How good it is to see the return of “large history”, that is, history that ranges across continents and centuries. The post-1960s drift was towards micro-histories, many of those products being vivid and exciting, although by their very subject books on medieval millers or nuns missed a grander, comparative picture of what was going on across the world at that time. In the past 15 or so years, large history has returned, and After Tamerlane is a fine case in point.

Its author, John Darwin, has contributed much valuable scholarship to the pattern and processes of European decolonisation – his previous works have included The End of the British Empire and Britain, Egypt and the Middle East. With this book, however, he takes the reader on a far larger and longer journey, offering an elegant and brilliant survey of the great empires of the world since the early 15th century. Concentrating not just on the familiar story of the western expansions and later contractions (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, British and, no doubt to come, American), Darwin puts the story of world affairs into a radically different perspective: namely, the history of imperial encounters as experienced through and by the bulk of humankind, not merely by the western seafarers.

The title of After Tamerlane is quirky but important to the overall argument – namely, that following the Mongol emperor’s death in 1405, all future efforts to create a world empire would simply founder on the geopolitical realities of distance and numbers, plus the stubborn capacity of the great cultures and vast populations of Eurasia to survive and absorb a conqueror’s rule without being very much affected by it. Thus, the extraordinary empire carved out by the Mughal conquerors (Babur, Aurangzeb) across almost all of India between the 16th and 18th centuries, which made Louis XIV’s France look like a tadpole by comparison, could not deal with the rise of the Marathas, the Iranian incursions, the Afghan counterattacks; nor, actually, did these Muslim rulers change the daily life of the tens of millions of Hindu peasants who had seen foreign lords come and go. How many imperial regimes, one wonders, have the Turkmeni and Khazaks seen off over the past 1,000 or more years? Did the Manchus really change the Chin, or simply put in place a superstructure?

Empires abroad left their mark, from Hadrian’s Wall to the British railway system across the entire Indian subcontinent, but what also impresses Darwin is the sheer recalcitrance of the societies that were lorded over by the Safavids, the Manchus, the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the unchanging nature of much of the lands they ruled. The outside conquerors sought eternal dominion, and failed, some faster (the Nazis) than others (the Ottomans). The locals remained. Perhaps another conqueror or two would sweep in, but not for long in the measure of world history. Just think about it. Today’s Iran, China, India, Turkey and much of the Arab world are the recognisable inheritors of great ethno-cultural entities that existed before Columbus set sail.

It follows, then, that this is one of those rare contemporary books about empires that is not obsessed by the author’s desire to cast light on the American imperium today. There is, thankfully, no lecturing US voters on whether to take up “the white man’s burden” or to bring home the legions from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. To be sure, Darwin does comment upon the extraordinary nature of the American footprint on today’s world, but his analysis is fairly brief (pages 468-485, roughly), and by that stage in the book the story is winding quickly to its close.

On the other hand, a reader would be blind not to see that there is a hard historical lesson here for the Richard Perles, Michael Rubins, Max Boots and other US neocon advocates of “staying the course” in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is the following: any attempt by any big power to impose its rule upon the vast, populous and culturally resilient entities of Eurasia is, if I read Darwin’s book aright, going to fail: if not this decade, then the next; if not this century, the next; if not, in two centuries’ time. The Turks, the Persians, the British, the Russians, the Nazis and the Japanese all tried to control parts of the area that the geographer Halford Mackinder called “the world island”, that is, the great Eurasian landmass roughly between Hungary and Siberia. But Mackinder, writing about 1900, could already sense that Eurasia was really impervious to external seapower and cultural influences, and was coming back – with a vengeance. So, too, did his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, an imperialist who understood that his beloved Raj would never last: “East is East, and West is West.” (This is hardly a message, incidentally, that today’s free-market and “the world is flat” enthusiasts will like to hear.)

Darwin’s book, then, can be read at two levels. Given our current international concerns about the troubled relationship between the West and the Arab/Iranian/Muslim world, After Tamerlane is bound to be ransacked for “lessons” of history. To give but one example, the author’s account of the multi-century capacity of the Iranians to handle Ottoman, Russian and British efforts to gain “informal empire” in their lands must give doubt to the idea that the contemporary United States could possibly bend the grand Iranian nation to its will. Still, if this work is to be read properly, it should also be valued at a second level, as a wonderful and imaginative addition to the select library of books on world history that one really wants to possess, and dip into, for ever.

After Tamerlane is a deeply significant book, one that will push fellow scholars to think of global history as something more – much more – than the story of the West’s domination of the Rest. It is rather wonderful to doff one’s hat to a historian who can range across time and space, giving the reader continual cause for pause, in the way that Darwin has done.

AFTER TAMERLANE: The Global History of Empire by John Darwin

Allen Lane £25 pp589

Buy the book here at the offer price of £23 (inc p&p) timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Read on... websites:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire Generic article, with linked pieces on empires from the Elamite to the US Paul Kennedy’s books include The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000.

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