In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking and burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. It was the most dramatic possible demonstration of the accelerating superiority, military and financial, of Europe over the rest of the world. China was far larger in territory and population than either France or England, yet the thought of a Chinese force storming Buckingham Palace was self-evidently absurd. The Middle Kingdom had no choice but to submit to the Western powers’ demands, giving their merchants and missionaries the right to move freely throughout the country.

For the Chinese — who still dominated East Asia, and enjoyed an unbroken cultural tradition much older than Europe’s — it looked as though the world had been turned upside down. “We are shamefully humiliated,” lamented a Chinese scholar quoted by John Darwin in his exceptionally wide-ranging new history, “After Tamerlane” (Bloomsbury, 592 pages, $34.95). China’s helplessness, the scholar
recognized, was “not because our climate, soil, or resources are inferior to” the ‘Westerners’, “but because our people are really inferior … Why are they small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet weak?”

These remain the great questions of modern history. How are we to explain what Mr. Darwin, a historian at Oxford, calls “the great divergence” between the trajectories of Europe and its New World progeny, on the one hand, and the civilizations of Africa and Asia, on the other? How did a small, fragmented region on the western edge of the Eurasian landmass manage to dominate the rest of the known world? Many historians have dedicated themselves to explaining this mystery, by analyzing the factors that distinguish the West from the rest. Jared Diamond, in “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” took a biologist’s approach, focusing on Europe’s advantages in geography and biodiversity. David Landes, in “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” argued for the importance of culture and values.

Mr. Darwin’s answer to the great question is more ambiguous, and therefore less likely to make his book a best seller. In fact, his major purpose in “After Tamerlane” is to complicate what he believes to be a simplistic and chauvinistic view of Western superiority. The rise of Europe, he reminds us, was neither preordained nor permanent. Europeans might have been able to have their way with China in the 1850s, but the march on Peking would have been impossible a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later.

More broadly, Mr. Darwin wants to show that Europe’s hegemony, which began in the late 18th century and crumbled after World War II, was the result of a contingent historical process, not the manifestation of some superior essence. Invoking Edward Said, Mr. Darwin attacks the “orientalist” assumptions behind Western historiography. “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,” he writes. “Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities — indeed, many modernities.”

Yet reading “After Tamerlane,” with its panoramic yet fine-grained view of six centuries of world history, it is by no means clear that Mr. Darwin has achieved his revisionist purpose. The clearest lesson of “After Tamerlane,” in fact, is that there were not “other modernities,” equally valid competitors with the West’s, which might have resulted in a different, more equal distribution of global power. On the contrary, it is precisely because modernity was Western — because it came flying the flag of England or France or America or Germany or even Russia — that it was so challenging and unsettling to the rest of the world. Non-Western civilizations were never at leisure to formulate their own visions of modernity, because they were desperately trying to stay afloat in the whirlpool caused by the West’s rapid progress. As even Mr. Darwin writes, “Being modern was not an absolute state, but a comparative one,” and it was Europe that always offered the term of comparison.

“After Tamerlane,” then, can be read as an account of the way each of the world’s empires dealt with the challenge of European modernity. And nothing less than empires, Mr. Darwin argues, will do as a unit of historical analysis. While the word “imperialism” is usually associated with the global domination of 19th-century Europe, and its benign or malign consequences, Mr. Darwin insists that “the history of the world … is an imperial history, a history of empires.” In the history of states, empires — which Mr. Darwin loosely defines as “systems of influence or rule in which ethnic, cultural, or ecological boundaries [are] overlapped or ignored” — are “the default position.” They are the most common way people and territory have been ruled, from the Incas to the Romans to the Persians. Our current assumption that empires are “abnormal,” Mr. Darwin writes — that only the nation-state is a really valid form of government — must be discarded if we are to understand the history of Europe and Asia.

