Jiang Shigong on Darwin's After Tamerlane

Jiang Shigong, “Imperial History without Empires”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jiang Shigong (b. 1967) is a professor at the Faculty of Law at Peking University, and a major New Left figure in China.  Translations of several of his texts are available on this site. 
 
The text translated here is a preface (推荐序, literally a “recommending preface,” a term which appears with some frequency in the mainland Chinese book world) to the Chinese translation of After Tamerlane:  The Global History of Empire, by the British historian John Darwin (b. 1948), first published in 2007.  The Chinese translation has just been published, and is selling well, Darwin tells me.
 
The point of Darwin’s wide-ranging volume (see reviews here and here) is to question familiar teleological arguments linking the ideas of “Europe,” “empire,” and “modernity,” by focusing on Eurasian resilience in the face of the rise of European empires (Tamerlane’s death in 1405 marked the last time continental Eurasia was united as an empire).  In the place of grand narratives that depict the striving, Promethean, aggressive Europeans imposing their will on a stagnant, passive “other,” Darwin explores a series of themes—empires and evolving economies prominent among them—that impacted different parts of the world in different ways at different moments.  From this perspective, the rise of the West was not the inevitable working out of an “idea,” but rather the contingent result of concrete decisions made to deal with specific circumstances.  European empires were perhaps more far-flung than earlier examples, and introduced any number of striking political and economic “innovations,” but other empires—notably the Chinese empire—pushed back and survived, not unchanged, but intact.
 
The purported purpose of Jiang Shigong’s lengthy preface (more than 8,000 words) to Darwin’s volume is to provide Chinese readers with certain theoretical perspectives which Darwin, writing as a historian and story-teller, glosses over.  In this sense, Jiang’s review of Darwin is quite thorough and indeed far-ranging; in an email exchange, Darwin remarked to me that Jiang had “certainly done his homework.”  Jiang ultimately takes Darwin to task for ignoring the moral failures of modern European and American imperialism, but the level of intellectual engagement Jiang displays is impressive, and I was once again struck by the extreme asymmetry between what Chinese intellectuals know about us and what we know about them.  Would a Chinese equivalent of Darwin’s book even be translated into English?  Would a major Western intellectual write a preface to it?  I doubt it.  Of course, this asymmetry may well be a lingering effect of the rise of European empires…
 
From my perspective, Jiang’s preface is interesting because we see him continuing to grapple with the concept of “empire.”  Jiang is always quick to denounce the American empire (calling it the “New Roman Empire”) which he sees as equivalent to the current “liberal international order” (for an example see here, as well as in the text translated below).  On other occasions, however, Jiang seems to adopt a more neutral concept of empire, arguing, much as does Darwin, that empires are concentrations of power that have existed throughout history and, presumably, will continue to exist in the future (see here for an example).  “Empire you will always have with you,” he seems to say, and if China’s One Belt-One Road initiative gives off a whiff of empire, then so what?  It will be an “empire with Chinese characteristics.”
 
However, after more or less accurately conveying Darwin’s major themes and conclusions, Jiang takes him to task for ignoring distinctions between different types of empire, thus giving a pass to the cruelty that “modern civilization” has brought to the world through the imposition of global empires.  To cite Jiang:
 
“The supreme principle of ‘modernity’ was finally expressed through the violence of war. Thus, the fundamental impetus behind the ‘Great Divergence’ of the ‘Eurasian Revolution’ lies in the fact that China, following its ‘natural’ path toward modernization and its own vision of Confucian universalism, consistently employed morality as a constraint on violence, while Europe, in order to join the Eastern world systems, followed an ‘unnatural’ modernization path and took the lead in completing the revolution from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity,’ building a new type of empire completely different from the classical Eastern examples. Thus, the history of global empires that promoted the ‘Eurasian Revolution’ is also the history of the coming of age of ‘civilized barbarians,’ the history of the transformation of classical Eastern empires into modern European empires, the history of the rise of European sovereign states and the establishment of colonial empires around the world. 

It is the history of the darkest global empires, the history of the slave trade and capitalist exploitation, and the history in which imperialism constantly launched global wars. Darwin's intentional or unintentional erasure of the differences between ancient and modern types of empire obscures the barbarity of the modern empire constructed by the rise of Europe. To this day, we still live in the world of barbarians created by Europeans, and the racism and social Darwinism of mankind's return to animal status has become the underlying ideology throughout the era of globalization. While globalization continues to aggravate global geopolitical inequality, trade wars, technology wars, financial wars, and cyber wars have become the norm in the era of globalization.”
 
In sum, Darwin’s portrait of “imperial history without empires” seems to have convinced Jiang Shigong of the wisdom of Hobson and Lenin.  It is a sad commentary on “empire with Chinese characteristics” that Chinese intellectuals are not free to discuss even China’s internal empire.
 
Links to other texts on the site
 
For texts related to the theme of globalization, click here.
 
For texts related to the theme of Sino-American relations, click here.
 
Translation
 
One
 
Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492 is generally regarded as the beginning of global history. This is not only because it was one of the great voyages that discovered the world and linked all of humanity together, but also, and more importantly, because modern civilization emerged from the West before conquering the rest of the planet, thus shaping a globalized world, to the point that many today envision the arrival of the "end of history" and "world empire," represented by the United States.
 
By contrast, John Darwin's (b. 1948) After Tamerlane attempts to break away from the Western-centric historical narrative we find in Western classics and popular textbooks by guiding the reader through many unfamiliar historical vistas, and focusing on the grand narrative of the interaction between East and West. He starts his story not in 1492, when Columbus discovered the New World, but in 1405, the year of the little-noted "death of Tamerlane." This year marked the end of the Mongol dream of building a world empire in Eurasia, and the beginning of a new page in global history.
 
