After Tamerlane

John Darwin's global history of the rise of European world power — arguing that European dominance was a relatively brief and contingent episode in a world otherwise dominated by great Eurasian empires.

The non-Eurocentric long view: European global dominance was not inevitable but the product of specific circumstances from the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries. The Eurasian empires — Mughal, Ottoman, Chinese, Safavid — were not simply waiting to be conquered. Tamerlane's death (1405) as a starting point: what kind of world might have existed. A major work of world history that challenges Western teleology.