So, pictured here is Kublai Khan, the Khan of Khans in the Mongolian Empire. An empire which, at its peak, became the largest one the earth had ever known.
Kublai was the first Mongol emperor to unite China under the Than dynasty, and grandson of the Great Chinggiss (Genghis) Khan.
If Marco Polo's tales of his great travels are true, Marco rose to a level of importance in the royal court of Kublai, and upon his return to Venice told stories of the silk road, persia, the steppe, China, and recounted stories of the vast armies of the Khan, (the most powerful man on earth at the time) sweeping through southern China and destroying the Song Dynasty.
There was much infighting between the traditional nomad Khanates and the great house of Kublai, and many historians believe that kublai's influence was mostly limited to inner Mongolia, and north/south china.
His empire extended from Mongolia to korea, the sea of Japan to the baltic, and included many Slavic, (poland, east germany, rus, hungary, the crimeab khanate, etc) Persian lands, Arab lands, the Caucasus mountains, and southeast Asia and Burma, though India remained unconquered.
I feel there is little discussion in the west of the brief period of Asiatic (Chinese, Mongol, Persian-Arab Islamic) supremacy here in the west.
Any one have some light that they can shed upon the periods often known as the Islamic Golden Age, The Mongol empire, and the age of Chinese sea faring exploration?
Why were these cultures only so briefly dominant? Why did they fall into dissarray and relative poverty only to be conquered later by European colonizers?
I know the Arabs and Persians mostly just translated and built upon older scientific books and manuscripts from rome, greece, egypt, etc, but why was that not enough? What stopped the far east's supremacy?
I hope some lurkers with useful knowledge find this thread and are open to enlightening me with more information.
>>1416954
He United the Chinese under the Yuan Dynasty, not "Than". Damn autocorrect
The empire was too damn big.
>>1416970
I understand this and the huge logistics problems the Mongols faced, including their being forced to become religiously tolerant of all faiths and using a meritocracy to promote foreigners from conquered lands to administrative positions, which in theory is not bad in and of itself, yet it opened the door to treachery and conspiracy from many administrators that despised the slaughter the Mongol armies wrought upon their homes.
However, even if the Mongol empire collapsing dealt a large blow to eastern supremacy, the Chinese still had amazing technology and a sea-faring fleet of ships ripe for trade, exploration, war, and colonization. What stopped then from conquering the world as opposed to the British, Spanish, or Dutch many centuries later?
Was it Chinese isolationist policy?
I'm interested but I know nothing about this topic. Bibliography recommendation?
>>1416954
I don't know what you're on about. Why are you treating the Chinese, Mongols, and Muslims as one thing? What supremacy are you talking about? Are you asking us to explain why every individual civilization in Asia didn't conquer the world or something?
>>1417356
No. During the height of the Mongol empire, the borders stretched from the sea of Japan in the east to the baltic in the west. Eastern Europe, Persia, parts of the Arabian peninsula, the Caucasus mountains, Siberia, burma, Korea, south east asia, the central Asian steppe, and a UNITED CHINA were within the dominion of the Mongol empire around the 13th Century. My mention of this is merely an illustration of the fact that east asia was the most powerful center of population in the world at the time.
With this illustration I provide the framework for my query. With most of the known world conquered and a near end less supply of the world's greatest scholars, engineers, healers, explorers, merchants, soldiers, horses, and ships, why did the Asiatic peoples not begin to colonize the world as the Europeans would three centuries later?
The Mongols (who by Kublai's time had heavily adopted Chinese culture) owned the silk road and were the masters of their universe. Eventually the great Mongol empire dissolved into several smaller autonomous Khanates, but the Chinese Ming dynasty still possessed the technology, manpower, and a fleet of sea faring ships of great stature.
I want to know why they didn't use these readily available assets to continue exploration, trade, and colonization. I want to know why they chose the policy of strict isolationism that lead to their fall from grace; from the most powerful culture on earth to a much poorer land that would become an easily taken jewel to be added to European crowns by white invaders with guns and steel.
