John Gray
The Great Game Goes On
After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire
By John Darwin (Allen Lane 592pp £25)

Halford Mackinder is not much read these days. The British geographer and imperialist’s emphasis on the enduring strategic and political importance of the earth’s physical features and resources pricked the complacency of his Edwardian contemporaries, and his ideas had a certain vogue in the interwar years. Notoriously, the Nazis adopted a crude version of his view that whoever controls Eurasia – the ‘world island’ stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze – controls the world. In the aftermath of the Second World War it was widely assumed that geopolitics of this kind was obsolete. Values of democracy and human rights rather than the distribution of resources would shape the future. In fact the struggle for control of natural resources did not abate. An Anglo-American coup removed the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and re-established Western control of the country’s resources, while the Gulf War of 1990–91 aimed solely to secure global oil supplies. Mackinder’s ideas may have been rejected, but the geopolitical facts on which they were based continued to shape international relations.

John Darwin does not subscribe to any simple version of geopolitics. Yet Mackinder’s observation that the ‘Columbian epoch’ in which the world was ruled by European sea power was only an interlude in history might serve as an epigraph to After Tamerlane. Rightly, Darwin rejects the Whiggish narrative in which Europe’s rise to pre-eminence and decline was a moment in the long-term rise of the ‘West’. Europe’s ascent was an incident in the history of Eurasia: ‘we must set Europe’s age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context’, he writes, and recognise ‘the central importance of Europe’s connections with other Old World civilizations and states in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East’. There was nothing foreordained about Europe’s rise or its fall, nor were its empires different in kind from those of other times and places. The view that empire is ‘the original sin of European peoples, who corrupted an innocent word’ is a commonplace in the developing world and in the United States; but, as Darwin points out, the true origins of empire are to be found in processes of exchange and the accumulation of power that are practically universal. In order to understand empire one must understand not only the experiences of Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Britain – themselves hugely diverse. The histories of the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Manchus, the Russians and the Soviets, the Japanese and the Nazis must also be examined. There is nothing peculiarly European, or Western, about imperialism. Empire is normal, and the intense hostility it arouses comes from the fact that post-colonial states base their legitimacy on a vision of it as an unnatural and alien institution – a vision that continues to sustain them even when they become imperialists themselves.

Starting in 1405 with the death of Tamerlane, the last of the ‘world-conquerors’ who was able to bring the whole of Eurasia under a single rule, Darwin presents an eagle’s-eye view of the role of empire in the creation of the modern world. An astonishingly comprehensive, arrestingly fresh and vivid history of the forces that underlie the world we live in today, After Tamerlane sets aside ideologies in which European power – sometimes seen as liberating and at others as diabolically oppressive – is the driving force of modern development. A global economy was not created by ‘the Promethean touch of merchants from Europe’ – it already existed, flourishing in the maritime commerce pioneered by Asians that linked China, Japan, India, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The powerful resurgence of Asia that is now under way only re-establishes these older patterns of trade and power. What we now call ‘globalisation’ has never been only a European or Western phenomenon. The Columbian era of European hegemony, always partly unreal, is now definitely over.

One of the lasting impressions left by Darwin’s account is how geopolitical realities resist and survive the most profound historical transformations. The last few decades have included the collapse of Soviet power and the seeming establishment of an American-centred world order. Yet these large changes have not relegated geopolitics to the past, as liberal and neoconservative bien-pensants like to imagine. The Great Game has not faded away, any more than Eurasia has ceased to be at the heart of global conflicts. There are new players – China and India are active protagonists, and Russia, having been unwisely written off as one of history’s has-beens, has re-emerged as the pivotal power in the new rivalry for energy. The site of the most intense struggles is not Central Asia as it was around the end of the nineteenth century, but the Persian Gulf. While these changes have altered the pattern of geopolitical conflict, they do not make it less pervasive or less prone to erupt into war. The Gulf War of 1990–91 is likely to go down as only the first of a series of resource wars. No doubt these conflicts will have many dimensions, including savage intra-Islamic enmities. They will still be struggles of a kind Mackinder would find familiar.

Towards the end of After Tamerlane, Darwin considers the events that led to Europe’s loss of global primacy. In 1919 the British Empire extended over a quarter of the world; thirty years later it was falling apart. In the early1950s the former Soviet Union – always a European-style empire rather than a type of oriental despotism – was the world’s second naval power. Thirty years on, it was a military-industrial rustbelt. Darwin locates the decisive moments in Europe’s decline in the run-up to the Second World War. The inability of the League of Nations to prevent the Italian invasion of Abyssinia ‘marked the brutal collapse of the last Europe-centred experiment maintaining global order’, and Europe was consumed in the ‘vast Eurasian war’ of 1942. No doubt Europe’s collapse reflected long-term processes, but when it came it was sudden and devastating. Despite the efforts of the Continent’s post-war elites, no ‘European project’ could reverse this catastrophic decline.

Referring to the breakdown that occurred during the interwar period, Darwin observes: ‘The appropriate imagery is not of rivers or tides, but of earthquakes and floods.’ One cannot help wondering what upheavals are in store for us. After reading this masterpiece of historical writing, one thing is clear. The world has not seen the last empire.