by Parag Khanna
The Seljuk khanates and smaller Turkic protostates, however, could not withstand the rapacious armies of the Mongols. After uniting disparate northeast Asian tribes in 1206, the young warrior Temujin took on the name of Genghis Khan, or “universal ruler,” and led savage campaigns across Eurasia. By the time of his death in 1227, Genghis Khan ruled the largest contiguous empire in history, stretching from the East Sea (also known as the Sea of Japan) to the Caspian Sea. The conquests continued under his sons and grandsons, who swept across Russia and sacked Kiev in 1240, laid siege to Hungary in 1241, and reached the gates of Vienna. In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad. In 1276, the Song Dynasty succumbed to Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan. A decade later, all of China—as well as the Gobi Desert and Siberia to the north—had fallen under the reign of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, which Kublai Khan ruled from Shangdu (Xanadu) and eventually from Khanbaliq (Beijing).
For all its brutality, the Mongol Empire was strikingly tolerant: three of the four major khanates were heavily Muslim populated, while the Yuan adopted Buddhism. The Mongols were also shrewd in coopting diverse cultures and intermarrying with leading families. They rounded up hundreds of thousands of Arabs, Persians, and Turks and brought them back to China as administrators, diluting the influence of Chinese Confucian bureaucrats. The Persian physician Rashid al-Din, who served in the court of Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu Khan, authored a three-volume compendium (Jami al-Tawarikh) chronicling this blending of Mongol, Persian, and other cultures.
The Mongols’ provision of reliable security across a vast swath of Eurasia also enabled flourishing trade between numerous civilizations along the Silk Road. Merchant caravans from as far as Europe—including that of the late-thirteenth-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo—brought goods and visitors to the court of Kublai Khan. The rapid connectivity the Mongols enabled, however, also facilitated the rapid spread of a great plague that emanated from Central Asia. By the mid–fourteenth century, about one-third of Persia’s population had died; farther west, half of Europe’s population perished. That pestilence curtailed Silk Road trade and accelerated the decline of Mongol influence.
The Turkic Ottomans were thus able to reclaim Mesopotamia in the 1300s, while also conquering the Balkans, Arabia, and most of North Africa. After defeating the Byzantine army, Sultan Osman I transformed the land from a Greek-speaking Christian region to a Turkish-speaking Muslim one, while preserving autonomy for Christian and Jewish communities. But a major rival quickly emerged. Claiming descent from Genghis Khan, Amir Timur (Tamerlane) led his armies to restore a vast Persianized Mongol Muslim dynasty covering Central Asia and northwest India. Upon Tamerlane’s death in 1405, the Ottomans wrested control of eastern Anatolia back from the Timurids. The spread of field artillery such as cannon and muskets spurred an arms race among Asian empires.
Timur’s legacy migrated southward into India. Beginning in the early fifteenth century, Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, laid the foundations of a multigenerational succession of Mughal (the Persian translation of Mongol) rulers whose domain stretched from the Fergana valley across most of the Indian subcontinent. Given their partial Turkic heritage, the Mughals soon began exchanging diplomatic missions with the Ottoman sultans. Initially, the Mughals were less tolerant than their Ottoman brethren, destroying India’s Hindu shrines and persecuting non-Muslims. Yet as Babur’s son Humayan and grandson Akbar expanded the empire both north and south, they increased trade with Europeans, modernized the court’s bureaucracy, and instituted a radical degree of religious tolerance. Akbar’s son Jahangir put down numerous revolts to consolidate the empire in the early seventeenth century, and his grandson Emperor Shah Jahan elevated Mughal opulence with Islamic monuments such as the Taj Mahal.
During India’s Mughal era, the Shi’a Muslim Safavids of Isfahan, whose ancestry included Turkic, Kurdish, and Azeri heritage, rose above numerous competing dynasties to become the first indigenous power to unify the Persian realm since the Sassanids, taking control of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and western Turkestan. The Safavids enabled the north–south trade routes connecting Europe to India. An estimated 20,000 Indian traders lived and worked across the Safavid Empire, with Mughal merchants establishing dozens of caravanserai in major trading hubs such as Shemakha and Baku, where they collected Russian furs, copper, and caviar and brought them back to India via Afghanistan or by ship from Bandar-e-Abbas to Surat.