The choice of this starting point surely has a double meaning.  On the one hand, it seems to distance itself from the familiar Western-centric historical narrative, highlighting the importance of Eurasia.  On the other, it is intended as a reminder to present-day politicians committed to the construction of world empire: "The Eurasian world is unwilling to accept a single set of rules (the last subheading of the book in the Chinese-language edition[2])." The book was published in 2008,[3] at a crucial moment when the United States was taking advantage of its unipolar status to expand throughout the world and build its "new Roman Empire."  The author clearly implies that the U.S. construction of a "world empire" is bound to meet with a failure similar to the "death of Tamerlane." In the last sentence of the book, we read: "“But if there is one continuity that we should be able to glean from a long view of the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance to a unified system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.  In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow—or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadow of his failure.”
 
Consequently, to truly understand Darwin’s work, one way to read it is to start with the final chapter, which allows you to grasp his starting point.  In his view, global history is the history of empires competing for hegemony, and the rise of the West and the ensuing jousts between empires are nothing more than a desire to follow in Tamerlane's footsteps and work toward the construction of a new world empire. Yet why have efforts to build world empire failed?
 
To answer this question you must return to the first chapter of the book and see what theoretical approach the author employs. Darwin clearly draws theoretical insight from the latest work on global history, emphasizing that global history cannot be viewed solely from a Western-centric perspective, but must also include Eastern perspectives. This book is thus another work in which the author debates with historians of globalization and in so doing develops his theoretical paradigm for understanding global history. Only by grasping this theoretical paradigm can we truly understand the scholarly contribution of this book.
 
Beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, Western thinkers have systematically posited differences and antagonisms between the East and the West to explain the rise of the West and its domination of the world. The rise of global history has consistently revised this Western-centric discourse and offered new theoretical insights. Darwin's attempt in this volume is to use the perspective of history of empire to engage in a dialogue with the dominant narrative of global history, which culminates in Chapter 4, where the author introduces the concept of the "Eurasian Revolution" to reinterpret the "Great Divergence" of the rise of the West and the decline of the East, thus revealing his theoretical perspective.
 
However, Darwin, a historian, prefers to present his work as a readable story rather than a theoretical treatise. His goal is to popularize major theoretical issues discussed in scholarship and to present his theoretical insights by interweaving various historical threads. Thus, in summary, Darwin’s book is an academic work that grew out of a certain theoretical background, that attempts a dialogue with theory and has certain theoretical concerns, but these concerns generally remain implicit in the historical narrative and are not developed into an in-depth theoretical analysis.
 
Therefore, to truly understand this book, the reader must pay attention to the theoretical narratives that the author mentions only in passing, without developing them more fully. This is the starting point I have chosen from which to write this preface, which might be read as a gloss on the book.  On the one hand, I will discusses the theoretical issues that the author fails to develop, helping interested readers to focus on the theoretical ambitions of the book rather than just reading it as a best-seller.  At the same time, I will attempt to start a dialogue on empire, exploring how we should understand it and what lessons we can learn from the global history of empire over the past six hundred years.
 
Two
 
Our understanding of history today is the product of the social scientific approach of 18th and 19th century theorists such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Comte, Weber and Marx, the idea that human history follows a universal historical development path from primitive to advanced, from traditional to modern, from barbarism to civilization. This view has been summarized concisely as modernization theory, so much so that it has become almost a theological belief that Western civilization is the purpose of human historical development, and that globalization must lead to the "end of history."
 
However, this historical narrative is currently facing challenges from global history studies. Global history is a complex spectrum of ideas, the most active of which is the political economy tradition of the left, such as Immanuel Wallerstein's (1930-2019) world system theory, Samir Amin's (1931-2018) dependency theory and Andre Gunder Frank's (1929-2005) "ReOrientation."[4] These authors consider the classical writers' accounts of “history” to be in fact "ahistorical," because they are overly biased towards European history, seeking out the origins and dynamics of the path to modernity solely in European history, while ignoring the fact that the historical conditions facilitating Europe's modernization were precisely the plunder and exploitation of non-European "peripheries.”
 
Thus, these classic theories reveal a "Western-centric" or even "Orientalist" mindset that treats the non-Western world as merely an external "other" and a counterpoint to the "Western miracle,” to the point that the theory of modernization has become an ideological tool of Western imperialism or neo-colonialism. Driven by this left-wing critical tradition, global history breaks away from the Western-centered paradigm and examines Western and non-Western civilizations in the context of an interactive world as a whole.
 
Thus, on the one hand, global history writing takes an "anti-teleological" stance, emphasizing the contingency of the West's rise, even imputing this contingency to factors such as geography, mineral resources, and the natural ecology.  On the other hand, they insist that the East in the era of the rise of the West was not in a state of "stagnation" as described by classical writers in well-known theories such as "Oriental despotism" and the "Asian mode of production."
 
Nor was globalization, or even the global system, created by the West following the Age of Discovery; the East had already developed a vibrant global trading system long before these discoveries (the difference is simply whether there was one system or many systems), and the rise of the West was actually a process of the West’s striving to enter into the Eastern trading systems and later, to gradually overtake them. This is the issue of "ReOrientation" that Frank insists must be incorporated into the writing of global history. On this basis, the historian Kenneth Pomeranz (b. 1958) further argues that the East maintained its economic dominance over the West even after the Age of Discovery, and that it was only after the Industrial Revolution in the mid- to late-eighteenth century that the West truly overtook the East, leading to the "Great Divergence."
 
