Already before, but even more so after the Mongol ruler Tamerlane/Tîmûr bin Taraghay Barlas's imperial power built and secured long-distance trade routes and boosted commerce by providing currency and legal structures.(1) In their urge to build empires, kings and sultans devoted state resources to explore beyond their borders, spending state funds to organize expeditions and to acquire scientific and technical knowledge necessary for long-distance travel. Empires worked like gene-mixers, intermixing the different genetic strains that marked geographically dispersed humans after their ancestors had left Africa. In the process, they brought about microbial and biological unity. Not only did empires extend legal systems to encompass a vast part of the earth, but they spread religion, promoted long-distance trading, and built worldwide transportation and communication networks, widely diffusing languages, flora, and fauna and bringing together knowledge and technology that would otherwise have been confined to separate corners of the world. In this chapter we will look at examples of how the warriors and the empires they built connected the world in myriad ways that none of them could ever imagine. Empires may seem a system of the past, but the notion of imperial domination still thrives. (See Darwin, After Tamerlane, 2007)

Not unlike the Pax Romana of the Romans, the Pax Americana dominates the world, linking the world ever tighter while provoking an anger that is as global as America's influence. Islamist extremists-still seething with rage at the humiliation suffered by Muslims since the collapse of the caliphate-plot terrorist attacks and dream of an empire establishing "Allah's sovereignty on earth."1

Whatever their motives, the empire builders,-old and new-have never lacked philosophical and political justification for dominating other human beings. Plato justified the distinction between superior and inferior in linguistic terms. To him, Barbarians, or the non-Greek barbaros (all those who could not speak Greek and whose language sounded like people stuttering "barbar") were less than fully human.2 He deemed that barbarians were enemies by nature and that it was proper to wage war on them, even to the point of enslaving or extirpating them. Aristotle further developed the notion of enemies by nature and maintained that barbarians, especially those of Asia-meaning people living east of the Bosporus-were slaves by nature. He told his student, the young king of Macedon Alexander, that it was proper to treat barbarians as slaves.3 But Alexander interpreted the good-evil difference not by race but by behavior, with the good as the true Greek and the bad the true barbarian. By subjugating the bad and uniting the good, he wished to achieve what has been the ideal of kingship: the creation of homonoia, or unity and concord, a union of hearts. As the great scholar of Hellenism Sir William Tarn put it, Alexander wanted to be "the harmonizer and reconciler of the world-that part of the world which his arm reached; he did have the intention of uniting the peoples of his empire in fellowship and concord and making them of one mind."4 He wanted to be remembered not as a conqueror but, in Plutarch's words, "as one sent by the gods to be the conciliator and arbitrator of the universe."5 In a bid to realize his dream of creating a universal empire of homonoia, Alexander the Great's army marched across West Asia and Asia Minor. After crushing the Persian Empire and pillaging and burning Persepolis, Alexander proceeded as far east as the Punjab plains of India, connecting for the first time the Mediterranean world with the Indian subcontinent. While Alexander and his troops marched on, thousands of soldiers and administrators were left behind to rule the annexed territories.

The Roman Empire that emerged from the small city-state in the Tiber River Valley and spread to what it believed to be the end of the oecumene, or inhabited world, developed other justifications to rule over people considered barbarous. The Romans developed an elaborate administrative system and a legal code to bring others under their control, and their actions were touted as acts of generosity, as spreading civitas, or civic society, the origin of civilization. "Roman imperialism came to be seen not as a form of oppression, as the seizure by one people of the lands, the goods, and the persons of others," Anthony Pagden notes, "but as a form of beneficent rule that involved not conquest but patronage, and whose first purpose was the improvement of the lives of others."6 In what could be seen as a precursor to the imperial British argument of the "white man's burden" and the French mission civilisatrice, Roman historian Cicero argued that even Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls, "savage and barbarous nations," were entitled to just government. Pagden quips that by extension this meant "if their own rulers were unable to provide it, then the Romans would be happy to do so for them."?

Often the dream of universal empire was simply the question of personal ambition for power and glory. From King Jayavarman VII of Cambodia, who proclaimed himself a universal emperor in the twelfth century, to the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, rulers were attracted to the idea of universal empire-even in a geographically limited universe. Hideyoshi saw himself as a universal monarch who would eventually "rule the whole human race from his residence in Peking or in India."8 He invaded Korea twice in a failed bid to reach China, which presumably was the limit of his universe. The classical Greco-Roman notion of political empire was updated after the American Revolution and the rise of the United States. The concept of empire as a civilizing mission was converted to Thomas Jefferson's "empire of liberty," and with the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 it was presented as an anti-colonial enterprise. Under President Theodore Roosevelt the doctrine was interpreted to give the United States a free hand in its Latin backyard. America's avowed mission to be a beacon of liberty in a broader world was challenged during the post-World War II period of Soviet military expansion. The notion of advancing liberty by extending American power abroad acquired greater urgency. America's responsibility, President Harry Truman admitted in 1947, was even greater than that which had faced "Darius I's Persia, Alexander's Greece, Hadrian's Rome [and] Victoria's Britain." The only way to "save the world from totalitarianism," he argued, was for "the whole world [ to] adopt the American system," for "the American system" could survive only by becoming "a world system."9

Sixty years later that thesis still stands, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire has not weakened the rationale. Although the world's leading democracy may find the concept controversial, the United States-a central hub of the world economy, a far-flung military presence with more than seven hundred military installations worldwide and an immense political-cultural influence-has come to acquire the attributes of an empire. Writer Jonathan Schell would prefer to call the United States an imperial power without an empire. Whatever the name, American power, exercised in the name of promoting democracy and human rights, of securing global peace and ensuring freedom of the seas and skies, girds the globalized world. Whatever the United States chooses to do affects people and countries allover the world. The ubiquitous presence of American brand-name products-such as McDonald's, present in 120 countries-has led critics to call globalization nothing but Americanization. I 0 The global security concerns of the United States can be seen in the fact that the power-projection capability of the U.S. Air Force has a presence or/and conducted training operations in some 170 countries.11 The British writer and labor politician Harold Laski was prescient: "America bestrides the world like a colossus," he wrote in 1947. "Neither Rome at the height of its power nor Great Britain in the period of economic supremacy enjoyed an influence so direct, so profound, or so pervasive. "12 But as we already know, the dream of empire has an ancient pedigrees and its integrating impact has been a long time coming.

The Aztecs and Incas had no universal pretensions; their empires were driven by their cosmology and faith in the spirits of the dead. Aztec cosmology dictated an unflagging effort to satisfy the sun god. If the sun was not nourished with the vigorous blood of warriors, he would grow too weak for his daily struggle against the forces of darkness, and the universe would be destroyed. So the Aztecs presented captives to the sun god in ritual ceremonies of human sacrifice.13 The unrelenting quest for sacrificial victims brought many Central American tribes under Aztec power by the fifteenth century. The Incas' practice of worshipping their dead rulers required sizable amounts of land and labor for the maintenance of their mummies. This need forced the new emperor to conquer new territories and exploit their wealth and resources. "By creating unrelenting pressures for new agricultural lands, the cult of the royal mummies eventually drove [the Inca empire] Tawantinsuyu into disastrous military adventures."14 An incredibly diverse collection of peoples were brought into the Inca domain-territory that would eventually fall in the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, aided partly by dissention within this heterogeneous empire.

Nearly a thousand years earlier, across the oceans a different empire was born to serve God. The empire founded by the Prophet Muhammad would be unlike any in the past. It would be God's empire, built not by a king but by millions of faithful led by a self-proclaimed messenger of God. Until the fateful night when the Prophet came down from the hill to proclaim the divine command of one god, the agency for spreading the Word was dispersed in many hands. There were priests to interpret gods' wishes and temporal rulers to carry them out. Islam eliminated not only the middleman but the distinction between religious and temporal power. The authority of God, as expressed in the Koran, was absolute, as was that of Muhammad as his Prophet. As the Koran states:

"Say: 0 mankind, I am the Allah's Messenger to all of you .... There is no god but He .... Believe [then] in Allah and in his Messenger." This absolutist claim to universalism was matched by the brotherhood of the umma, or community, that the Prophet called for. Unlike religions such as Buddhism or Christianity, which found converts among temporal authorities who would propagate the faith, Islam was born as a state amid bitter strife among stateless Arab tribes.

The Prophet enjoined that the umma be totally egalitarian: "0 people, your Lord is one and your ancestor is [also] one. You are all descended from Adam and Adam was [born] of the earth." As members of the umma, Muslims have since been obligated to pay alms for the needy and refrain from fighting one another. Their duty is also to bring all humanity within the umma and fight "infidels" who resist. Islam thus eliminated not only the middleman but the distinction between religious and temporal power. The authority of God, as expressed in the Koran, was absolute, as was that of Muhammad as his Prophet. As the Koran states: "Say: 0 mankind, I am the Allah's Messenger to all of you .... There is no god but He .. ,. Believe [then] in Allah and in his Messenger."

This absolutist claim to universalism was matched by the brotherhood of the umma, or community, that the Prophet called for. Unlike religions such as Buddhism or Christianity, which found converts among temporal authorities who would propagate the faith, Islam was born as a state amid bitter strife among stateless Arab tribes. The Prophet enjoined that the umma be totally egalitarian: "0 people, your Lord is one and your ancestor is [also] one. You are all descended from Adam and Adam was [born] of the earth." As members of the umma, Muslims have since been obligated to pay alms for the needy and refrain from fighting one another. Their duty is also to bring all humanity within the umma and fight "infidels" who resist.