During the Timurid and Mughal periods in Central and South Asia, internal rebellions in China loosened Mongol control, and by 1368, the Ming Dynasty controlled the Yangtze River valley and claimed its place as the successor to the great Tang. In contrast to Song Dynasty capitalism and Mongol openness, however, the Ming emperor Hongwu curtailed private foreign trade and instituted a highly statist trade regime to project power over neighbors such as Tibet and Korea, which became a Ming vassal state and underwent a cultural sinicization. By contrast, Japan kept its distance from China, with neither the imperial military Kamakura Shogunate, which had fended off numerous Mongol naval incursions, nor its successor, the Ashikaga, submitting to the emperor Hongwu. Only in the fifteenth century did they reestablish ties through a series of diplomatic and trade missions.
Hungwu’s fourth son, Yongle (Zhu Di), continued to expand the Ming Empire by protecting the Uighurs from the Timurids, annexing Annam (as the Tang had done) and cultivating relations with the Karmapa of Tibet. Upon Timur’s death, Yongle reestablished peaceful ties with Persia. Ming China was an export juggernaut, trading from its Yellow River port of Guangdong and the Yangtze River ports of Shanghai and Nanjing, perhaps the largest city in the world at the time with half a million residents. To demonstrate China’s incredible wealth, Yongle ordered the Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He to undertake grand expeditions that established relations with Luzon and Sulu (today’s Philippines), Brunei, and Sumatra, and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. At home, Yongle reconstructed the Grand Canal, built the Forbidden City (modern-day Bejing), instituted a rigorous Confucian examination system, and commissioned a comprehensive encyclopedia of Chinese culture and history. Even though the Ming under Yongle set the global standard for weaponry and shipbuilding, by the 1420s the emperor became preoccupied with defending the northern frontier against the Mongols and Turkic Tatars, turning China inward to focus on agriculture and limiting foreigners’ access to southern ports.
One major consequence of the Ming shift inward was that large numbers of Chinese migrated to Southeast Asian kingdoms, intermarrying with local women and assimilating into the societies of the Banten Sultanate (Java), Manila, Ayutthaya in Siam, Hoi An (in Vietnam), and Phnom Penh (Khmer). In Siam, Chinese migrants often changed their last names to be considered more local, while King Rama I of Siam was of partial Chinese descent. As a result, from the Malay Peninsula through the Mekong valley and across the waters to Luzon, Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century became a tapestry of blended ethnicities. It was also a complex religious patchwork, with Islam continuing to spread from Sumatra east to Java and north to Malacca, where King Paramesvara converted to Islam in 1414 and changed his name to Iskander Shah. Although Christianity had already established a strong presence in the southern Indian kingdom of Kerala, the arrival of missionaries and explorers from Portugal and Spain greatly accelerated its advance.
Asia and the Western Empires
The Ottomans completed their triumph over Christian Byzantium with the sacking of Constantinople in 1453, at which time most European nations descended into civil war. Seeking more secure routes to the wealthy markets of Asia, Europe’s maritime centers plied multiple long-distance routes in the hope of reaching the Moluku Islands to buy nutmeg and cloves. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus ventured across the Atlantic Ocean, reaching not the Asia he expected but the Caribbean islands. Several years later, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded the cape of Africa to establish trade ties and entrepôts in Calicut and Gujarat. And
in 1521, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, aided by the skills of his Malaccan interpreter, Enrique, rounded the tip of South America and leveraged the Pacific Ocean trade winds to make landfall at uninhabited islands near the Kingdom of Cebu. Collectively, these maritime passageways weakened the Turkic-Arab-Persian Silk Roads across Eurasia. By the 1580s, the Portuguese confronted and defeated the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean, entrenching Europe’s positions from Mombasa to Gwadar, with Portuguese bridgeheads in Goa and as far away as Macao.
