After Tamerlane - John Darwin

A book with a title like this could have gone in a clearer direction. Tamerlane was a savage butcher, seen in his parting gift to Isphahan in Iran – a pyramid of 70,000 skulls. But after Tamerlane we have the global, mainly maritime empires - the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Russians, the Manchus, and later the French, and then the British, with the greatest empire the world has ever seen. This was challenged by the Germans and the Japanese, with their cruel war empires. And after their defeat, the world was first dominated by two empires – the USA’s and the Soviets, and since 1989, by one: America. So the story line could have been – there’s lot of cruelty with nomadic tribal marauders like the Mongols, but with sensible imperialism there has generally been more stability and prosperity, unless the fault lines between the empires erupt as they did in 1914. But though, as Nial Ferguson has shown in his brilliant, ‘How Britain Made The Modern World’, this is a perfectly valid thesis (imperialism good; tribalism bad), Darwin does not have such a focused aim. And that is a bit of a problem. What we have is an extremely competent telling of the story of world history since 1400 with the emphasis that it is about empires, not those dreaded ‘ethnic groups’. And he does a great job in showing there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the West, as well as looking at the reasons (mainly to do with intellectual freedom) why the West did ultimately come to dominate. But after nearly 500 pages of pretty detailed narrative, where it was easy to lose the main picture, you rather want a punchy, ‘this is where we should go now’ conclusion. It’s not there. There is a very thorough summary, where again it’s easy to get lost and the only conclusion is that history has shown that it is not possible for one imperial system, like Tamerlane’s, to rule Eurasia, let alone the Far West and Far East. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it does not shed much light on where we are today. How much better it would have been if Darwin had used his enviable grasp of imperial history to deliver an easy to understand message: history is about empires (so forget all the liberal twaddle about the rights of ethnic groups); benign empires provide prosperity and security, i.e. more human happiness; hence the crucial importance of a. establishing empires, spheres of law and order b. crushing anarchy and c. diplomacy between empires to stop fault lines (e.g. Taiwan for China and the USA) turning into wars. Here is a vision, and what is needed is the history to show that this works; a detailed analysis of what ruins imperial orders; and most importantly of all, how the vision of empires can be restored again in our generation.