Scholars have long debated whether an expansionist urge is inherent in Islam. Some passages in the Koran suggest only defensive warfare, such as "fight in the way of God with those who fight you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors." Others clearly call for proactive warfare: "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush." In his last visit to Mecca in 632, the Prophet said that although all Muslims were brethren and should not fight one another, their mission as Muslims was "to fight people till they testify that there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God, and perform the prayer and pay the alms-tax." 15 Based on such conflicting statements, medieval Muslim scholars developed a doctrine of holy war, which Islam scholar Michael Cook says "endorsed the fundamental idea of aggressive warfare aimed at extending the dominion of Islam, but at the same time hedged it about with a variety of ifs and buts." Despite equivocation about applying the policy of holy war, the concept enjoys a central place of value in Islamic heritage, according to Cook. It "certainly made available to Muslims a moral charter for the continuing conquest of infidel lands .... In that sense, there clearly was something about Islam that lent itself to the creation of a global culture." 16

Since the Prophet Muhammad forbade razzias, or traditional raids for cattle and property, against tribes who converted to Islam, local raiding parties had to look beyond traditional Arab lands. The Koran allowed believers to relieve infidels of their possessions, provided that the bounty was redistributed among the members of the expeditionary force. The other method of property acquisition was to collect tax from nonbelievers. In 630 Muhammad himself led an army of some thirty thousand soldiers toward the Byzantine frontier. After a five-hundred-mile journey up to the Gulf of Aqaba, he camped for twenty days and negotiated a peace agreement with the Christian prince of Aylah. In rerum for an oath of allegiance and an annual tribute, the dhimmi, or the people of the Book, like Christians, were placed under the umma's protection and granted freedom of worship. This practical arrangement for coexisting with other faiths emerged as a source of revenue for the Islamic empire as it expanded in the following centuries. Some scholars argue that the impulse to seek martyrdom in the cause of Allah and reach paradise may have attracted converts in the early years of Islam. "The immediate gratification of desires for the comforts and luxuries of the civilized regions of the Fertile Crescent was just as strong in the case of many." 17 Interestingly, the warfare of the first imperialist ruler, Sargon of Akkad, beyond his zone of direct political control was driven by a search for booty and tribute, not unlike that of Muhammad's some three thousand years later.

In 637, within five years of Muhammad's call to arms, an Arab army invaded Mesopotamia and won a famous victory at al-Qadisiyah, near modern Baghdad, bringing Islam to Persia. This victory has since inspired the faithful to make sacrifices for the glory of Islam. Even the secular dictator of Iraq Saddam Hussein alluded to the victory of al-Qadisiyah to cheer his troops when they were engaged in a protracted battle in the 1980s with Iran, modern Persia. Chalking up victory after victory in North Africa, the Arab army crossed the narrow Strait of Gibraltar and reached Europe. Its advance to the heart of the Continent was halted at last by the Frankish king Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. But the empire continued its march to the east and south. When the Mongols, who had earlier sacked the caliphate in Baghdad, converted to Islam, a vast part of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and most of sub-Saharan Africa came under Islamic rule, even though the Ottoman Empire was confined to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Muslim traders spread the religion to Southeast Asia, which would eventually boast the largest Islamic nation on earth: Indonesia. Islam connected the globe and fused culture in a way that changed the world forever. Of course, the Islamic empire did not automatically mean expansion of the number of Muslims. Because Islam forbade taxing the faithful and the revenue of the empire had to h collected from the infidels, pragmatic Islamic rulers discouraged conversion to Islam. The logic of maintaining the temporal power by having a large tax base of nonbelievers often trumped over the urge to convert all humanity to Islam-the original mission laid down by the Prophet.18

The world's largest contiguous land-empire was not, however, built out of desire to convert or liberate. It was, instead, accomplished by nomadic Mongol who had no religious mission other than to rule the world. Between 1190, when Genghis Khan  and next Tamerlane, began unifying the nomadic tribes of Mongolia, and 1258, where a grandson of Genghis sacked the Islamic caliphate in Baghdad, the Mongol overran the whole swath of territory from the coasts of southern Siberia t Hungary and Poland in the West and from the South China Sea to the Persia Gulf. Although the Mongols believed in one god, the Eternal Blue Sky, the were remarkably secular until they converted to Islam. The Mongol expansion was thus motivated by the need to move out of regular grazing areas for foo and other necessities. Historians have advanced many theories to explain Mongol expansionism. Yale historian Valerie Hansen says one possible reason could be climatic: a steep and regular decline in the mean annual temperature in Mongolia between Il75 and 1260 resulted in less grass for the Mongol herd prompting the Mongols to conquer new territories. 19 According to some, a tacking and robbing neighbors became a strategy that unified the Mongol tribes that roamed the steppes of Central Asia.

As one scholar puts it, Genghis Khan "understood that the road to power went precisely through unification of the steppe nomads. Only having accomplished this would it be possible to conquer the settled civilizations. Simultaneously, however, he had to hold out the prospects of plunder to achieve the unification. The two could not be separated. Mongol society was a herder ar hunter society, but it was also a predatory society. "20

As the Prophet Muhammad had done with Arab tribes, the rising Mong leader Genghis Khan forbade tribes from attacking each other and instead advocated unified raids against sedentary neighbors for food and other essentials at luxuries that nomadic life could not provide. Raiding well-entrenched powerful neighbors like China, Persia, or the Abbasid caliphate required large-scale organization. An empire not only offered internal peace among the various Mongol tribes but held out "an opportunity of enrichment at the expense of outside, groups."21 As they expanded their raids, capturing more booty and craftsmen however, the Mongols needed more food and tools to put their captives to work like other conquerors before him, Genghis Khan came to view himself anointed by heaven to bring the world under his control. A contemporary Armenian chronicle quotes Genghis Khan as saying that "it is the will of god that we take the earth and maintain order" to impose Mongol law and taxes. He added that the Mongols were obligated to "slay [their opponents] and destroy their place, so that the others who hear and see should fear and not act the same."22

Religious fervor often combined with greed to drive imperial ambition. What was simply the desire to control minerals and timber in the time of Sargon's Akkadian empire evolved into greed for gold and other luxuries. Even Alexander the Great-who aspired to create a civilized universal empire-dispatched a fleet to conquer the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea because it produced the most fragrant resin and aloe.23 The Portuguese and Spanish empires were driven by greed for spices and gold, not just god and glory. For example, when Henry the Navigator attacked the Muslim port city of Ceuta on the North African shore, the unimaginable riches that he found, along with tales of mountains of gold being exchanged for Moroccan goods in the interior of Africa, inspired him to launch further expeditions into the continent.24 Crusades against Islam and missions to convert pagans to Christianity also proved to be a lucrative business. Henry the Navigator's naval expeditions, launched in the early fifteenth century, culminated in Vasco da Gama's voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope and to the founding of a Portuguese empire that would last four hundred years.

Within a hundred years of Prince Henry's seminal explorations in the Atlantic, the kingdom's far-flung empires in Asia and the Americas brought in three-fourths of all Portuguese government revenue.25 Portugal itself became a coveted object for Spanish monarch Philip II, who was already the sovereign of an empire spanning Latin America and Southeast Asia. The creation of the Spanish Empire initiated by Columbus's serendipitous discovery of the New World was the outcome of the search for gold, spices, and souls to convert. A year after Columbus's voyage, the pope granted the Catholic monarchs of Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, sovereignty over all non-Christian lands they might discover in the Atlantic, as well as the duty to evangelize all humans found there. The pope assumed the right of temporal authority over both Christians and believers in other faiths called "pagans."26 Conquistadors like Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, who helped create the Spanish Empire in South America, were not only interested in the fame that came from their conquests but intent on enjoying the spoils of the New World. They positioned themselves as encomenderos, or patrons, to exploit, usually in brutal fashion, the labor of the Americas. 27

The largest and longest-enduring empire-Britain's-also arose out of greed and envy. After Columbus returned from the New World with tales of unbelievable riches, the British crown, along with individual sailors and merchants, dreamed of gold and silver in a new continent. In March 1496, four years after Columbus's voyage, King Henry VII followed in the footsteps of the Castilian monarchs and sanctioned a journey by the Genoese navigator John Cabot, giving him and his sons "full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea ... to conquer, occupy and possess, as our vassals and governors, lieutenants and deputies therein, acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same towns, castles, cities, islands and main lands so discovered."28 In succeeding times, however, as the Industrial Revolution transformed the British Empire and economic and political liberalism took hold, high-minded rationale replaced unabashed greed. As the English historian James Bryce argued in 1901, it seemed as if "a new sort of unity is being created among mankind." And while marching into Baghdad in 1908, General Frederick Stanley Maude declared: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."29 The British venture in Iraq ended quickly, but what had begun centuries earlier with the innocent landings of adventurous traders carrying the British flag on the shores of Virginia and Surat, India, grew into a globe-spanning empire. I witnessed the sunset of that empire in Hong Kong almost exactly five hundred years later. In the intervening time, the British rationale for empire had evolved from the civilizing imperative of the "white man's burden" to the commercial arguments in favor of free trade, liberation from autocracy, and creation of a humane global community.

After the ancestors walked out of Africa, their descendants spread to the habitable parts of the earth and gradually changed their pigmentation and body shape. Humans demonstrated substantial diversity by the time sedentary agriculture developed. Interbreeding on a relatively small scale occurred through the diaspora of traders and missionary activities. Only with the rise of empires were large numbers of people of varied ethnicity, languages, and religious persuasions linked under a single authority. Empire thus emerged as history's most Arabs took the genetic seeds in different directions. Intermarriage with the subjugated people who were converted to become mawalis, or clients, of the Arabs altered the genetic landscape of the Middle East. From Persia to Spain, Arab masters married the locals. In the process, the term Arab began its gradual transition from the name for a bedouin nomad of the Arabian Peninsula to its present meaning of anyone whose culture and language are Arabic.33 However, by the thirteenth century, the original bedouin Arabs were outnumbered by the other subjugated people and could no longer provide the army that the caliphate needed. The caliph started importing Central Asian slave boys known as mamluks-from to day's Turkmenistan and training them to be soldiers. The same mamluks would one day take power themselves and rule part of the Islamic empire.