With the Ming having withdrawn their Indian Ocean fleets, Europeans took advantage of the latest technologies in shipbuilding and weaponry to advance trade among Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. As they collaborated with the robust trading network of the southern Japanese Ryukyu Kingdom, they also established durable beachheads of political and religious control. As the Iberians spread across the region (soon followed by the Dutch and British), their merchants drove Indo-Muslim traders from their stronghold of Malacca, began widespread conversions to Christianity, and leased Macau from China in 1557. In 1571, the Spanish colonized Manila, making it the hub of the transpacific trade in silver brought on galleon ships from Acapulco and used to purchase Ming goods sent onward to Europe.4 The enormous Ming appetite for silver became a major vulnerability as both Spain and Japan reduced silver exports to China, causing huge monetary and trade imbalances. With China weakened, the Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who reunified the country in 1590, invaded Korea and China, but Korean resistance and Ming resilience thwarted his efforts. Upon Toyotomi’s death, the Tokugawa Shogunate rose to power but, paranoid about the proselytizing Europeans, chose an isolationist foreign policy from 1640 onward.
By 1644, the Ming had declined and were replaced by the Manchu Qing Dynasty, who put an end to the nomad-warrior Seljuks and Mongols (to whom they were related culturally) and reorganized the disparate Buddhist nomads and steppe Muslims of Dzungaria into the province of Xinjiang. Under Emperor Hong Taiji, the Qing invaded Korea twice, with Chinese princes marrying Korean princesses. The Qing Dynasty’s successive Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors ruled over continuous prosperity and security, making China the wealthiest empire of the eighteenth-century world.
Casting off the Mongol yoke also enabled the Grand Duchy of Muscovy to pursue a more expansionist course. Through the sixteenth century, the Russian tsardom grew by approximately 14,000 square miles per year as it swept eastward across the tundra and plains, brushing aside the Khanate of Sibir to cement its claims west of the Irtysh River, after which it crossed the Lena River and reached the Pacific Ocean. Pushing south, Russian merchants and armies reached the Amur River, where they first clashed with the Qing but then signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, exchanging their claims to the Amur valley for all territory east of Lake Baikal and trade routes to Beijing. Stability on Russia’s eastern and southern flanks set the stage for the four-decade rule from 1682 to 1721 of Tsar Peter I, who expanded into Scandinavia and fought a series of wars with the Ottomans for control of the Black Sea. Over the following century, Russia also wrested control of the entire Caucasus region from Persia’s Qajar Dynasty.
The Qing, meanwhile, could not sustain their grandeur, with rapid population growth, fiscal pressures, and corruption bringing the dynasty to the brink of disintegration. As Asia’s large imperial and bureaucratic powers resisted change, smaller European nations outmaneuvered them to achieve global dominion. Through the late 1600s and 1700s, the Dutch displaced the Portuguese from Hormuz to Malacca, and in 1800 they nationalized their corporate colonies across Batavia, Java, Sumatra, and Moluku, including seizing the Qing Dynasty’s Lanfang tributary in Kalimantan. European expansion in Southeast Asian economies relied on long-standing Chinese and Indian diaspora networks of credit that connected European businesses to local Asian markets. As the 1800s progressed, the French colonized Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, fusing them into a French Indochina union. Only by shrewdly balancing the interests of Western powers did King Rama of Siam and his successors manage to maintain the kingdom’s independence. Still, over the nineteenth century European powers transitioned from colonial intruders to global empires.
The durability of European conquest was enabled by a new set of industrial technologies pioneered in Great Britain, including steam power for ships, locomotives, and factories. As England accumulated large stockpiles of finished goods such as cotton-based textiles, it looked to Africa and Asia as markets to exploit. After its initial forays and skirmishes with Mughal princes on India’s western coast, the British East India Company established a stronghold at the mouth of the Ganges River in Calcutta in Bengal, from which it built out its revenue collection and governance functions across ever greater swaths of India. In 1784, the British Crown took over control of the company, beginning a period of direct rule of the subcontinent from Punjab through Southeast Asia, including Burma, Malaya, and the port of Singapore. During this nineteenth-century “Raj” period of rule, India was the hub for governing all territories east of the Suez Canal, meaning all of British olonial Asia. In India itself, the British built a national railway network and established institutions such as universities and a modern administrative bureaucracy. At the same time, they enslaved millions of Indians, with tens of millions more dying in famines, undercut domestic industries, and fomented divides between Hindus and Muslims.
Colonialism also stirred Asia’s ethnic pot. The British took Indians to Burma to work as schoolteachers and civil engineers, and Tamils populated Malaya to work on rubber plantations. Tens of thousands of Indians were moved to East Africa as well to build the Uganda railway. Meanwhile, an estimated 20 million Chinese living in or around British coastal concessions such as Canton, Fujian, and Hong Kong shifted to Southeast Asia, where many married locals and deepened Southeast Asia’s multiethnic patchwork.