As a historian of empire, Darwin had to confront the basic assumptions of those engaged in global history writing when he enters into their territory. Thus, when we open the first chapter of Darwin’s book, we find that the chapter title—“Orientations”—is a simple adaptation of Frank's "ReOrientation," to express his basic attitude and position toward global history, which is to take a global view of Europe's relations with the world outside of Europe, especially the East, viewing all parties on an equal footing. The book devotes almost as much space to the dynamism of the Russian Empire, the Islamic world, India, and China prior to the 18th century as to European events, discounting the image of the East as "stagnant" as described by 19th century theorists.
 
It is from the historical perspective of this "ReOrientation" that Darwin argues that "the center of gravity of modern world history lies in Eurasia," rather than in the Atlantic world as emphasized by "Western-centrism.”  In Chapter 4, "The Eurasian Revolution," the title of the second subsection is taken directly from Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, indicating that he has drawn his problématique from the paradigm provided by Frank and Pomeranz. As for Darwin’s criticisms, in Chapter 1, of the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber concerning, the rise of the West in Chapter 1, they are more a tribute to his above-mentioned colleagues in global history than a statement of the author's own theoretical views.
 
Nonetheless, when Darwin, known for his work on empire, took up the study of global history, this necessarily led to a dialogue between the two distinct fields of studies of empire and studies of global history. Generally speaking, the work of J. R. Seeley (1834-1895), Professor of Empire at Cambridge University, is seen as having marked the beginning of the study of history of empire with his The Expansion of England (1883), a tradition that both summarized the historical experience of the expansion of European colonial empires and provided a theoretical justification and support for the expansion of empire.
 
However, with the theoretical criticism of imperialism offered by J. A. Hobson (1858-1940) and V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) in the 19th century, the decline of European colonial empires after World War II, and the rise of national liberation movements, studies of empire declined. As the United States struggled for global hegemony, imperial studies shifted to "regional studies" that downplayed the imperial dimension. Nonetheless, with the rise of the various cultural revolutions in the West in the 1960s, these "regional studies" approaches also came to be influenced by post-colonial theory, new social theory, cultural criticism, and other post-modern theoretical trends.
 
After the end of the Cold War, left-wing criticism of imperialism declined, and the ideologies of globalization and the end of history contributed to the revival of studies of empire. For example, the historian Niall Ferguson (b. 1964), who is well known in the Chinese world, is one of the key representatives of this trend (CITIC Publishing Group has translated and published a series of Ferguson’s books). In the wake of 9/11, as the United States sought to build a "new Roman Empire" through a series of military conquests, theories of empire moved from history into international politics.
 
Darwin was born in 1948 to a family of British Empire officials, but he spent his adolescence in South Africa,[5] witnessing the colonial struggle for independence, and attended Oxford University at a time when academic thinking was changing.  This means that his views are different from Ferguson's nostalgia for a Whig historiography of the glory days of the British Empire, or the current imperial debates over American dominance. The post-colonial and post-modern theories that were in vogue at the time had a profound impact on the study of empire.
 
The "new imperial history" shaped by these trends adopted sociological, anthropological, and environmental perspectives, focusing on environmental change, migration, missionaries, commerce, ideas, and the resistance and cooperation of colonized people. In particular, Darwin’s mentors John Gallagher (1919-1980) and Ronald Robinson (1920-1999) published their famous paper "The Imperialism of Free Trade" in 1953, which provided a new interpretation of the history of the British Empire, and had a huge impact on Darwin's own work. It can be argued that Darwin's later publications, Unfinished Empire and The Empire Project, were in fact further elaborations of his mentors’ ideas.
 
Following in their path, Darwin argues that the "Great Divergence" of the West and the East in the 18th century was the result of historical contingencies. The full expansion of European empires was made possible not only by the destruction of the Eastern empires by "industrial imperialism," as emphasized by classical social theory, but also, and more importantly, by the development of a "civilized" "imperial liberalism.”  The ideal of becoming "civilized" earned the appreciation and support of elites within the Eastern empires, so that that the expansion of European empires ceased to be a simple matter of violent conquest and came to include the active cooperation of these colonies.
 
It can be said that the focus of the "new imperial history" is no longer on the external colonial expansion of the European powers, but on the various economic, social, and cultural interactions between Europe and the colonies. Therefore, studies in "new imperial history" seem to deconstruct "Western-centrism" as well as elements of conscious planning by Western powers, and their dominant position in the process of empire-building.  In fact, however, they wind up deconstructing the political economy of Western empire-building, thus weakening or even dissolving the critique of "imperialism" originally lodged against the Western powers.
 
This is precisely why Darwin emphasized the need to liberate the concept of "empire" from the theoretical critique of "imperialism" and to see "empire" solely as "a pattern of political organization that would naturally develop through most of history," even stating that "the history of the world…is the history of empire.”  For this reason, he neither seeks to criticize the history of the West's rise and conquest of the East as "a brutal tale of predatory imperialism," nor does he want to glorify this history as "a world history of modernity with the West as guide and template."   Instead, he attempts to look at the history of global empire with an objective dispassion that is free of emotional judgment.
 
Once "empire" becomes a neutral concept, "imperialism" can also be defined as "the attempt of a state to dominate other societies by absorbing them into its political, cultural, and economic system."  Thus, "while it was often the Europeans who were most active in promoting imperialism, such practices were not unique to Europeans."  In his book, Darwin not only sees the expansion of Tsarist Russia in Central Asia as "continental imperialism," but even refers to the expansion of Ottoman Turkey as "imperialism." "Imperialism" is thus no longer the particular historical phenomenon occurring during the "advanced stage" of capitalism, criticized by Lenin, but a universal imperial expansionist impulse frequently encountered in human history. One might say that once this "new imperial history" had effectively “sanitized” the leftist criticism of "imperialism" that has been in vogue since the 19th century, Darwin found himself able to look at the global expansion of European imperialism with equanimity and write a global imperial history with ease.
 
