with the catastrophic events of WWI and WWII. He concludes with a short section on the present status of the world.
Much of the narrative is quite good, and some is excellent. Darwin's specialty is the 20th century British empire and he is particularly good on the 19th century formation of European colonial empires, the crucial role of dominating India in the formation of the British Empire, and the process of decolonialization. While the narrative sections, which are the great majority of the book, are good, the quality and depth of analysis is not strong. For example, why did the early modern period have its particular structure with the parallel emergence of several strong polities across Eurasia, followed by 17th century stagnation, followed by another vigorous period of state building? Could it have something to do with gradual Eurasian recovery from the effects of the Black Death, followed by the interruption of the Little Ice Age? There is no discussion of any of these important features.
Perhaps more important, Darwin's attempt to shift away from a Eurocentric focus is largely belied by his narrative. Much of the book is necessarily a narrative of how Europe came to dominate the world. Darwin even describes the key events initiating and terminating this period of dominance as rooted in intra-European conflicts in the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries. Similarly, his Eurasian Revolution includes the crucial European elements of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Darwin, following the work of many other scholars, is careful to stress the highly contingent nature of European success and its relatively late occurrence. He is careful to emphasize appropriately that non-European societies were not passive, decadent cultures overthrown inevitably by dynamic Europeans. Nonetheless, even with all these qualifications, this is very much a Eurocentric account shorn of triumphalist language.
Darwin is not always consistent in his analyses. For example, he attacks the old conclusion that non-European societies were less intellectually dynamic than European societies. On the other hand, he is careful to point out that important Early Modern non-Western states, like the Ottomans and Ming-Qing China were considerably less outward looking than European states. At one point, he attacks suggestions that the very competitive European state system generated the relative dynamism and expansionism of Europe but his own account leads directly to this conclusion. Like many historians, he tends to underestimate the importance of the Scientific Revolution, in this case, misunderstanding the argument in the key text that he cites in support of his conclusions.
Another significant defect is Darwin's emphasis on empire. Given his prior research interests, this is understandable but Darwin uses the term to describe the Mongol Empire, 19th century colonial empires, the Qing and Ottoman states, the preponderant hegemony exerted by the US after WWII, and the Soviet Union. Pulling such a diverse array of polities under one title considerably undermines the utility of the concept and really does nothing to advance understanding of historic changes.
Darwin asserts some surprising and hard to support conclusions at the end of the book. He suggests, for example, that the present globalization is a means of guaranteeing diversity. But the best index of human cultural diversity is linguistic diversity. Human languages have been going extinct at a phenomenal rate for at least the past 2 centuries and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. While Darwin takes pains to emphasize continuity in states like China, he pushes this argument too far. China today is a nation-state, not an empire ruled by a semi-divine figure. It is run by a technocratic one party bureaucracy with a nominally egalitarian and meritocratic ideology, not by a gentry based on inherited privilege espousing Confucianism. It is highly urbanized and its economy is a form of industrial capitalism. Its predominant intellectual culture is rationalistic and scientifically oriented. This isn't the continuity of Chinese history, its the triumph of European culture.
For readers interested in overview analysis of Eurasian history, a considerably superior book will be published later this year. Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels, which covers medieval and early modern Eurasia, is an outstanding analysis of a broad sweep of history.
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