Page 293 - Encyclopedia Of World History

empire 643

This illustration from a
1914 children’s magazine
is entitled Round the World
with the Union Jack and
supports the notion of empire
with the European explorer
sitting casually as he talks to
the African leader.

rise of new gunpowder empires in
Europe, Russia, China, India, and the
Near East which hemmed in their
nomadic neighbors and put an end
forever to their depredations on agri-
cultural communities.

Transoceanic
Empires
The mid-fifteenth century marked a
related shift in the history of empires
—the rise ofWestern European trans-
oceanic empires. The projection of
power by sea was not in itself a new
phenomenon. The Greeks and the
Phoenicians had used their seafaring
skills to plant their peoples and spread
their influence across the ancient
Mediterranean world, though neither
found a way to knit their scattered
mobilize to carry out still more conquests. Two of the communities together into a single powerful state. The
largest empires in Eurasian history were the work of pas- Vikings faced the same problem despite their remarkable
toralist peoples, the Mongols and the Arabs. Both burst success in raiding and settling coastal zones from the
out of their natal lands (the central Asian steppes and the North Sea to the Mediterranean.The Persian Gulf, Indian
Arabian desert), crushed the states that stood against Ocean, and the South China Sea all sustained their own
them, created new state structures on the foundations of series of seaborne traders and raiders, some of whom
the old, and used them in the task of empire building established polities of considerable size and sophistication.
with astonishing success. By sitting astride the Malaccan Strait, a chokepoint in the
After about 1450 CE, however, the pastoralist threat to Asian seaborne trade, Srivijaya became the dominant
agrarian societies began to disappear.As William McNeill power in Southeast Asia in the seventh century. Oman, a
and others have argued, the gunpowder weapons that small city-state on the southern Arabian coast, controlled
came on the scene around this time proved to be more trade along the east coast of Africa through much of the
than a match for nomadic warriors on horseback. They eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the estimation of
gave an irreversible strategic advantage to large sedentary some historians, both states became empires.
states, which had the fiscal, technical, and logistical The transoceanic empires established by Western Euro-
means to produce these weapons on a large scale and put pean states shared some features with the cases men-
them into use with devastating effect.The result was the tioned above, but they differed in crucial respects as well.