However, this sanitization of "imperialism" has also led the concept of "empire" to lose its specific historical connotation, thus becoming a very broad concept. For a work on the history of empire, Darwin finally offers no theory of the idea of empire, and does not stress differences between ancient and modern empires, describing empire them simply as "the massive accumulation of power," "a system of power or a structure of domination that breaks down or ignores racial, cultural, and ecological distinctions."  He simply adds various modifiers to the concept of "empire" to describe its external characteristics, such as "commercial empire," "military empire," "undeclared empire," “unlimited empire," etc.
 
Although in the last chapter he mentions three forms of empire—classical empires, colonial empires, and “informal empires"— he does not stress the differences among these three forms, but instead deliberately obscures these differences by talking about common problems of governance all three have faced.  Nor does he use these three forms in the discussion of his “Eurasian revolution.”  Yet the only way to understand the origin and impact of the "Eurasian Revolution" and the "Great Divergence" is to look at the different types of empires and the differences between the ancient and modern worlds behind them.
 
Three
 
Darwin’s study can be seen as a dialogue between the study of global history and the study of empire, orchestrated by the author. On the one hand, he tries to critique the left-wing tradition of critical political economy in global history from Wallerstein to Frank from his "new imperial history" position, while at the same time trying to deconstruct Hobson’s and Lenin’s criticism of "imperialism" by presenting empire as a universal global historical phenomenon from a global history perspective.  His understanding of the history of global empire draws directly on Halford Mackinder's (1861-1947)[6] geopolitics.  
 
From the very outset, Mackinder's geopolitics proposed a global perspective on Eurasian relations.  At the same time, geopolitics itself served as a strategy of European imperialist expansion and global hegemony, the strategic center of which is the "Eurasian continent" that Darwin focuses on. Darwin argues that for centuries prior to the 18th century, Eurasian empires were evenly matched, and it was not until the 18th century that European empires rose to overwhelming dominance. 
 
So what were the factors that led to the "Great Divergence" of power in Eurasia?  Here, Darwin proposes a new concept:  the "Eurasian Revolution." He argues that the Eurasian Revolution, this "Great Divergence" between East and West, was brought about by three intertwined revolutions, including a geopolitical revolution, an economic (or industrial) revolution, and a cultural or “civilizational” revolution. The industrial and civilizational revolutions were generally emphasized by the classical theories, and Darwin's greatest contribution is to introduce Mackinder's geopolitics into the study of the history of global empires, emphasizing that the Eurasian Revolution was based on a "geopolitical revolution" (the first subhead in Chapter 4 of Darwin’s work).
 
It is precisely this geopolitical perspective that leads Darwin to stress that the discovery of the New World produced great changes in the territorial boundaries and the concept of "greater Europe," from Russia in the east to all of the European colonies in the Americas and Oceania. Similarly, the rise of the "Atlantic World" allowed Europeans to use the silver of the Americas to "reluctantly get on board the Asian economic train" (in Frank’s words), thereby joining the Eastern world economic system. In addition, and more importantly, the collapse of Napoleon's empire in the early 19th century destroyed the geopolitical balance of power among the empires within Europe, leading to the global expansion of the Russian Empire in the heart of the continent and the British Empire on the maritime front, both of which were attacking Eurasia by land and by sea, from north to south, jointly squeezing, gobbling up, and occupying the geopolitical space of the Eastern empires.
 
It was precisely in the course of the century-long "Great Game" between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia that the British Empire occupied India and colonized it, thus gaining a springboard for the conquest of East Asia. From this point forward, Britain began its period of domination of the maritime world, and also promoted the rise of global free trade. In order to conquer China, the last Eastern empire, via trade, it was necessary to rely on goods of high quality and cheap price, the products of Britain’s industrial revolution. 
 
Thus, the rise of "Greater Europe" promoted a global geopolitical revolution, an industrial revolution in the economic sphere and the formation of the capitalist world economic system, while differences in levels of economic development motivated Europeans to rescue the backward "primitives" through the spread of “civilization,” thus giving birth to the Orientalist image of the stagnant East.  These three revolutions were intertwined, leading Europe to overtake Asia on the Eurasian continent and determining the fate of Asia, which was to decline.
 
While it is certainly insightful to explain the Great Divergence from a geopolitical perspective, Darwin's explanation of the Eurasian Revolution overlooks two fundamental questions in the history of global empire. One is the "Zheng He mystery" in global history.   Zheng He (1377-1433) was a court eunuch who led expeditionary voyages to Southeast Asia, India, and even West Africa in the early 15th century.  In other words, Ming Dynasty China was fully capable of global navigation, and Zheng He had even already discovered "Africa," so why did China pass on the opportunity to dominate the world, leaving it to the Europeans to do later?
 
The second is the "mystery of Voyages of Discovery," or in other words, why did the Europeans risk their lives to undertake these voyages? The only way we can truly understand the geopolitical basis of the "Great Divergence" and its economic and cultural origins is to consider these two questions together.
 
Although Darwin emphasized Mackinder's influence, he overlooked the far-reaching implications of Mackinder's division of the globe into a continental heartland, a continental periphery (the Inner Crescent), and an oceanic island zone (the Outer Crescent). The long-range impact of the continental heartland on the margins led China, located on the margin of the continent, to give priority to the northern nomadic peoples, and thus its geostrategic focus was always on competing with the continental heartland for the "inner subcontinent" (Lattimore's term).
 