No empire, however, had as direct an effect on genetic blending by violence as did the Mongol Empire. "To have caused the dispersion of Turkic peoples to three corners of the earth-China, India and the Middle East-is thought by one historian to have been the principal outcome of the empire."34 Genghis Khan has been quoted as saying that his supreme joy was "to cut my enemies to pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those dear to them, and embrace their wives and daughters."35 The mass murder of men and children and the large numbers of concubines amassed by Genghis and his successors have left their mark on the region's genetic landscape. The extent of their impact has been revealed in a remarkable study of population genetics in the areas that once formed part of the Mongol Empire. A team of scientists has found the Y chromosome that belonged to Genghis Khan in the DNA of 8 percent of the males of a large part of Asia. They estimate that the proportional percentage DNA inheritance would correspond to some sixteen million people allover the world.36

Forced migration also played a role. Because the nomadic Mongols knew nothing other than hunting and herding, they captured professionals and craft workers of all types from the conquered territories. As historian Jack Weatherford writes: "The Mongol armies rounded up translators, scribes, doctors, astronomers, and mathematicians to be parceled out among the families in the same shares that they parceled out musicians, cooks, goldsmiths, acrobats, and painters. The authorities divided these knowledge workers, together with all the other craftsmen, the animals, and other goods for transportation via a long caravan trek or sea journey to the various parts of the family."37 For instance, Kublai Khan imported Persian translators and doctors, as well as some ten thousand Russian soldiers, to settle them on land north of present-day Beijing. The Russians stayed as permanent residents for nearly a hundred years before they vanished from the official Chinese chronicles.38

With the emergence of ocean-based European empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there began the most far-reaching interbreeding in history. According to one estimate, every year in the sixteenth century between three and four thousand young men left Portugal bound for Portuguese India. By 1709, population levels in Portugal's northern provinces had fallen so drastically that King John V reiterated earlier orders requiring travelers to obtain passports before they departed. Meanwhile, the gold rush in Brazil saw the number of Portuguese settlers there leap from around two thousand a year in the late seventeenth century to five to six thousand annually between 1700 and 1720. To this influx was added a higher number of African slaves to work in the plantations and mines. In 1818, Brazil's population stood at about 3.8 million. Of these, only an estimated 250,000 were Indians. This means that over 93 percent of Brazil's population was the product of migration from Europe and Africa over the previous three centuries.39

Like the Mongols, the Spanish conquistadors killed male American Indians and took their women as concubines, an action that was attributable, in part, to the scant number of female voyagers accompanying them. Partial records kept in Seville suggest that less than 5 percent of people sailing to the New World were women. The consequent effects on the colonial population became a source of concern to the monarchy, and in 1514 King Ferdinand gave his approval for the intermarriage of Native Americans and Spaniards, saying that nothing "should impede marriage between Indians and Spaniards, and all should have complete liberty to marry whomever they please. "40

The migration of other Europeans to the Spanish colonies was even more pronounced. As the population of Spain started to decline by the end of the sixteenth century, a law passed in 1590 in New Spain (present-day Mexico), allowed non-Spaniards-including Portuguese, Germans, Flemings, Italians, Greeks, and English-to settle. The result was the creation of a huge mestizo, or "mixed," population. The Spanish colony in the Philippines also heralded the arrival of Asians to the New World. Some six thousand "Orientals" were believed to have entered New Spain from Manila during each decade of the early seventeenth century.41 Although reliable data are scarce, the import of African slaves into the Spanish Empire also visibly affected Latin American demography. In Lima in 1795, for instance, free blacks and slaves made up 45 percent of the city's population. AB historian Henry Kamen has noted, "Though they had been brought in simply to work and serve, Africans transformed the society and economy of vast tracts of America, and firmly implanted their race and culture wherever they went."42

While the African presence among today's South American population is evident to casual observers, the deep impact of European migration is less so. A genetic study in Colombia offers a glimpse of the overwhelming preponderance of European male DNA in the Spanish colonies of South and Central America. That research showed that approximately 94 percent of the Y chromosomes-transmitted from the father-are European in origin. When viewed against a variety of Amerindian mtDNA-maternal DNA-found in Colombia, James D. Watson, one of the fathers of modern genetics, sees a clear explanation: "The invading Spaniards, who were men, took local women for their wives. The virtual absence of Amerindian Y chromosome types reveals the tragic story of colonial genocide: indigenous men were eliminated, while local women were sexually 'assimilated' by the conquistadors."43

The British trading diaspora of the seventeenth century morphed into the British Empire, and its legacy set the stage for to day's multiethnic globalized world.44 From the British landings in North America and the Caribbean to the development of the dominions of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the empire produced a steady flow of emigration from "the mother country" to the new territories, boosted by convicts from home and slaves fmm Africa. All through the nineteenth century, and continuing into the twentieth, especially after World War I, voluntary emigration was supported by state-funded inducements, including assisted passages and a ten-pound subsidy for travel and settlement in Canada. As a senior British official explained, "Empire migration" was designed to give "fuller opportunities for individual human beings" -meaning British citizens who could improve their life in the colonies.45 Between the early 1600s and the 1950S, more than twenty million people left Britain to begin new lives in the colonies. As Niall Ferguson puts it, "The Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white. "46 In the century before World War I, some fifty million Europeans emigrated, the vast majority of them, about forty-six million, leaving for the New World. The British Empire also contributed to diversifying the American continent. Between 1807 and 1882, British ships transported nearly 3.5 million Africans to the New World as slaves. That figure is more than three times the number of white migrants making the journey west over the same period.

'Decolonized history' has cut Europe down to size. And this has made it harder to assume unthinkingly that European societies were inherently progressive, or that they were necessarily more efficient than other peoples in Eurasia - or on other continents. European definitions of 'progress', like European observations on the rest of the world, have lost their once unchallenged authority. Indeed, some modern writers reject the validity of any comparison between different cultures (because no one can be an insider in more than one culture), in the curious belief that a much-jumbled world is really composed of distinct and original cultures. Post-colonial history takes a generally skeptical view of the European impact and an even more skeptical view of the 'improvements' once claimed for colonial rule. It treats 'colonial' history as myopic and biased, perhaps even delusory, and its claims as so much propaganda aimed at opinion at home. Indeed, closer inspection has suggested an ironic reversal of the colonialist case. Far from dragging backward peoples towards European-style modernity, colonial rule was more likely to impose a form of 'anti-modernity'. Caste in India symbolized Indian backwardness. Yet British rulers, for their own convenience, struck a bargain with Brahmins to harden caste status into an administrative system (formalized in the census).  In colonial Africa a parallel process took place as clans and followings were reinvented as 'tribes', with chiefly rulers as their ancestral leaders. Here, as in India, a political gambit was carefully packaged as an act of respect to local tradition. In the colonial version of history, caste and tribe were inscribed as immemorial features of the Indian and African past. In imperial propaganda, they became the genetic flaws that made self-rule for Indians and Africans impossible. But in 'decolonized history' the expansion of Europe appears as a vast conspiracy to reorder the non-Western world along pseudo-traditional lines, the better to hold it in check and exploit its resources - indefinitely.

On these and other grounds, Europe's place in world history now looks rather different from that in conventional accounts written a few decades ago. But histories that aim to 'provincialize' Europe still leave a lot to explain. The European states were the main force that created the 'globalized' world of the late nineteenth century. They were the chief authors of the two great transformations that were locked together in the 'modern world' of the I870s to the I940s. The first was the making of a world economy not just of long-distance trade in high-value luxuries but of the global exchange of manufactures, raw materials and foodstuffs, in huge volumes and values, with the accompanying flows of people and money. This was an economic revolution that was chiefly managed (not always well) from Europe or by Europeans, and fashioned to suit their particular interests. The second transformation was closely connected. This was the extension of European rule, overt and covert, across huge swathes of the non-European world - a process under way before 1800, but accelerating sharply in the nineteenth century. It was strikingly visible in the colonial partitions of Africa, South East Asia, the South Pacific and (later) the Middle East; in the great ventures of empire-building in North Asia (by Russia) and South Asia (by Britain); in the subjection of much of maritime China to foreign controls; and in the European occupation (by demographic imperialism) of the Americas, Australasia and parts of South Central Africa. In Africa, the Middle East, much of South East Asia, the Pacific, Australasia and even the Americas, it created the territorial units that provide the state structure of the contemporary world.

Europe thus engaged in a double expansion. The outward signs of the first were the spread of railways and steamships, building a vast web of connections much faster and more certain than in earlier times and capable of pouring a huge stream of goods into once inaccessible places. Harbour works, railway stations, telegraph lines, warehouses, banks, insurance companies, shops, hotels (like Shepheards' in Cairo or Raffles' in Singapore), clubs and even churches formed the global grid of Europe's commercial empire, allowing free passage to European merchants and trade and easing their access to a mass of new customers. The second mode was territorial. It meant the acquisition of forts and bases from which soldiers and warships could be sent to coerce or conquer.

It meant the control of key zones astride the maritime highways that ran between Europe and the rest of the world: the classic case was Egypt, occupied by Britain in 1882. It meant a pattern of rule through which the products and revenues of colonial regions could be diverted at will to imperial purposes. Once their Raj was in place, the British taxed Indians to pay for the military power - a sepoy army - that they needed in Asia. Europe's commercial empire and its territorial empires did not overlap completely. But the crucial point about this double expansion was its interdependence. Territorial imperialism was a battering ram. It could break open markets that resisted free trade, or (as in India) conscript local resources to build the railways and roads that European traders demanded. It could promise protection to European entrepreneurs, or (as happened often in Africa) make them a free gift of local land and labour. But it also relied on the technological, industrial and financial assets that Europe could deploy. These might be decisive when it came to fighting - steam-powered ships and superior weaponry helped win Britain's first war in China in 1839-42 - though certainly not in all places.18 The real advantage of industrial imperialism lay in scale and speed. Industrial technique and the supply of capital allowed Europeans to stage a series of blitzkrieg conquests. They could lay down railways at breakneck speed to bring their force to bear hundreds of miles from the sea. They could flood a new zone with European settlers and transform its demography almost overnight, disorienting indigenous peoples and making resistance seem futile. They could transform alien environments with amazing completeness into a familiar European-style habitat: introducing wild animals, birds, fish, trees and flowers as well as crops and livestock. Above all, they could turn even the remotest parts of the globe into suppliers of the everyday goods like butter, meat or cheese once reserved for local producers at home. The gaunt freezing works with their grimy smokestacks that sprang up round the coasts of New Zealand after I880 were the industrial face of colonization.