The British Empire also had grand designs for Central Asia. With India and the kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan firmly under control, England sought a direct trade route to the Emirate of Bukhara. It also hoped to use the Ottomans (with whom England had allied to push back tsarist Russia in the 1850s Crimean War) and the Persians as buffers to prevent Russia from accessing the Indian Ocean. As it pushed northward from Punjab into Afghanistan, it skirmished with the Sikhs and pushed the Qajars out of Herat. A “Great Game” of maneuvers pitting Anglo and Russian proxies unfolded from Turkestan to Tibet, resulting in an 1893 agreement between the two powers to keep Afghanistan as a buffer state. But to the north, Russia rapidly expanded its railway lines eastward, easily taking the khanates of Khiva, Khokand, and Bukhara and the city of Tashkent. After clashes with the Qing Dynasty over the Illi River region at the border of Xinjiang, it also cemented its control over Turkestan.
British expansionism compounded the Qing Dynasty’s difficulties. Seeking to grow its trade surpluses, the British forced the Qing to absorb ever greater volumes of opium from India, leading to widespread addiction. In 1838, the British responded to the destruction of 20,000 cases of opium with military force, sailing up the Pearl River delta with gunboats and bombarding Chinese defenses, repeating the intrusions in the 1850s. These humiliations were exacerbated by European imperialists seizing Chinese ports as their own dominions in Shanghai, Tianjin, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Hong Kong. China was also plagued by civil wars such as the Taiping Rebellion. In the late nineteenth century, the reformist Guangxu emperor attempted to establish a constitutional monarchy, but a coup d’état led by the conservative dowager empress Cixi thwarted him. The Yihetuan militia also launched a violent uprising (the “Boxer Rebellion”) to expel foreign intruders, but an alliance of Western powers, including England, France, Germany, and the United States, along with their Qing sympathizers, put it down. The failed rebellion further burdened the Qing with indemnity payments and reparations.
The arrival of Western powers brought very different results in Japan. Americans sailed into Edo Bay in 1868, opening the Tokugawa Shogunate to modernizing reforms that restored the Meiji empe
ror to the throne. The Meiji renamed Edo to Tokyo, centralized governance, built a national railway, and undertook major economic initiatives around industries such as shipping. As Japan became the leading East Asian power, it sought to emulate the West while also competing with it to dominate regional trade. It asserted itself militarily, defeating China in 1895 to take control of Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, and the Ryukyu Islands. The United States’ efforts to dislodge Europe from the Western Hemisphere also had reverberations in Asia: In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War over the liberation of Cuba, the United States took possession of the Philippines as well as Spanish islands in the Pacific including Palau, Guam, and the Marianas.
Russia also continued to assert itself in the Far East, forcing Japan to return Manchuria to China so that Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway could be extended to reach the naval base at Port Arthur (Dalian). By 1905, Japan secured a major victory over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima, winning back Manchuria, gaining the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and forcing Russia to recognize Korea as part of the Japanese sphere of influence. The Japanese further annexed Korea in 1910, sending Korea’s government into exile in Shanghai and then Chongqing. In 1911, Chinese revolutionary nationalists overthrew the Qing, ending China’s last great imperial dynasty. Sun Yat-sen was elected the first president of the new republic, whose seat was in Guangzhou, but warlordism continued to increase across the country.
Japan’s victory over Russia galvanized Asians to shed their fears of foreign aggressors and colonialists. The Ottomans, for example, were inspired by Japan’s defeat of their northern nemesis Russia as well as its ability to modernize without Westernizing. With his mantra “Asia is One,” the Japanese philosopher Okakura Tenshin became a leading voice of Pan-Asianism through his writings on the historical linkages not only among East Asians but also between Chinese and Muslims. Okukura’s Indian counterpart, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, traveled from Japan and Korea to Persia, advocating a return to Asian ideals and traditions. Tagore’s host in China was the renowned intellectual Liang Qichao, who lamented how European colonialism had severed Asia’s historical interconnectivity and turned Asians against one another. The civil rights lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi stepped up his campaigns of nonviolent disobedience against British rule in India throughout the 1920s, as did Aung San in Burma.