This long-term geostrategic focus shaped China's character as a continental state, and as a result the maritime world never became the focus of China's attention. Thus, from the outset, Zheng He's voyages never aimed at the commercial trade in the maritime world, and even if new continents were discovered, these barren lands would have been of little significance to the already rich China.
 
On the other hand, and more importantly, during the long struggle with the less civilized nomads in the north, the northern minorities continued to enter the Middle Kingdom and were culturally Sinicized, thus strengthening the Chinese civilization's self-confidence to the point that it came to see itself as the center of the world. This cultural self-confidence developed into arrogance that hampered the Chinese ability to perceive changes occurring in the outside world, to the extent that in China's interaction with the Western world in the 16th and 17th centuries, China displayed little interest in the emerging scientific knowledge of the West.
 
The "Eurasian revolution" was accelerated by a "fateful coincidence" in history—the fact that as European empires entered their heyday, the Chinese empire began its decline. In this sense, both China's historical power as a continental empire, as well as its lack of maritime awareness and its cultural isolation and arrogance toward the West, were the result of a long-term geopolitical interaction with the Eurasian continental heartland. Similarly, the rise of the West resulted not only from the Mediterranean way of life, but more importantly, from the accidental discovery of the New World. This was a true "fateful coincidence."
 
To understand why Europeans undertook the Voyages of Discovery, we must first understand the influence of the Mediterranean world from a geopolitical perspective. European civilization has always revolved around the struggle for control of the Mediterranean, in the sense that commercial trade and navigation are to Europeans what agricultural farming and horseback riding are to the Chinese, a cultural gene shaped by long-lasting geographic factors. More importantly, over the long arc of history, European civilization has often been defeated by Eastern civilization: Greek civilization was destroyed by Eastern empires, the Roman Empire and was subdued by Eastern Christianity, and Christian Europe was almost destroyed by the Mongols (the root of the European fear of the "Yellow Scourge").
 
The primary significance of the "death of Tamerlane" for Europe is that the Europeans survived, but the longer-term impact is that the disintegration of the Mongol Empire led to the discontinuation of the "Silk Road", which bridged trade between East and West, and the rise of the Ottoman Turks, who monopolized the Mediterranean Sea, whose constant offensives squeezed the Europeans into the small living space of Western Europe. Christianity had no cultural advantage over Islam, and the "Crusades" were just a desperate effort by Western Europe that ended in failure.
 
In this geopolitical environment, the Voyages of Discovery were part of the survival instinct of Europeans, and in addition to looking for the legendary Christian King John with whom to establish a geopolitical alliance against the Ottoman Turks, the more important objective was to find maritime trade routes with India and China, not only because they were the center of wealth in the Eurasian world, but also because their knowledge, values, and ways of life were of great significance.
 
Setting aside the importance of China’s "four great inventions" to the rise of Europe, studies increasingly show that the knowledge of astronomy, cartography, and navigation required by the European the age of navigation also came from the East, as did a large number of inventions such as cotton processing, tea cultivation, and engineering technology, which today can be understood as industrial intellectual property, were also imported from the East without compensation.
 
And in the field of thought and culture, Indian Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism became popular in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, contributing to the European Enlightenment. However, in Darwin’s book, we read instead about how Western knowledge spread to the East after the rise of the West, and there is no mention of the earlier transmission of Eastern knowledge toward the West.  The term “four great inventions” does not even appear.  Clearly, Darwin's "new imperial history" does not completely escape from "Western-centrism," but only obscures it.
 
Four
 
From the "Great Divergence" of the Industrial Revolution to the earlier "Mystery of Zheng He," the differences between Chinese and Western civilizations are obvious, but explanations of the causes of these differences diverge widely. This has been an unavoidable issue in classical social theory beginning 18th and 19th century Europe and continuing today in contemporary studies of global history. If we look at it from the perspective of "empire," we may be able to arrive at a suitable explanation by examining the different types of empire developed by different civilizational traditions.
 
Unfortunately, in this work on the history of empire, Darwin does not focus on differences in empires over time and space, and thus fails to see the enormous impetus that these different types of empire had on the "Eurasian Revolution." The title of Darwin's 2013 book Unfinished Empire, which recounts the history of the British Empire, comes from Adam Smith, so let us start with Adam Smith's explanation of the "Great Divergence" in the 18th century.
 
On the issue of the "Great Divergence," Darwin invokes the historian Mark Elvin’s (b. 1938) concept of the "high level equilibrium trap" to explain why China failed to follow the path of the Industrial Revolution, a problem that first came from Adam Smith's insight. Adam Smith astutely observed that human history has developed two paths of industrialization. One is the "natural" path of modernization, typified by China, that is, the path from agriculture to manufacturing to commerce and trade. The other is the "unnatural, backward" modernization path typified by Europe, i.e., the path from commerce to manufacturing to agriculture.
 
The European path is rooted in the fact that the feudal system constrained the improvement and development of agriculture, while the commercially oriented Italian republics, the first to destroy the feudal system, redirected the freed people toward Mediterranean commercial trade, at the same time that the Age of Discovery created incentives for the production of small but high-value goods. This forced Europe to evolve from an early trade in luxury goods to a later commerce in industrial goods, thus propelling Europe to take the lead in the Industrial Revolution.
 
Adam Smith's insight lies not only in seeing the economic roots of the "Great Divide" between East and West, but more importantly, in seeing that this "unnatural" path of commercial trade-led development in Europe produced the state structure of the modern "military-fiscal state." The profitability of commodity trading depended on availability of markets for the sale of commodities, and in order to open up markets European countries were constantly waging wars. The wars gave impetus to the rise of finance, and the issuing of bonds allowed the European states to significantly increase the scale and capacity of warfare. The vast markets opened up by the wars in turn stimulated the development of manufacturing industries to provide more and cheaper goods.
 