It would be wrong to suppose that Europeans lacked the support of allies and helpers; but they played the critical role in remaking the world. But how do we explain the extraordinary shift, which seemed all but complete by I9I4, from a world of Eurasian 'connectedness' to a global-imperial world? Despite the libraries of writing that deal with the subject, much remains puzzling. Those magical dates I492 (when Columbus crossed the Atlantic) and I498 (when Vasco da Gama arrived in India) may have signaled the start of Europe's new era. But the pace of advance was spasmodic at best. Three centuries after Columbus had made landfall, most of the North American mainland remained unoccupied and virtually unexplored by Europeans. It took nearly three hundred years for the corner of India where Vasco da Gama had landed to fall under European rule (Calicut was annexed by the British in I792). The rush started only at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not just the timing, but the form and direction of Europe's expansion need more explanation. Why did the Ottoman Empire and Iran preserve their autonomy long after India, which was much further away? Why was India subjected to colonial rule while China was able to keep its sovereign status, though much hedged about, and Japan had become a colonial power by 1914? If industrial capitalism was the key to the spread of European influence, why did its impact take so long to be felt across so much of the world, and with such variable consequences? Why were Europe's own divisions, periodically unleashed with such lethal effect, not more destructive of (and some writers did so) that history itself was an alien enterprise that forced knowledge of the past into the concepts and categories invented in (and for) Europe.

Few intelligent people accepted the logical conclusion of this postmodern extremism - that nothing could be known and that all inquiry was hopeless. But the broader point held good: that European depictions of other parts of the world needed very careful decoding. The Saidian critique was part of a great sea change, a conscious attempt to 'de-centre' Europe or even to 'provincialize' it. European accounts of other cultures and peoples should no longer be treated as the 'authorized version', however full or persuasive. Europe should no longer be seen as the pivot of change, or as the agent acting on the passive civilizations of the non-Western world. Above all, perhaps, the European path to the modern world should no longer be treated as natural or 'normal', the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world should always be measured. Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities - indeed, many modernities.

But for the moment at least it is widely acknowledged that we live in an age that is strikingly different in many essentials from the world as it was even a generation ago. In ordinary language, we sum up the features that have been most influential in a catch-all term: 'globalization'. Globalization is an ambiguous word. It sounds like a process but we often use it to describe a state - the terminal point after period of change. All the signs are that, in economic relations at least the pace of change in the world (in the distribution of wealth and productive activity between different regions and continents) is likely to grow. But we can, nonetheless, sketch the general features of the 'globalized world' - the stage which globalization has now reached in a recognizable form. These features can be briefly summarized as follows:
1.    the appearance of a single global market - not for all but for most widely used products, and also for the supply of capital, credit an (financial services;

2.   the intense interaction between states that may be geographically very distant but whose interests (even in the case of very small states) have become global, not regional;

3.   the deep penetration of most cultures by globally organized media whose commercial and cultural messages (especially through the language of 'brands') have become almost inseparable;

4.   the huge scale of migrations and diasporas (forced and free), creating networks and connections that rival the impact of the European out-migration of the nineteenth century or the Atlantic slave trade;

5.   the emergence from the wreck of the 'bipolar age' (I945-89).

the dramatic resurgence of China and India as manufacturing powers. In hugely increasing world output and shifting the balance of the world economy, the economic mobilization of their vast populations (I.3 billion and 1 billion respectively) has been likened to the opening of vast new lands in the nineteenth century.

This list ought to provoke a series of questions. Why, in a globalized world, should one state have attained such exceptional power? Why has the economic revival of China and India been such a recent development? Why until recently have the countries of the West (now including Japan) enjoyed such a long lead in technological skills and in their standards of living? Why do the products of Westernized culture (in science, medicine, literature and the arts) still command for the most part the highest prestige? Why does the international states system, with its laws and norms, reflect the concepts and practice of European statecraft, and territorial formatting on the European model? The globalized world of the late twentieth century was not the predictable outcome of a global free market. Nor could we deduce it from the state of the world five centuries ago. It was the product of a long, confused and often violent history, of sudden reversals of fortune and unexpected defeats. Its roots stretch back (so it is widely believed) to the 'Age of Discovery' - back, indeed, to the death of Tamerlane.

Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial empires began to see a reverse flow-of natives coming to the metropolitan countries in large numbers. In their West African colonies, the French converted former slaves into infantrymen known as tirailleurs Senegalais to serve further colonial expansion. The region of Mali was one such conquest, which was later turned, in the memorable phrase of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mangin, into a "reservoir of men." Mangin argued for using the tirailleurs to fight against the Germans in World War I, and as many as 160,000 West Africans did so.47 After demobilization, a large number opted not to return to Africa, thus forming the core of France's African immigrant community. Along with North African Berbers who migrated to France after the loss of the French colony in the Maghreb, these immigrants, whose numbers would swell to five million by 2005, would prove to be an unintegrated, explosive component of French society.

At the end of World War II, the momentum of ex-colonial subjects returning to the metropole picked up, beginning with the celebrated case of the Empire Windrush. Reverse migration to the empires and prosperous former colonies like the United States would eventually emerge as one of the strongest currents of global population movements, laying ever-thickening webs of connection. Before the last British governor left Hong Kong, tens of thousands of former subjects fled the colony for safe havens in Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

The U.S. global involvement in wars in foreign lands during the past century has had the effect of bringing migrants from those countries. The Vietnam War's legacy was more than a million Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong settling in the United States. In an echo of the Roman Empire's granting of citizenships to elites in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa to strengthen the armed forces in the second century, the Bush administration has expedited the naturalization of twenty thousand resident aliens in the U.S. Armed Forces.48 Employing mercenaries in war is a longstanding practice, bur today's closely integrated world has made it a global phenomenon. In recent years, Pentagon contractors have recruited some thirty-five thousand foreigners to serve the American forces in Iraq. The realization that a global village could be a lethal place came in 2005 to farming families in a remote place in Nepal.

Some families, who may not have known where Iraq was until a few weeks earlier, woke up to the news that their children had been killed by insurgents in Iraq. Those desperately poor young men were lured by manpower supply agencies to go to the Middle East to work as cooks and kitchen hands.49

The relocation of peoples forced by empires brought in new languages, foods, dress, customs, and cultures, a skein that would grow into an interconnected world. In that sense, genetic diffusion that resulted from empires was like the first lines of text on the palimpsests of history that would be written over and over again in the ensuing centuries to create to day's globalized world.

By promoting trade over vast areas, empires enriched local languages. For example, Malay is the traditional lingua franca of island Southeast Asia, but over time it has been overlaid with the expressions and vocabulary of the Arab or Indian principal traders. Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule introduced new vocabulary, but at the same time, pidgin or bazaar Malay spoken in different parts of the region was revitalized by the traders' expressions and vocabulary.
Likewise, in East Africa, both the spread of Islam and the influence of European colonial powers enriched a similar bazaar language, Swahili.50

Of course, long before ambitious rulers began marching with their soldiers, people of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley had begun exchanging goods, making use of elements of language common to them.51 Koine, for instance, became the common speech among the elites and traders throughout the empire left behind by Alexander the Great.52 Even after Latin became the official language of the Roman Empire, Greek remained the lingua franca. Latin, originally spoken by small groups of people in the lower Tiber River Valley, traveled with Roman political power, spreading from Italy to western and southern Europe and to the north shores of the Mediterranean and coastal regions of Africa. Later modern Romance languages grew out of the spoken Latin in territories under the Roman Empire.53

No language, however, spread as fast and over as vast a territory as Arabic. As the Prophet Muhammad and his successors carried Islam to Mesopotamia, Persia, and the North African Maghreb countries, the language of the Koran overwhelmed existing tongues-Kurdish, Berber, Aramaic, and Coptic. 54 By the beginning of the eighth century, Arabic had evolved into the official imperial language. As Michael Cook has noted: ''A new elite culture was established, centered on the Islamic religion and the Arabic language; Arabic became the classical language of a civilization in the manner of classical Chinese or Latin, and everything that an educated elite might want to read became available in Arabic."55 The language and culture of the Persians survived their conquest by the Arabs and their acceptance of the Islamic faith, but both were deeply transformed. By adopting Arabic script and extensively borrowing Arabic vocabulary, Persian Farsi emerged as a second great literary language and spread far afield, especially toward India and, much later, throughout the Ottoman Empire.56

Although the Turks were not conquered by the Arabs, their conversion to Islam in the tenth century brought in significant Arabic vocabulary, and Turkish came to be written in the Arabic script.57 Most important, the adoption of the Arabic language by all the conquered peoples-Iranians, Syrians, Greeks, Copts, Berbers, Jews, and Christians-opened up their stores oflearning, art, science, history, and technology to scholars throughout the empire. The foundation was thus laid for the emergence of a dazzling Islamic civilization. Thanks to the Arabic translation of Greek classics, including Aristotle and Plato, a world intellectual heritage was preserved.

The Mongol conquerors, who lacked a written language, were transformed by their imperial experience. Despite its linguistic shortcomings, the Mongol Empire served as a diffuser of other languages. To rule such a vast empire, the Mongols needed administrators and clerks who spoke local languages. As Jack Weatherford notes, ''After executing the soldiers, the Mongol officers sent clerks to divide the civilian population by profession. Professional people included anyone who could read and write in any language-clerks, doctors, astronomers, judges, soothsayers, engineers, teachers, imams, rabbis, or priests. The Mongols particularly needed merchants, cameleers, and people who spoke multiple languages, as well as craftsmen."58

European empires, starting with the Portuguese and Spanish and later the Dutch, French, and English, took the legacy of the Roman Empire across the oceans. Today nearly a third of the world population speaks European languages spread by colonial rule. After Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, English is the most widely spoken language in the world. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the speakers of this global lingua franca reside in the former British Empire. In his famous minute on education in India written in 2 February 1835, Lord Macaulay, a member of Britain's Supreme Council of India, wrote: " [English] is like[ly] to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are raising, the one in south of Africa, the other in Australasia .... We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."59

A month later, on 7 March 1835, Governor-General William Bentinck issued an order supporting Macaulay's position. That historic decision to put the empire's resources to the teaching of English would have a far-reaching consequence in integrating the world. India became the largest English-speaking country in the world, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the nation's language was a principal source of attraction for the outsourcing of service jobs and foreign investment.

The differing impact of colonial education policies can be seen in the New World. Thanks to Britain's liberal education policy, at the time of America's war of independence there were nine universities for two and a half million people, and the thirteen colonies had an intellectual elite-the likes of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson-who were thoroughly engaged with the world. But in the Spanish colonies, Brazil, and the Caribbean, where more than seventeen million people lived, there were just two universities, in Mexico City and Guadalajara, which concentrated on theology and law. We have seen that the inspiration that gods have given to create empires, but empires that were not expressly created for theological reasons nevertheless played a role in the diffusion of religion.

