A mind opener
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John Darwin's canvas is a broad one but he controls his subject so well that the overall perspective never gets lost. It is all too easy to see the history of the world from an European viewpoint. This book helps us to see it from a global viewpoint and to understand the world the way it is now. The fact that the book is so elegantly written is a considerable bonus!
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Top notch!
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This is a very ambitious book. It tries to examine the rise and fall of global empires over 500 years. The concentration is on the Ottoman, Mughal, Safavid (though quite slim on them), China, Japan, France, Britain, USA and Russia - with much briefer mention of other European powers such as the Dutch, Germans (Nazi Germany is given some page space) and the Beligians. Despite its great ambitions I think the book succeeds.
One way to describe this book is to call it the political version of Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel (but only for the last 500 years). Like GGS it looks into why certain states/nations/empires rise and why do others fall. GGS looks into the natural reasons and is detatched from political considerations (which is one of the many things that makes GGS so original). After Tamerlane concentrates far more on the political side and in this the author shows an impressively wide and deep knowledge.
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Stunningly wide-ranging rereading of the history of empire
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1492, Chris Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And so Europe conquered the world.
Or so we have been taught. What we've all forgotten (or ignored) is that there were other world powers. Before the British Empire, before the United States, there were the Ottoman, Chinese and Islamic empires that lasted far longer and had more influence than anything Europe produced.
Tamerlane was the last world-conqueror, a violent inheritor of Genghis Khan, whose empire ranged from Iran to China to Moscow. After his death in 1405, his empire fell apart and the modern world as we know it began to form. Princes in Muscovy began to take control of their neighbours; China's accelerated cultural progress began to stagnate; and Europe's sea-worthy nations began to extract wealth from their overseas conquests.
AFTER TAMERLANE is a fabulously balanced and wide-ranging revelation of world history of the past six hundred years, written by one of our preeminent historians. John Darwin is a true star. Up to now he has been too busy making other historians famous; now it's his turn. AFTER TAMERLANE reveals the seeds of the modern world; read this if you want to understand what fawned today's world events.
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