Thus, the four factors of trade, war, finance, and industry, which were all mutually reinforcing in this "unnatural" path of modernization, led to the formation of a unique political organization, the "military-fiscal state.” The rise of Europe involved not only the globalization and industrialization of commerce and trade, but also the globalization of finance and war machines. This new political organization of the "military-financial state" unleashed the most barbaric forces of human nature, fundamentally reversing standards of civilization and barbarism as understood to this point. This is what Darwin understands as "modernity," i.e., how to mobilize "human" and "material" forces in a unified way, organizing economic, political, and cultural factors into a "force."
 
If "civilization" means the restraint of the savage animal nature of human nature, then "modernity" means the release of this same nature, and what Darwin calls the "cultural revolution" was a battle between the ancient and the modern in which the great barbaric forces unleashed by desire and freedom were used as the new measures of "civilization:" science and technology, industrial and commercial capitalism, and the construction of sovereign states in liberal democracies. 
 
Yet the supreme principle of "modernity" was finally expressed through the violence of war. Thus, the fundamental impetus behind the "Great Divergence" of the "Eurasian Revolution" lies in the fact that China, following its “natural” path toward modernization and its own vision of Confucian universalism, consistently employed morality as a constraint on violence, while Europe, in order to join the Eastern world systems, followed an "unnatural" modernization path and took the lead in completing the revolution from "tradition" to "modernity," building a new type of empire completely different from the classical Eastern examples.
 
Thus, the history of global empires that promoted the "Eurasian Revolution" is also the history of the coming of age of "civilized barbarians," the history of the transformation of classical Eastern empires into modern European empires, the history of the rise of European sovereign states and the establishment of colonial empires around the world.  It is the history of the darkest global empires, the history of the slave trade and capitalist exploitation, and the history in which imperialism constantly launched global wars. Darwin's intentional or unintentional erasure of the differences between ancient and modern types of empire obscures the barbarity of the modern empire constructed by the rise of Europe.
 
To this day, we still live in the world of barbarians created by Europeans, and the racism and social Darwinism of mankind's return to animal status has become the underlying ideology throughout the era of globalization. While globalization continues to aggravate global geopolitical inequality, trade wars, technology wars, financial wars, and cyber wars have become the norm in the era of globalization.
 
From the perspective of the history of empire, the rise of Europe created a completely new type. The European empire first constructed the core of the modern sovereign state, a small entity with strong capacities of organization mobilization and an internal cohesion, which we usually call the "military-fiscal state," the "constitutional state," or the "nation-state." One might say that the sovereign state was the engine of the new empire. It was by relying on the great power of the imperial core that small European sovereign states could conquer the huge empires in Asia or the New World, and thus build vast colonial empires.
 
Thus, the concepts of "colonial empire" and "colonialism" emphasize the economic exploitation, violent domination, and military conquest of colonies by European sovereign states.  However, in the "new imperial history" narratives, it is common to emphasize that European colonial empires were not constructed by governments in a planned and purposeful manner, but were instead the fortuitous results of global commercial trade since the Age of Discovery.  In particular, the Dutch and British overseas colonies were often established by private companies of merchants and adventurers who obtained charters from governments.
 
Thus, in the narratives of the "new imperial history," special emphasis is placed on the fragmented and diverse modes of governance established by merchants, missionaries, adventurers, and immigrants based on the interests of commercial trade, in a variety of ways that suited the different circumstances of the colonies, which were nominally loyal to the British king, but in fact had a "high degree of autonomy" in matters of governance. Such empires, unlike classical empires based on territorial conquest, were organized around commercial interests, so that empires were not dominated by unilateral violence, but by compromise and cooperation with an eye to commercial interests, resulting in what Darwin's teachers characterized as "empires of free trade" or "informal empires."  It is on this basis that Darwin is happy to portray the British Empire as a "world-system."
 
However, unlike Wallerstein's use of the concept of the "world-system" to emphasize the economic exploitation of the periphery by the central regions of Europe, Darwin's view of the British Empire as a "world-system" was in response to a critique of European "colonial empires" or "imperialism.”  Although the two words can be used interchangeably, "colonialism" more often refers to imperial territorial appropriation and violent conquest in political and military terms. With the development of capitalism, the extraction of economic resources was increasingly carried out through trade and investment, which are more advanced and covert forms than seizure through brute force.
 
Thus, in contrast to the "colonial empires" of naked, violent conquest and the plunder of wealth, "imperialism" is actually a higher form of empire (Lenin saw it as an advanced stage of capitalism), a redistribution of economic wealth through seemingly equal commercial transactions, thus becoming a more subtle and apparently more civilized form of imperial domination. In this sense, we can say that the "formal empire" (colonial empire) of "colonialism" still has shades of the "tribute empire" (Amin) of the ancient agrarian era, and is the transformation of the classical empire into a modern empire. The "informal empire" or "world-system" of "imperialism" is modern and is a product of the capitalist mode of production, where economic forces play a decisive role. It is a product of the capitalist mode of production, a product of the decisive role of economic power and the service of political power to economic power.
 
In the context of Darwin's "Eurasian Revolution," it is clear that the early global empires of Portugal and Spain fit more the classical "colonialist" pattern of the direct plunder of wealth, while the subsequent Dutch and British empires, both in North America and in East India, had elements of "colonialism" but gradually developed an "imperialist" character based on trade and investment.  However, the formal empire of "colonialism" and the informal empire of "imperialism" must be seen not as two different stages of historical development, but rather as two different ways of building empires. In fact, the rise of European empires has displayed both faces of "colonialism" and "imperialism" from the very outset, and they have always been intertwined, but they have taken different forms at different times and in different places. In the case of the early Spanish and Portuguese empires, they were completely "colonial" and engaged in direct plunder in Africa and the Americas, but took on more of a trading stance when they first entered the Eastern world.
 