In the third century BCE, India's Mauryan emperor Asoka became the first ruler in history to devote imperial authority to the spread of religious faith. By the time Asoka was converted to Buddhism, founded three centuries earlier, he had already built a huge empire covering northern India. After Asoka won the Battle of Kalinga, a monk converted him to the religion of nonviolence and compassion. The emperor not only set up rock inscriptions-akin to public billboards-laying down a Buddhist code of conduct, he also launched a campaign of religious conquest by dispatching missionaries allover the Indian subcontinent, as well as to Sri Lanka, Burma, and Hellenistic and Central Asian kingdoms.60 Thanks to Asoka's power and influence, missionaries gained access to the courts and the people and succeeded in converting many to Buddhism. One of the most successful of such missions was led by Asoka's son, Mahinda, to Sri Lanka.61 From there the religion later spread to Southeast Asia. Other rulers carried on Asoka's missionary work, notably the Kushan ruler Kanishka (second century CE). Thanks to Kanishka's efforts, Afghanistan, Bactria, eastern Iran, and Central Asia all became Buddhist and provided a pathway for the religion to reach China, which it did in the first century CE.62

The Roman emperor Constantine played a role, not unlike that of ASoka, in promoting the diffusion of Christianity. After years of persecuting the Christians, Constantine converted in 312 to the faith propagated by Jesus, dramatically turning the religion's fortunes. Constantine diverted the massive state resources that had been lavished on pagan temples to Christianity, making it "the most-favored recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favor."63 In 325 he and the pope convened a gathering of around three hundred bishops from all the corners of the empire. Clad in gold and sitting on a gold throne, Constantine presided over the first Council of Nicaea, marking the imperial launch of the church.64 A historian summed up the result of Constantine's conversion: "A clergy recruited from the people and modestly sustained by member contributions suddenly gained immense power, status, and wealth as part of the imperial civil service."65

After the fall of Rome, the church had to revive its missionary spirit to dispatch monks to preach in non-Christian territories. An early success came in the late fifth century, when the great Frankish king Clovis converted to Christianity and immediately baptized three thousand of his armed followers. The Christianizing mission was carried out with zeal by Clovis's successors, so much so that Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 800. Charlemagne took both his title and task seriously and sought the immediate conversion of all territories he conquered. As one historian notes, "Each victory was followed by forced mass baptisms, and thousands of captives who showed reluctance were beheaded."66 Nearly 730 years later, in 1532, Spanish conquistadors subjugated native peoples in South America in the name of Christ. In one celebrated event, Francisco Pizarro killed two thousand Incas and took their emperor to protect Christian honor.67 Violent conversion of native peoples continued, and despite a papal injunction against abusing natives, the Spaniards carried on destroying their temples and building churches in their stead. Backed by economic and military power, Portuguese and French colonial rulers, too, continued converting native peoples throughout their domains. Portugal claimed to have converted some 1.2 million people to Christianity from Mozambique to Japan.68

Even the British commercial empire took on religious duty as a Christian nation. As Niall Ferguson notes, "The English sense of empire envy only grew more acute after the Reformation, when proponents of war against Catholic Spain began to argue that England had a religious duty to build a Protestant empire to match the 'Popish' empires of the Spanish and Portuguese."69 The British took care to place Christian evangelists in the highest positions of government in India, including at all levels of the army. With aid from London, missionaries ran almost half of all the subcontinent's schools.

The short-lived American colonial venture in Asia also promoted Christianity in the region. The U.S. seizure of the Philippines from the defeated Spaniards was justified as a civilizing mission thrust on the nation. As President William McKinley told Methodist clergymen: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died."70

Beginning with the conquest of the Philippines until 1917, the United States tied the Atlantic to the Pacific through the purchase and military acquisition of territories, the forcible opening of markets (witness Commodore Matthew Perry's naval expedition to Japan in the 1850s), the setting up of naval bases, and the digging of the Panama Canal. Proselytizing, trade, and investment followed.

France's emperor Napoleon III sent an expeditionary force to Vietnam and eventually occupied the country, supposedly as retribution for Vietnam's persecution of Catholic missionaries.71 Today Catholics constitute a significant minority in Vietnam and serve as an important institutional link with the world outside. A third of the world's population today is Christian, and the vast majority of Catholics among this group can be found in former Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies.

But ironically, the European colonial empire that sought to win Christian converts unwittingly reinforced the sense of unity of the Islamic umma. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the introduction of regular shipping from India and Southeast Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean, for example, saw a dramatic rise in the number of Islamic pilgrims going for hajj in Mecca. A shorr-lived movement among Muslims in India to restore the caliphate in the early twentieth century was a reminder of the close linkage forged among Muslims dispersed over a wide territory. "Though separated from Turkey by thousands of miles, they were determined to fight Turkey's battle from India," a Pakistani historian proudly noted.72

The reach of the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate that was the House of Islam (Dar-al-Islam) and the subsequent rise of non-Islamic powers in the House of War (Dar-al-Harb) continue to haunt many. The sorry state of many of the successor Islamic states today has incited generations ofIslamist radicals from the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb to the Saudi Osama bin Laden, all seeking to restore Islam to its pristine glory and power. A British-based Islamic group supports the establishment of a new caliphate, and terrorists who blew up trains in Spain were likewise intent on reclaiming the country for the caliphate. Bin Laden calls on Muslims the world over to "resist the current Zionist-Crusader campaign against the umma, or Islamic super-nation, since it threatens the entire umma, its religion, and its very existence."73

Along with language, religion, food, and customs, imperial powers brought their legal systems to their new territories. The practice of enacting legislation and then using the coercive power of the state to enforce laws was first systematized by the Roman Empire. Roman jurists assembled two reference works containing collections of past laws and the opinions of the great Roman jurists. The codes also contained elementary outlines of the law and a collection of the emperor Justinian's own new laws.

Roman law, modified by the Germanic tribe that succeeded to the Roman throne in the late fifth century, was eventually adopted by all of Europe, amplified by a legal category called the Law of Nations, which applied to both Romans and foreigners. Anthony Pagden notes that this concept was to have a prolonged and powerful impact on all subsequent European legal thinking. As the European powers reached outward into other areas of the globe, many of which the Romans had never ever imagined, it became the basis for what is now called "public international law," and it still governs all the actions, in theory if never consistently in practice, of the "international community." ... The conqueror's right to possession lay merely in his success in battle. The Romans, however, introduced a complex distinction, which still governs the conduct of most modern conflicts, between "just" and "unjust" wars.74

The emerging global British Empire presented itself as a return to the lofty notions of the Roman Empire built on "a thought of a World-State, the universal law of nature, the brotherhood and the equality of men."75 British customary law and the French Napoleonic code spread to the colonies in Africa and Asia, providing the basis for legal systems that have since emerged in the decolonized states.

The rule of the Islamic caliphate and the spread of Islam also introduced the Koran-based sharia and hadiths that now officially or unofficially govern the lives of some two billion people in the world. The struggle between the proponents of the national and secular civil law of European origin and the supporters of sharia has emerged as a major issue of global contention. The imperial legacy that initially brought large populations together under similar laws is now perceived as threatening to divide populations and pit communities against one another. The Nigerian government's threat to execute a Muslim woman for adultery under sharia in 2004 brought international condemnation and isolation of the nation, prompting authorities to reverse their ruling. But demands for the replacement of British customary law with sharia in many African and Asian countries continue to raise political tension.

Foreign policy, as well as the legal infrastructure that undergirds life and transactions in today's interconnected world, directed the development of new transportation routes by empires. The Roman Empire offered a huge boost to trading and communications by building roads and setting up a piracy-free transportation system that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Arabia. The Roman annexation of Egypt, and the subsequent campaign against Red Sea pirates, revived the ocean link between India and Southeast Asia. The trading often began with diplomatic missions to foreign capitals. In 25 BeE, an Indian king sent a mission to Rome that sailed from Barygaza, an ancient port near present-day Surat, and presumably transferred to caravans across Mesopotamia to make the journey to Rome in four years. The king's gifts included a strange assortment of men and animals: tigers, pheasants, snakes, tortoises, a monk, and an armless boy who could shoot arrows with his toes.76

The Islamic empire, founded by a spice merchant turned prophet, was particularly trade-friendly from the outset. "With the Arabs, Egyptians, and Persians newly unified under the common rule and ideology of Islam, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea ceased to be rival routes but became two arms of the same sea as they had been in the age of Alexander."77 In fact, the unity of the Islamic empire in the West and that of the trader-friendly Tang dynasty of China (618907) produced a conjuncture that encouraged intercontinental trade. The transfer of the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad moved the center of gravity eastward. As Peter Mansfield notes, Baghdad emerged as "the center of a vast and increasingly prosperous free-trade area in which most sections of the population had the opportunity to engage in vigorous commercial activity. Arab ships sailed to China, Sumatra, India and southwards along the east coast of Africa as far as Madagascar. "78

Europe and the Mediterranean trade with China reached a peak under the Mongol Empire. The unification of the central Eurasian landmass by the Mon gols in the thirteenth century, writes Janet L. Abu-Lughod, put the termini of Europe and China in direct contact with each other for the first time in a thousand years and opened up the northern route between China and the Black Sea.79 Insecurity on the road, combined with the uncertainty of finding water and shelter along some of the most inhospitable terrain of Central Asia, limited Silk Road trade. Mongols-who produced only wool and meat and otherwise relied on merchandise from foreign countries-encouraged trade in every possible way, from setting up and maintaining shelters and wells to maintaining stations to provide transport animals. The Mongols even issued gerege or paiza, a tablet of gold or silver-what has been called a combined passport and credit card. It allowed the holder to travel throughout the Mongol Empire assured of protection, accommodation, and exemption from local taxes or duties.80

It is ironic that the Mongol army emerged as a great champion of trade that intensified China's commercial links with Europe and prepared the terrain for the flowering of the Renaissance. Pax Mongolica exacted a terrible price in innocent lives but also contributed to an increasingly interconnected world. Although contemporaries experienced only devastation, misfortune, and terror, a French historian of the Mongols wrote that "later generations were able to enjoy the advantages bequeathed by the worldwide empire. To them came the fruits of the fertilizing contact between the great national cultures, which was perhaps the most outstanding requisite for extensive changes and the unanticipated impetus of Europe during the next few centuries."81 Mongol traders introduced Chinese porcelain to Persia, from where they imported cobalt into China, thus allowing Chinese kilns to develop their famous blue-and-white porcelain. Chinese even took to calling the blue made from cobalt Huihuiqing or Muhammadan blue. From horsehair steppe bows to play the stringed instruments to trousers and new foods, the impact of Mongol contact with Europe was felt in every sphere oflife. Europeans even picked up the Mongol exclamation "Hurray!" as a cry of bravado and encouragement.82

After the Mongol Empire fell apart and the Islamic Ottoman Empire took control of the Indian Ocean trade, seafaring in the Atlantic became imperative for the Europeans. As we noted earlier, Henry the Navigator of Portugal pioneered the development of new vessels and ocean routes. From his base in Sagres, he presided over an elaborate effort to develop technology that would allow safe long-distance travel. He designed light but sturdy four-masted ships, and his team developed navigational charts and maps that enabled Vasco da Gama to round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India in 1498, ushering in the age of European empires in Asia.

