Free After Tamerlane by John Darwin Page B

growth of much cheaper air travel, the ‘container revolution’ in the shipment of goods, and, above all, the commercial application of Internet technology. Hard on the heels of the financial ‘liberalization’ of the 1980s that brought much greater freedom for financial services and capital transfers between Western countries, the conditions were met for a phase of exceptional growth in the volume of trade and an intense integration of economic activities on a global scale far beyond the limited promise of the pre- 1914 world. The ‘great divergence’ in wealth and economic performance between the Euro-Atlantic West and most of the rest of Eurasia has given way instead to the ‘great convergence’, which should, if it continues, restore the balance to the rough equilibrium of half a millennium ago in the next fifty years.
    Yet the world that ‘globalization’ is in process of remaking has largely been formed under very different conditions. For most of the period covered in this book, economic relations between differentparts of the world have done little to hinder (and quite a lot to encourage) the building of empires, states and cultures with distinctive values, attitudes, institutions and ideologies. Economic interdependence, the main constraint upon cultural diversity, has been too short-lived, too quickly aborted and too blunt in its impact to reverse this trend. It is widely assumed that this long era is ending: that vernacular cultures and the nation state cannot withstand the invasive effects of the world of free movement in information, people and goods. So far the run of free movement has been short. We will have to see.
TAMERLANE’S SHADOW
    Perhaps this is the point. It might well be true that we are now on the brink of a great transformation – in geopolitics, economics and culture – at least as far-reaching as the Eurasian Revolution of the late eighteenth century. If this is so, it can hardly be doubted that its impacts in different parts of the world will vary enormously. The history of Eurasia suggests that, while new methods of warfare and government, newtechniques of production, newcultural practices and new religious beliefs were diffused from one end of the Old World to the other (and from every direction), they failed to induce a common view of modernity or of what it was to be ‘modern’. The past patterns of trade and conquest, diaspora and migration that have pushed and pulled distant regions together and shaped their cultures and politics have been exceptionally complex. Their effect has been not to homogenize the world, but to keep it diverse. By contrast, the magnetic force of the global economy has been too erratic thus far, and too unevenly felt, to impose the cooperative behaviour and cultural fusion to which theorists of free trade have often looked forward. What we call globalization today might be candidly seen as flowing from a set of recent agreements, some tacit, some formal, between the four great economic ‘empires’ of the contemporary world: America, Europe, Japan and China. For them, and for all other states and societies, the challenge will be to reconcile their internal cohesion with the disturbing effects of free competition. The strain will be great; the outcome uncertain. But if there is one continuity that we should be ableto glean from a long viewof the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules. In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow – or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadowof his failure.

Notes
PREFACE
    1 . Frederick Teggart,
Rome and China
(Berkeley, 1939), p. 245.
CHAPTER 1: ORIENTATIONS
    1 . For Ibn Khaldun, Y. Lacoste,
Ibn Khaldun
(Paris, 1969);
Encylopaedia of Islam
(Leiden, 1999).
    2 . The authoritative study is B. F. Manz,
The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane
(Cambridge, 1989).
    3 . For a recent study stressing the exchanges