Taking a continental and global view, Mr. Darwin charts the rise and fall of such empires over a span of 600 years. His starting point, as his title indicates, is the death of Tamerlane, the great Mongol conqueror, in 1405. Tamerlane was the last in a long series of Turkic and Mongol warlords who burst out of the Central Asian plains at the head of a mounted army to conquer the cities of the Middle East — to “rule the sown from the steppe,” in Mr. Darwin’s phrase. Before he died, he managed to cut a path of destruction from Damascus to Delhi. But his significance for Mr. Darwin is that he had no successors: After Tamerlane, it was no longer possible “to challenge the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West, Islamic Middle Eurasia and Confucian East Asia.”

Instead, in the 15th century, it was Europe that took the first steps on the road to world dominance. The opening act in this long drama was Columbus’s discovery of America — what Mr. Darwin calls “the Occidental Breakout” — which gave Christendom an important commercial and scientific advantage over its Muslim and Confucian rivals. It also demonstrated in the most dramatic fashion what an encounter with the West could mean for other civilizations. But the instantaneous collapse of the Aztec and Incan empires in the face of Spanish aggression also provides Mr. Darwin with a key example of the contingency of Western expansion. If the Spanish had not advanced so quickly from the Caribbean to mainland South America; if they had not found the local empires at odds with their own subject populations; above all, if European diseases had not proved so devastating to native immune systems, what Mr. Darwin calls “the Spanish blitzkrieg” could not have succeeded.

Europe’s conquest of the New World was “more like science fiction than history,” Mr. Darwin writes, and it could not be replicated with the much more vigorous and wary civilizations of Asia. Indeed, he reminds us that the European penetration of Asia and Africa was a long, halting process, with many lulls and setbacks. His accounts of the imperial fortunes of China and Turkey, Japan and Iran, introduce the reader to whole dimensions of modern history usually invisible from a Western perspective. Simply by juxtaposing Europe’s history with its neighbors’, Mr. Darwin helps to dispel the easy assumption that only Europe could have played the protagonist on the world stage.

Not until after the Napoleonic wars did “the Eurasian revolution” take hold in earnest, and “even in the 1830s,” Mr. Darwin maintains, “European pre-eminence was not a foregone conclusion.” What turned it into a reality was a combination of three factors: the prolonged peace of the long 19th century in Europe, the accelerating industrial revolution, and the growing willingness of Europeans to see their own civilization as superior to all others. Together, these elements gave Europe, and especially Britain, the power and opportunity to impose its will on the rest of the world.

Crucially, Mr. Darwin helps us to see European expansion as a dynamic system, in which commerce, politics, and culture reinforced one another. Non-Western empires were faced with an impossible dilemma. To join the modern world system meant ceding political autonomy to Europe, accepting a subsidiary place in the global economy, and jeopardizing local structures of authority and belief. On the other hand, refusing to join meant facing financial coercion or armed force from the European powers. Over the 19th century, the British in particular managed to strongarm their way into positions of dominance around the world, whether as outright colonial sovereigns, as in Africa and India; de facto rulers, as in Egypt, or bullying profiteers, as in China. Attempts to resist were met with concentrated fury: When the Islamic “Mahdist” movement rebelled against British rule in Egypt, in the 1880s, the British commander Lord Kitchener not only crushed the rebels, he disinterred their leader’s corpse and threw it into the Nile. “A word from Queen Victoria,” Mr. Darwin writes, “was needed to stop him using … the skull as an ashtray.”

The last part of “After Tamerlane” deals, inevitably, with the decline and fall of this arrogant hegemony. As late as the 1890s, Europe’s domination looked irresistible: China and Turkey seemed destined to fall entirely under its grip. What brought it to an end was the suicide of European civilization in the two world wars. “The most vital prop of Europe’s primacy in Eurasia,” Mr. Darwin argues, “had been [the European powers’] determination not to fight each other.” When that determination failed, so too did the financial and cultural premises of European imperialism. In telling the story of the last 50 years, Mr. Darwin is on more familiar ground, and his analysis of the Cold War is fairly conventional. He ends “After Tamerlane” on a cautious note: Despite the current unipolarity of American power, he writes, history demonstrates “Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.” This final judgment — so general as to be a truism, yet fruitful as a reminder of the diversity of history — reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Darwin’s book.

akirsch@nysun.com