Empire building required not only military might to conquer others but the means to conquer distance. The roads that the Romans built, the routes that the Mongols developed for horse and camel journeys, and the pathways that the Incas built for controlling population and resources laid the basis for both future invasion and global trading.

Two of the three ships used by Columbus were caravels, or light ships, the likes of which were designed at Prince Henry's ocean-research station at Sagres. The technology spread, and in 1514, a ship built for King Henry VIII of England pioneered a design that allowed vessels to carry a row of cannons on each side. At a time when piracy was customary, the double-sided gunboat gave the English fleet the upper hand.83

With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of steam power, ocean liners and railway trains were mobilized for war and for peacetime commercial uses. The first railway that the British built in India, in 1853, linked Bombay to a suburb twenty-one miles away. The Indian railways eventually expanded into a robust twenty-four-thousand-mile network, allowing agricultural and mineral resources to be brought to ports and enabling the greater penetration of British manufactured products into the subcontinent. 84

Empires not only developed trade routes and helped build ltliable transportation to carry out commercial activity, they also provided the lubricant for transactions-namely, currencies that faraway countries and people would accept and honor. Alexander the Great started the trend by issuing international coinages. The Phoenicians in Egypt issued another currency, so by the third century BeE, the Mediterranean world was divided into two main currency spheres.85 Roman and Byzantine gold and silver coins continued to be the legal tender for international trading for a long time until the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, Genoa issued their own coins. Currencies minted by the Ottoman Empire dominated Levantine trade, but with less clout than coins issued by the Italian city-states.

Global trade reached unprecedented heights beginning in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish empires in South America began pumping huge quantities of silver bullion into the market. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Spanish coins became the effective international currency of Southeast Asia, prompting one Filipino official to comment that "the king of China could build a palace with the silver bars from Peru which have been carried to his country."86

The Spanish also promoted paper IODs to replace precious metals as a means of immediate settlement of payments due. For instance, the Spanish government had difficulty financing its increasing military enterprises. To make payments to its troops, financiers, and suppliers, Spain began issuing "bills of credit," pieces of paper that kept the wheels of the empire turning. And as trade expanded, Spanish, British, and Dutch empires emerged as a vast emporia of world goods.87

By the sheer necessity of traveling far to conquer other peoples and control vast spaces, empires often emerged as transmission belts for technology and their fusion. Genghis Khan, leader of a band of armed nomadic cattle herders, had more need than any other emperor to secure technology from others. He recruited his first engineers among the other nomadic tribes who had learned the Chinese technology of warfare using gunpowder-one of the earliest technologies for storing, transporting, and applying energy.88 When Genghis took these men westward with him, he brought about a cross-stimulation of Chinese and Iranian engineering and technology, which almost certainly led to the eventual development of the cannon.89 Chinese iron-smelting technology and gunpowder, combined with Persian and Arab engineering skill, gave the Mongols sophisticated weapons to defeat the powerful Song dynasty. Arnold Pacey, a technology historian, says that the siege engine used by the Mongols was of Arab design, with Chinese gunpowder that launched missiles and bombs much farther.90 Not long after the victory in the thirteenth century, the same technology instigated a revolution in European warfare. As Alfred W. Crosby writes, "Europe took gunpowder to its bosom like a lover's bouquet."91 Firearms assisted in the English conquest of Normandy and the Spanish Catholic victory against the Moors.92 Eventually ship-deck cannons gave the Europeans a decisive edge in expanding their control to Asia and the New World.
Even during the twentieth century, with tanks and aircraft replacing horses, military planners in Britain and Germany continued to study Mongol strategy.

During World War II, two of the leading exponents of mechanized combat, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General George S. Patton, were keen students of Mongol tactics.93 The bureaucratic-military power that allowed empires to promulgate and enforce laws also gave them the ability to introduce new crops and animals. Humans had long collected and traded animals and crops, but on a small scale, with limited impact on local agricultural development or animal husbandry. But imperial conquests and the expansion of administrative power led to a biological unification that Crosby has called "ecological imperialism." Imperial expansion broadened the horizon of biological knowledge. The Greek historian Aristobolus, who accompanied Alexander the Great's invasion of India in 327 BeE, may have been the first in the West to learn about rice: "a strange plant, standing in water and sown in beds ... , [which] has many ears and yields a large produce."94 Despite this discovery early on, rice did not reach the dinner tables of Europe until the Renaissance.95

The Song emperor Zhenzong (998-1022) learned about drought-resistant and quick-maturing rice from Champa, today's central Vietnam, and sent envoys to bring seeds back to China. This variety of rice had a marked impact on the food supply, spurring a dramatic population boom. Historian Jerry Bentley notes that the population of China almost doubled during the course of two centuries, from sixty million in the year 1000 to one hundred million a century later and 115 million by 1200.96

The eastern provinces of the Arab empire became the gateway for the entry of plants, medicines, and pharmacological knowledge to the western Mediterranean. As historian Andrew Watson has demonstrated, under th~ patronage of the Islamic rulers a great variety of major crops-cotton and sugarcane, as well as rice, hard wheat, sorghum, citrus fruits, the coconut, banana, artichoke, spinach, and eggplant-were diffused from the eastern margins of the empire in India all the way to Morocco and Spain. As Watson puts it, "Over this eastwest route moved not only most of the new crops, the farming practices and the irrigation technology that were the main components of the agricultural revolution, but much else that was to shape the world of classical Islam: higher learning, industrial technology, fashions of dress, art forms, architecture, music, dance, culinary arts, etiquette, games and so forth. The end result of so much diffusion through this medium was at once to strengthen the unity, begun by the conquests, of this vast world and to set it apart from both its predecessors and its neighbors."97

The Mongol rulers were interested in crops like cotton that they themselves did not grow but could grow throughout their empire. Cotton was introduced to China during the tenth century but was promoted by the Mongols. The Mongol emperor created a Cotfbn Promotion Bureau in 1289 and dispersed representatives throughout the newly conquered Chinese provinces.98 The Mongol empire also provided channels that allowed the mixing and comparison of Indian, Chinese, and Persian pharmacology, enabling each to enrich the others. The Mongols recognized that simply transporting medicinal herbs was not enough; the herbs had to be accompanied by detailed instructions for their use. The Mongol court imported Persian, Indian, and Arab doctors into China to run hospitals, and Kublai Khan founded a department for the study of Western medicine under the direction of a Christian scholar. 99

Some imperial ventures into foreign lands unintentionally introduced new crops or species, perhaps the most important of which for Asia's taste buds was chili pepper from the New World, found by Columbus. The Aztec name for the piquant fruit, chili, which was believed to be a cousin of familiar peppercorn, was combined to call it "chili pepper." Asians are surprised to discover that the hot chili that defines their regional culinary identity arrived just 450 years ago, thanks to European adventureres and traders-that there would be no hot curry without Columbus. In the case of Koreans, the surprise can be even worse. Some modern Koreans, proud and nationalistic, might have difficulty acknowledging that they owe their fiery kimchi-fermented cabbage pickled in garlic and chilies-to the hated Japanese samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who invaded Korea in the late sixteenth century. Chili pepper, originally: introduced to Japan by Portuguese traders from the New World, was left behind in Korea by Japanese soldiers who had carried its seeds along with their food rations. Until the arrival of this red pepper, kimchi was bland garlic and cabbage. With an eye to the antiglobalization movement in South Korea spawned by the 1997 economic crisis, one writer commented: "It would not be the last time in the history of Korean food that globalization was associated with suffering, for the Japanese left behind not only red pepper in their 16th century incursions but widespread destruction as well."100

India's Mughal emperor Jahangir was curious about the new flora and fauna that the Portuguese galleons had brought to Goa from the New World and sent a representative to Goa every two weeks to look for novelties. Thus, pineapples were procured from a Portuguese ship, as immortalized by a court painter in Delhi, and thousands of "fruit of the European port," as the emperor would later proudly note, grew in the imperial gardens in Agra.101

The Portuguese domination of the seas, linking continents, made Portuguese vessels the principal carriers of plants an~ vegetables from one clime and soil to another. The huge price fetched by spices was a big incentive for the Portuguese to grow spices in lands under their own control. Legend has it that in 1498, when Vasco da Gama requested pepper stock for replanting, the ruler of Malabar, Zamorin, issued a calm response: "You can take our pepper, but you will never be able to take our rains." With the acquisition of Brazil, however, the Portuguese acquired enough sun and rain to make a go of it-and no longer had to request permission to transfer a pepper plant. 102

Imperial Britain introduced one Amazon plant to the world and changed industrial history. The Native Americans called it caoutchouc, the same word as in French, and used it to make waterproof boots and bouncing balls. In 1755, King Joseph I of Portugal sent several pairs of his royal boots to Brazil to be coated with latex-the white secretion that natives tapped from trees. 103 The latex was carried back to Europe for experiments, and in the early nineteenth century, the rubber raincoat was born-named Mackintosh after the Scottish scientist Charles Mackintosh, who succeeded in making a waterproof fabric with rubber. Rubber soon became the substance on which the automobile revolution would run. With demand for rubber skyrocketing, the British Empire stepped in. In 1876, at the request of the government and of British citizens living in Brazil, Henry Alexander Wickham smuggled out seventy thousand rubber seeds.