Similarly, the British Empire, even in the Victorian era, with its emphasis on free trade, had to call on the gunboats to open China to trade. Thus, in the history of European empires, maritime trade has always been closely linked to the development of navies, and free trade policies have always been linked to gunboat policies. While Britain was an "imperialist" in the period of global free trade, it intensified its "colonialist" policy in India, transforming it from an "informal empire" into a "formal empire" with colonial rule.
 
As can be seen, the modern empire has a richer arsenal than the ancient agricultural "tribute empire," with more diverse combinations of inputs from the military, from religion, from trade and finance, and from cultural diffusion, thus presenting a varied and dynamic imperial landscape. If the fierce competition among European empires in the 18th century led to the creation of more colonial monopolies under mercantilist strategies, it was in the 19th century, with the eclipse France, Britain's archrival in Europe, following the dissolution of Napoleon's empire, that Britain gained a decisive advantage in global commercial trade and thus began to promote a kind of "free-trade imperialism." Thus, we find that the rise of Europe resulted in a complex mix of sovereign states, colonial empires and "informal empires."
 
If we place the new model of empire in the spatial-historical context of the Eurasian revolution, we find that it is geographically and spatially organized into a "Greater Europe" that adopts a system of sovereign states (the Westphalian system), a vast "colonial empire" built on the margins of the Americas, Africa and Eurasia, a “triangular informal empire" (world-system), constructed globally through trade and investment. This triangular relationship describes both the internal organizational structure of the modern imperial system as well as the historical space created by global geopolitics. If we place this triangular relationship in the context of the geopolitical transformation occasioned by the  "Eurasian Revolution," we will find that no matter how we criticize the so-called "Eurocentrism" “discursively,” we cannot deny that “in practice,” the fundamental driving force behind the construction and eventual rise of a new modern empire in Europe was undoubtedly located within Europe. 
 
In other words, in the face of geopolitical pressure, Europe did not readily surrender or yield, but engaged in life or death struggle in the face of "challenges.” This posture of "tit for tat" in the face of "challenges" is precisely the barbarism that grows out of the spirit of "freedom" cherished by Europeans, who elevated this savagery of never succumbing to pressure and always dominating the world to the philosophical spirit of “mastery.”  It is in this sense that the success of Confucian civilization in taming savagery is seen by Westerners as having stifled the spirit of "freedom" or of "mastery." In Montesquieu's writing, Oriental absolutism is often summarized as the "rule of the stick," especially in terms of the absolute authority of the father in the family. Therefore, whether in the case of voyages throughout the world to find the path to the East, or the life-and-death struggle within European countries, it was "modernity" that stimulated Europe to seek power and domination.
 
In this triangular relationship of modern empires, it was precisely the "forces" unleashed by "modernity" that linked together the complex network of tiny sovereign state organizations with vast colonial empires and "informal empires" throughout the globe.  Science and technology replaced religion and superstition, ever-increasing objective knowledge replaced stable and unchanging beliefs, large-scale division of labor replaced self-sufficiency, industrial products replaced natural products, abstract currency replaced visible wealth, law (the rule of law) replaced morality (the rule of man), citizens replaced subjects, and democracy replaced monarchs. It is by virtue of the enormous energy unleashed by "modernity" that tiny European countries could deliver a “fatal” blow to the huge traditional Eastern empires.
 
Thus, "modernity" is not a simple development based on tradition, but a revolutionary leap into a different dimension. The three tiny islands of Great Britain could build an unprecedented form of empire in a new way, not by trying to conquer global territories with military power, as Tamerlane did, but by using trade and financial power to draw a constant flow of global resources and profits to London. Whereas traditional empires required a finite amount of money and tribute, the wealth extracted by the British Empire was unlimited. As a model of modern empire, the British Empire replaced the Mongols' steeds with money and industrial goods, thus fulfilling Tamerlane's dream of a new world empire.
 
Five
 
As a specialist in the history of empire, Darwin's book is actually a "history of empire without empire." Although "empire" is the key word in this book, we do not see any systematic consideration of the concept itself. It can be said that Darwin’s understanding is that of the old empires of Eurasia, which are so closely linked to territorial occupation that he understands "world empire" only as the Mongol empire of the steppes that "died with Tamerlane," and he does not see that Great Britain built a world empire in a new way.
 
When he tries to distinguish the traditional concept of "empire" from the "world-system," he winds up caught in a self-contradiction, on the one hand seeing the British Empire as an "unfinished empire," while on the other believing that it should be understood not as an "empire," but as a "world-system" in flux. He believes that Eurasia will not accept a single unified world empire, but fails to see that Eurasia is already in a world empire constructed by the Internet, the dollar, and global commercial trade as a "world-system," except that this world empire is no longer the British Empire, but the American Empire.
 
The reason why I emphasize here that this is a new type of "world empire" instead of adopting Darwin's "world-system" or the usual "liberal international order" in international political theory is that the latter's thinking about "international relations" based on the theory of sovereign states obscures the imperial essence of Western hegemony, especially because the "new imperial history" narrative based on post-modern theory weakens the political economy critique of "imperialism, «so that today's concepts of "Sino-US relations" and "Sino-US competition" based on the concept of sovereign state are actually very deceptive and misleading.
 