Botanists at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew successfully grew seedlings, which were then shipped to the British tropical colonies of Ceylon and Malaysia. As Henry Ford's assembly line for the Model- T revved up, a rush for "white gold" swept Malaysia, with large acres put qnder rubber plantations. By 1924, as the ten-millionth Ford hit the road, Malaya, as it was called then, was exporting more than two hundred thousand tons of rubber each year-accounting for more than half of global production. In the process, some 1.2 million Indian indentured workers were brought into the country, changing Malaysian demography forever. Today, 10 percent of the country's population is of Indian origin, many the descendants of the original rubber tappers. 104

Under Spanish encouragement the Philippines was turned into the world's major coconut producer at the end of the nineteenth century. The Philippine coconut plantations got a further boost when the U.S. company Proctor and Gamble, hurting from a shortage of beef fat and tallow resulting from a series ofblizzards and droughts, turned to the new American colony for a substitute. By 1930 nearly 13 percent of the country's arable land was turned into coconut plantations to meet the surging demand for coconut oil. Eventually, less expensive soybeans and cottonseed supplanted coconuts as sources for oil, and worldwide demand for coconut oil fell, leaving a third of Filipino peasants trapped in poverty. 105

The Spanish colonizers took their domesticated animals with them to the Americas, hoping to re-create the homes they had left behind. Horses, dogs, sheep, pigs, goats, cattle, and chickens were all new to the New World, but they quickly adapted. As Henry Kamen puts it, "Some vessels crossed the Atlantic as veritable arks of Noah."106 American Indians took to horses as if they were made for each other. The Plains Indians culture of North America was transformed by the horse, and in South America, Argentina-with its vast grazing lands for cattle and sheep-eventually emerged as a major world supplier of beef and wool.

When Captain James Cook left for the Pacific on his first voyage in 1768, his explicit but confidential task was to cultivate diplomatic and trade relations with the natives and to pursue biological exchange: he was "to bring home Specimens of the Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect."107 His right-hand man for the job was Joseph Banks, honorary director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. As one scholar has written, Banks was "the leading exponent of the 'gospel of plant interchange.'"108

Empires played a significant role in building up human knowledge about the world. It is hard to overestimate the role played by the Islamic caliphate in gathering, protecting, and diffusing knowledge. At the court of the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, manuscripts from allover the world were collected and scholars were invited. Books from Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, and other languages were translated, and because many of the originals have since disappeared, the Arabic translations made in Baghdad often remain the only extant copies. The Umayyad rulers of Spain regularly sent agents to Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo to attract scholars and buy rare books. 109 The European Renaissance would have been impossible without the rich libraries of Islamic Spain.

The gathering of knowledge continued hand in hand with the search for profitable plants and resources in European colonies. Plant and animal exchanges across continents~promoted by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British empires-were followed by the establishment of various societies in European capitals, with specialties ranging from exploration and geography to botany and history. These institutions provided a justification for colonial expansion-the "civilizing mission" -and thickened the web of connections through knowledge. Adventurers of the past morphed into explorers and researchers in the employ of the colonial powers. No individual did more to es tablish the interconnected and interdependent nature oflife than British naturalist Charles Darwin. The journey that he took as member of a British science team in 1831-36 aboard HMS Beaglis expedition around the world brought him to the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. His research and observation there and in many remote places led Darwin to his theory on evolution, set out in his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).

To send soldiers on horses, camels, and elephants to subjugate other peoples far away from home was both costly and difficult. But imperial rulers found out that they had an even more serious long-term problem: to conquer what historian Fernand Braudel has called "space, the enemy number one." To rule and maintain control over people across vast distances required an organized information network. Information had to be recorded on clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and a variety of other media and dispatched with messengers. The Roman Empire, with its elaborate road network and horse carriages, developed the first information network. Under Roman occupation, the cattle-rich Anatolian city of Pergamum, with its tradition of parchment-making, emerged as the supplier par excellence of parchment to the world (the word is a vulgarization of the name Pergamum). 110 Parchment, made from animal skins, remained Europe's main medium of storing and transferring information before Europeans learned paper-making technology from the Chinese via the Arabs.

Information written on parchment or paper still had to be transmitted over physical distance. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar each developed an elaborate system of relays, by which messages were carried from one post to another by mounted messengers. The system was further developed in China's Tang dynasty and later in the Mongol Empire. In the days of Genghis Khan, a communication network consisting of rest stops and relay horse riders allowed messengers to travel a hundred miles a day for weeks on end. III The system was copied by the Egyptian Mamluk sultan, who had observed it in the Mongol domain, and from there it reached Latin Christendom and eventually the Habsburg Empire, where a full-blown postal service emerged. 112 Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century came the revolutionary telegraph. The first application of the telegraph in wartime was made by the British during the Crimean War in 1854. Four years later, undersea cables laid across the Atlantic allowed Queen Victoria to send the first telegraphic message to President James Buchanan. It may have taken sixteen and a half hours to decode the message in Morse code, but its arrival was greeted by a huge celebration accompanied by fireworks, which inadvertently resulted in New York's City Hall burning down. By 1880, some 97,568 miles of cables had been laid across the world's oceans, linking Britain to its colonies in Asia, Canada, Africa, and Australia. Queen Victoria celebrated her Jubilee by sending something akin to a mass e-mail. As James Morris describes it: "On the morning of June 22,1897, Queen Victoria of England went to the telegraph room at Buckingham palace .... It was a few minutes after eleven o'clock, she pressed an electric button; an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office; in a matter of seconds her jubilee message was on its way to every corner of her Empire. The message simply said: 'Thank my beloved people. May God bless them.' "113

Almost like one billion Internet users today, who can walk to their home or office computers every morning to check e-mail, Queen Victoria could simply walk to the telegraph room in her palace basement and read the cables from the far corners of her empire. By the early twentieth century London had emerged as the capital of the industrial world, and the economist John Maynard Keynes could write these words, which sound familiar today: "The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or wen trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages."114

Private entrepreneurs and companies played a key role in the development of the telegraph arid telephone, but the imperial authorities' need for secure communication acted as a prime mover in developing what has been called "the world's system of electrical nerves."115 The rise of the Internet, foreshadowed by the telegraph network, was itself initiated by the Pentagon, concerned about losing command and control in the event of a nuclear war.
It was perhaps fitting that the worldwide system of "electrical nerves" that the British Empire helped create would be used at the empire's final moment. As the royal yacht Britannia pulled out of Hong Kong harbor in the wee hours of 1 July 1997, Britain's last governor, Chris Patten, sent a terse cable from the ship:

"I have relinquished the administration of this government. God Save the Queen."116 As the Britannia melted into the darkness, the globally interconnected, multicultural world-that the British and others had done so much to create-continued to spin and pulsate, as if indifferent to the passing of empire. Buchanan. It may have taken sixteen and a half hours to decode the message in .1orse code, but its arrival was greeted by a huge celebration accompanied by fireworks, which inadvertently resulted in New York's City Hall burning down. Iy 1880, some 97,568 miles of cables had been laid across the world's oceans, inking Britain to its colonies in Asia, Canada, Africa, and Australia. Queen Tictoria celebrated her Jubilee by sending something akin to a mass e-mail. As ames Morris describes it: "On the morning of June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria of ~ngland went to the telegraph room at Buckingham palace .... It was a few ninutes after eleven o'clock, she pressed an electric button; an impulse was ransmitted to the Central Telegraph Office; in a matter of seconds her jubilee nessage was on its way to every corner of her Empire. The message simply said: Thank my beloved people. May God bless them.'"113

Almost like one billion Internet users today, who can walk to their home or office computers every morning to check e-mail, Queen Victoria could simply ;valk to the telegraph room in her palace basement and read the cables from the :ar corners of her empire. By the early twentieth century London had emerged lS the capital of the industrial world, and the economist John Maynard Keynes :ould write these words, which sound familiar today: "The inhabitant of Lonion could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various Jroducts of the whole earth in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably ~xpect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and Jy the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trqpDIe, in their prospective fruits and advantages." 114

Private entrepreneurs and companies played a key role in the development of the telegraph arid telephone, but the imperial authorities' need for secure communication acted as a prime mover in developing what has been called "the world's system of electrical nerves."115 The rise of the Internet, foreshadowed by the telegraph network, was itself initiated by the Pentagon, concerned about losing command and control in the event of a nuclear war.
It was perhaps fitting that the worldwide system of "electrical nerves" that the British Empire helped create would be used at the empire's final moment. As the royal yacht Britannia pulled out of Hong Kong harbor in the wee hours of I July 1997, Britain's last governor, Chris Patten, sent a terse cable from the ship:

"I have relinquished the administration of this government. God Save the Queen." 1 16 As the Britannia melted into the darkness, the globally interconnected, multicultural world-that the British and others had done so much to create-continued to spin and pulsate, as if indifferent to the passing of empire.

1)  For a more in depth approach then Wikipedia see Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (2007); for a critical on-line article by jihad specialist Andrew G. Bostom see. http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/10/killing_from_quranic_piety_tam.html
 

1.     Egyptian Islamisr wrirer Sayyid Qurb, quoted by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 212.
2.     Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest,from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 12-13.
3.     William W. Tarn, "Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind," Raleigh Lecture on History, British Academy, IO May 1933, 4.
4.     Ibid., 27·
5.     Plutarch quoted in Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 13.
6.     Ibid., 31.
7.     President Theodore Roosevelt announced that "chronic wrongdoing, or an~mpotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere .... The Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however, reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power." Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 52-53.
8.     Cesare Polengh, "Hideyoshi and Korea," 25 April 2003, Samurai Archives, http://www. samurai-archives.com/hak.html.
9.     Ferguson, Colossus,80.
10.  There are more than thirty thousand McDonald's restaurants in 120 countries.
11.  Robert Kaplan, "Empire by Stealth," Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2003,66.
12.  Cited by Ferguson, Colossus, 68.
13.  Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest, Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), I, quotation at 129.
14.  Ibid., 129.
15.  Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 19.
16.  Michael Cook, A Brief History of the Human Race (New York: W. W. Norton 2003), 28184·
17.  Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, "Demographic Shocks and the Factor Proportions Model: From the Plague ofJustinian to the Black Death," typescript, Columbia University, University Seminar in Economic History, 28, available at http://www.econ. barnard.columbia.edu/ ~econhist/ papers/FindlaY%20 Justinian. pd£
18.  Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 34.
19.  Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to I600, 6th rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 337.
20.  Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004), 101.
21.  Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, "The First Globalization Episode: The Creation of the Mongol Empire, or the Economics of Chinggis Khan," 14, available at http:// yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/pdfs/mongol.pd£ See also Nicholas Wade, "Scientists Link a Prolific Gene Tree to the Manchu Conquerors of China," New York Times, I November 2005·
22.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan,111.
23.  According to a later account, when Alexander set out for Syria, Aristotle wrote to him advising hitn to seize Socotra and send a group of Greeks to settle there for the sake of alqatir (resin) and aloe. Vitaly Naumkin, "Fieldwork in Socotra," Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 133-42.
24.  Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 160- 61.
25.  Henry Kamen, Spain's Road to Empire: The Making ofa WorldPower, I492-I763 (London: Penguin, 2002), 301.
26.  Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, I5I3-I830 Yale University Press,1998), 14.
27.  Robert Tignor, "Colonial Africa through the Lens of Colonial Latin America," in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (New York: Routledge, 1999), 35.
28.  Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 7.
29.  James Bryce and General Stanley Maude quoted by Tony Judt, "Dreams of Empire," New York Review of Books, 4 November 2004.
30.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, xxiii-xxiv.
31.  Sir William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), 4.
32.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 25.
33.  Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East (London: Penguin, 2003), 17.
34.  John Keegan, A History of Waifare (New York: Vintage, 1994), 212.
35.  Findlay and Lundahl, "First Globalization Episode," 21.
36.  Tatiana Zerjal et al., "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols," American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (20°3): 717-21.
37.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan, 227.
16.  Ibid., 221. Michael Cook, A Brief History of the Human Race (New York: W. W. Norton 2003), 28184·
17.  Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, "Demographic Shocks and the Factor Proportions Model: From the Plague ofJustinian to the Black Death," typescript, Columbia University, University Seminar in Economic History, 28, available at http://www.econ. barnard.columbia.edu/ ~econhist/ papers/FindlaY%20 Justinian. pd£
18.   Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 34.
19.  Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to I600, 6th rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 337.
20.  Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004), 101.
21.  Nicholas Wade, "Scientists Link a Prolific Gene Tree to the Manchu Conquerors of China," New York Times, 1 November 2005.
22.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan,111.
23.  According to a later account, when Alexander set out for Syria, Aristotle wrote to him advising hitn to seize Socotra and send a group of Greeks to settle there for the sake of alqatir (resin) and aloe. Vitaly Naumkin, "Fieldwork in Socotra," Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 133-42.
24.  Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 160- 61.
25.  Henry Kamen, Spain's Road to Empire: The Making ofa WorldPower, I492-I763 (London: Penguin, 2002), 301.
26.  Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, I5I3-I830 (New Hayen and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 14.
27.  Robert 1. Tignor, "Colonial Africa through the Lens of Colonial Latin America," in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (New York: Routledge, 1999), 35.
28.  Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 7.
29.  James Bryce and General Stanley Maude quoted by Tony Judt, "Dreams of Empire," New York Review of Books, 4 November 2004.
30.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, xxiii-xxiv.
31.  Sir William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), 4.
32.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 25.
33.  Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East (London: Penguin, 2003), 17.
34.  John Keegan, A History of Waifare (New York: Vintage, 1994), 212.
35.  Findlay and Lundahl, "First Globalization Episode," 21.
36.  Tatiana Zerjal et al., "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols," American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003): 717-21.
37.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan, 227.
38.  Ibid.,221.
39.   A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, I4I5-I808: A World on the Move (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 60-62.
40.  Kamen, Spain's Road to Empire, 354-
41.  Ibid., 345.
42.  Ibid., 355.
43.  James D. Watson, DNA: The Secret of Lift (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 250-51.
44.  "Britishers do not land on the shores of other people's states to become ethnic minorities and parricularistic lobbies. They create states: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Mrica. When the ancient Greeks emigrated, they ipso facto left the polis city-state; when British people emigrated, they took the state with them." Engseng Ho, "Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat," Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004): 2IO-46.
45.  Stuart Mole, "From Empire to Equality? Migration and the Commonwealth," Round Table 358 (2001): 89.
46.  Ferguson, Empire, 60.
47.  Gregory Mann, "Immigrants and Arguments in France and West Mrica," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 362-85, quotation at 364.
48.  Claudia Zequeira, ''A Petty Officer and Now, a U.S. Citizen," Orlando Sentinel 30 July 2006.
49.  Cam Simpson, "U.S. to Probe Claims of Human Trafficking," Chicago Tribune, 19 January2006.
50.  Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History, 155.
51.  Henry the Navigator heard a story of "the silent trade" in North Africa designed for people who did not know each other's language. As Daniel Boorstin tells it: "Muslim caravans that went southward from Morocco across the Atlas mountains arrived after twenty days at the shores of the Senegal River. The Moroccan traders laid out sepalfte piles of salt, of beads from tan coral, and cheap manufactured goods. Then they retreated out of sight. The local tribesmen, who lived in the strip mines where they dug their gold, came to the shore and put a heap of gold beside each pile of Moroccan's. Then they, in turn, went out of view, leaving the Moroccan traders either to take the gold offered for a particular pile or to reduce the pile of their merchandise to suit the offered price in gold. Once again the Moroccan traders withdrew, and the process went on." Boorstin, Discoverers, 161.
52.  Sir William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), 2.
53.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 36.
54.   Mansfield, History of the Middle East, 15-16. 55
55.  Cook, Brief History, 279
56.  Fernand Braude!, A History of Civilizations, trans. Richard Mayne (New York: Penguin, 1993), 79·
57.  Mansfield, History of the Middle East, 16.
58.  Wearherford, Genghis Khan, II2.
59.  Macaulay's speech is available at http://www.languageinindia.com/april2003 / macaulay. html
60.  Romila Thapar, A History of India: vol. I (London: Penguin, 1966), 86.
61.  Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 46-49.
62.  Priyatosh Banerjee, "The Spread ofIndian Art and Culture to Central Asia and China," Indian Horizons 43, nos. 1-2 (1994), available at http://ignca.nic.in/pbo0I3.htm.
63.  Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 19·
64.  Catholic Encyclopaedia, s.v. "The First Council of Nicaea."
65.  Rodney Stark, "Efforts to Christianize Europe, 400-2000," Journal of Contemporary Religion 16, no. I (January 2001): 109.
66.  Ibid.
67.  Michael Wood, Conquistadors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 133-35.
68.  Russell-Wood, Portuguese Empire, 201.
69.  Ferguson, Colossus, 7.
70.  Ibid., 49.
71.  U Thanh Kh6i, Histoire du Viet Nam: des origines it I858 (Paris: Sudestasie, 1981), 37I.
72.  Story of Pakistan, "Khilafat Movement [1919-1924]," http://www.storyofpakistan. coml articletext.asp?artid = A033&Pg= 2.
73.  Bruce B. Lawrence, "In Bin Laden's Words," Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 November 2005.
74.  Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 28.
75.  Ernest Barker, quoted in ibid., 32.
76.  Romila Thapar, Early India from the Origins to A.D. I300 (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2002), 255
77.  Janet 1. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. I250-I350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 198.
78.  Mansfield, History of the Middle East, 18.
79.  Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 170.
80.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan, 22l.
81.  Michael Prawdin, The Mongol Empire: Its Rise and Legacy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Free Press, 1967), 507.
82.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan, xxiv.
83.  William H. McNeill, The Age of Gunpowder Empires, I450-I800 (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1989),14.
84.  Ferguson, Empire, 17l.
85.  Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation, 250-5I.
86.  Kamen, Spain's Road to Empire, 295.
87.  Ibid., 295.
88.  Wood and coal store energy that can be transported, but until the discovery of the steam engine, that energy could not be used for any other purpose than heating. The crossbow and trebuchet could not store energy transferred from muscle. Gunpowder-combining saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal-was thus the first invention in which energy could be stored, transported, and applied. Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to I700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3I.
89.  Findlay and Lundahl, "First Globalization Episode," 32.
90.  Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),46.
91.  Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1I8.
92.  Chase, Firearms, 71-72.
93.  Giancarlo Casale, "The Ottoman 'Discovery' of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century: The Age of Exploration from an Islamic Perspective," paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 12-15 February 2003, available at http://www.historycooperative. org/ proceedings/ seascapes/ casale.html.
94.  K. T. Achaya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209
95.  Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-I900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 136.
96.  Jerry H. Bentley, "Hemispheric Integration, 500-1500 C.E.," Journal of World History 9, no. 2, citing Ho Ping-ti, "Early-ripening Rice in Chinese History," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 9 (1956): 200-218.
97.  Andrew M. Watson, "The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700- 1I00," Journal of Economic History 34 (1974): 22.
98.  Weatherford, Genghis Khan, 229.
99.  Ibid., 229·
100. Choe Yong-shik, "Historians Unearth Secret Past of Kimchi," Korea Herald, 3 October 2001. See also Amal Naj, Peppers: Story of Hot Pursuits (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 8.
101.Achaya, Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, 188.
102.Russell-Wood, Portuguese Empire, 154. 103
103. Ibid., 172.
104.Murray Hiebert, "Tin Cans and Tyres," Far Eastern Economic Review, 15 April 1999.
105.Rigoberro Tiglao, "Roots of Poverty," Far Eastern Economic Review, 10 June 1999.
106.Kamen, Spain's Road to Empire, 270.
107.Wade Graham, "Traffick According to Their Own Caprice: Trade and Biological Exchange in the Making of the Pacific World, 1766-1825," paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 12-15 February 2003, available at http://www.historycooperative.org/ proceedings/ seascapes/ graham.html.
108.Tony Ballantyne in Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History, 135- 36.
109.Watson, "Arab Agricultural Revolution," 21.
110.Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation, 168.
111.William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1977), 162.
112. Quoted by S. A. M. Adshead, Tang China: The Rise of the East in World History (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 183.
113. James Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (London: Penguin, 1968).
114.Cited in Ferguson, Empire, 171.
115. Ibid.
116. Nisid Hajari, "A Most Dignified Retreat with Bagpipers," Time (International), 14 July 1997, 22.

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