Thinking that China and the United States are two equal sovereign states ignores the three faces of modern Western empire and the fact that the United States is a more complex system of world empire than the British Empire. First, the United States is an imperial system within its own territory, added to which is the imperial core of the Five Eyes Alliance, followed by a system of vassal states in the guise of allies, such as the military domination systems of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, in addition to Latin America, which operates as a backyard, and, of course, other "world-systems" that rely on the Internet, finance, and trade control.  
 
The essence of the U.S.-China relationship is thus the relationship between China as a rising sovereign state and the U.S.-dominated world-empire or world-system. Thus, the Sino-U.S. relationship is not a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China deals with the U.S.-dominated world empire. The essence of the "U.S.-China decoupling" issue that has been the focus of global public opinion in recent years is the U.S. attempt to expel China from the "world imperial system.” 
 
Thus the current struggle between China and the U.S. not only affects the fate of two countries but rather the future of the world order, in other words, if they entire world will be subservient to the American-led world empire, or will we establish truly equal international relations on the basis of sovereign states? When the U.S. and Soviet superpowers were trying to build two different types of world empires, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that emerged in China and India, among other countries, was dedicated to creating a fair and rational international order. And today, the root of the U.S.-China rivalry remains a struggle over the future of these two worlds and the destiny of humanity.
 
From a geopolitical point of view, with the rise of modern maritime empires, in addition to the importance of space and the Internet, the geographical advantage of a continental heartland is gradually being lost, and it is impossible to build a world empire by taking the road of territorial annexation of continental empires. Following Tamerlane, the Napoleonic Empire, the German Empire, and the Soviet Empire all tried to build a continental empire like that of the Mongols, but were defeated by maritime empires.
 
One of the major reasons for the failure of the continental empires was the constant repetition of Tamerlane's tragedy, where attempts at territorial annexation led other continental states to join the camp of maritime powers, which ultimately defeated them. The Soviet Union had been the closest to success in this attempt, but it was precisely the Soviet Union's strategy of territorial expansion that pushed Western Europe into the American system of world empire, and China had to part ways with the Soviet Union, leading Nixon's visit to China in 1972, which became the geopolitical origin of the end of the Cold War.
 
In this sense, the book After Tamerlane should become a reference book for all politicians in Eurasia to draw lessons from the tragedy of trying to build a world empire after Tamerlane.  In other words, the countries of Eurasia must abandon the old road of territorial annexation and take a new road of mutual exchange and cooperation and win-win cooperation, which is exactly the path promoted by China's "Belt and Road" initiative. Only then will the center of gravity of world history return to Eurasia and to the Eastern world.
 
For China, the most important lesson is that it must abandon its traditional strategic positioning as a continental country and the cultural notions that belong to that positioning, and embrace the global by continuously facing the maritime world. Having both continental and maritime geopolitical characteristics and two political and cultural identities necessarily requires China to cycle between the continental and maritime worlds, to maintain a balance between the Eurasian and maritime worlds, and thus to build a new world order.
 
However, the "Eurasian Revolution" was not only a product of geopolitics, but also a product of human history moving from tradition to modernity, a product of the interplay of technological, economic, legal, political, military and ideological and cultural revolutions, which ultimately propelled mankind to grasp the universe, the world and itself through knowledge. The fact that mankind has moved from regional empires scattered in different parts of the earth to a world empire means that mankind has the knowledge and ability to organize and master the entire world, and the continuous growth of this knowledge and ability will also push mankind to master a broader universe in the future.
 
The world empire dominated by Britain and the United States is the result of centuries of accumulated knowledge, experience and wisdom in the West, and we still live today in a world created by modern Western knowledge. China's rise has undoubtedly benefited from the continuous active learning of modern knowledge created by the West since modern times. Only with the autonomous consciousness and free will to grasp the entire world and even the universe in terms of knowledge, to absorb the achievements of the whole human civilization with an open mind and to promote continuous knowledge innovation, can we transform China's rise into the construction of a new world order. In this sense, Darwin's work, which summarizes the history of the rise and fall of the Eurasian empires, is undoubtedly a primer for us to think about the future world order.

Notes

[1] 强世功, “没有帝国的帝国史,” published in the online edition of 法意读书 on March 25, 2021.
 
[2] Translator’s note:  The final subtitle in the original volume is “Tamerlane’s Shadow,” but the sentence from which the Chinese translator drew their inspiration is surely this one:  “But if there is one continuity that we should be able to glean from a long view of the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance to a unified system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.  In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow—or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadow of his failure.”
 
[3] Translator’s note:  Darwin’s book was first published in 2007 by Allen Lane before being reprinted by Penguin in 2008.  I don’t know if this detail escaped Jiang’s notice, or if he chose to fudge it because 2008 was such an important year in the history of America’s “New Roman Empire.”

[4] Translator’s note:  Jiang is referring to at least two of Frank’s books:  ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), and ReOrienting the 19th Century: Global Economy in the Continuing Asian Age, with Robert A. Denemark (2013).

[5] Translator’s note:  Darwin noted in an email exchange that this account of his family background and adolescence is incorrect, but that Jiang drew it from a review of one of his works.

[6] Halford Mackinder  was a British geographer who pronounced his “Heartland theory” in a paper entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” presented to the Royal Geographical Association in 1904.  His theory divided the world into three regions:  the World-island, the outlying islands and the offshore islands.  The World-island included Europe, Asia, and Africa, and thus dominated in terms of population and resources.  Offshore islands included Japan and Great Britain.  Outlying islands included the Americas and Australia.  Mackinder emphasized the importance of Eastern Europe, a region that offered a gateway to control of the core of the Heartland, in part to warn Great Britain that its historical reliance on sea power might have limitations.  See https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-heartland-theory.html.