>>1417569
You keep talking about 'Asiatic people' as if they were a single thing. Much of Asia was united under the Mongol Empire, for less than a century, before it fell apart. It had fallen apart even before Kublai had conquered China. And for the brief time in which that unity existed, it was basically just limited to being ruled by the same people, rather than merging into a single civilization. The Mongols in Iran didn't have access to all the resources of China, or vice versa. And once that empire collapsed, things basically went back to the way they were before.
Both before and after the Mongols, there wasn't some kind of 'Asian' dominance. There was no no 'Asian' civilization in the first place, instead there were several civilizations flourishing throughout Eurasia; an Islamic one, an East Asian one, an Indian/Southeast Asian one, a Western one and an Orthodox one. None of these were necessarily 'dominant', though Islam was the most widespread. Every one of these civilizations produced great scholars, inventions, innovations and so on. They continued to develop at a steady pace (except for the Indian and Orthodox civilizations which fell apart after the 13th century), except for the West which due to a multitude of factors began to develop at a faster pace from the 15th century onward, eventually leading to their world-dominance.
Basically, it wasn't a case of Asia stagnating while Europe shot ahead. Rather it was India and Orthodoxy stagnating/declining, while Islam and East Asia developed steadily and the West developed even faster.
The reasons for the West's sudden development are complicated and I can't really explain it all, but they include the printing press combined with the Latin alphabe, geographical position and hostility with Islam which encouraged the exploration of the oceans, an expansionist Christian ideology and the highly 'compact' and interconnected nature of Western Europe.
Cavalry gave them an advantage on the steppes, they could then draw resources from across the steppes and focus them against fortifications or terrain unsuitable for cavalry.
By the end of the 13th century they had conquered China in a war lasting decades, but at the same time other sedentary peoples had adapted to their style of warfare and they could no longer make much progress far from the steppes, though they still dominated neighboring regions like Eastern Europe and Persia.
There was a resurgence under Timur in Persia and later Babur in India, possibly due to disruptions following the black death, little ice age and proliferation of early guns, though after the shift from cavalry to gunpowder only steppe peoples that had captured population centers like the Ottomans and Mughals would continue to have large influential empires.
>>1416954
>If Marco Polo's tales of his great travels are true
They're not
>>1417823
Yes, I'm well aware that the book bearing his name was ghost written by a romance author with much of it being lifted from other romances and other parts being outright untruths. What remains factual however, is that historians have confirmed that Marco polo knew things about China and other parts of the far east that he could not have learned without physically being there during the timeline his stories claim, nor could he have learned these precise details by just travelling to the near east or persia.
I never intended to give the impression that his account (of which there are many versions, translations, and copies that contain differing tales and content due to the lack of a printing press and each book being hand written) is factually true in any sense, merely that Marco did actually travel into khanbilaq (now beijing) and into southern China, as well as the steppe.
>>1417786
I don't speak of them as a whole. I speak of the fact that the vastness of the resources and intellectual capital that were brought to the disposal of Inner Mongolia and China through Mongol conquest gave the Chinese the capability to expand explorations, trade, conquest, and colonization a few centuries before the famed European age of expedition and colonialism. You are not understanding my point that regardless of the collapse of said Mongol empire into smaller, warring khanates, the Chinese dynasty still had the technology, man power, and resources to begin their own age of global expedition and colonialism before Europe.
My question is what stopped them? Why did the Ming dynasty burn their massive Armada of ships and turn to isolationism?
Did the emperor simply not want to make China into a global colonialist, mercantile When I spoke of 'Asiatic' supremacy I mispoke. I should have more clearly said Chinese supremacy thanks to the resources and knowledge they gained from the Mongol empire briefly being in control of nearly all 'Asiatic' peoples for some
>>1418094
So you're just talking about China then? Alright that makes more sense.
>I speak of the fact that the vastness of the resources and intellectual capital that were brought to the disposal of Inner Mongolia and China through Mongol conquest gave the Chinese the capability to expand explorations, trade, conquest, and colonization
Like I said, being under the same empire as other parts of Asia didn't give China access to all the resources of Asia. If anything, the Mongols stunted China's development by destroying so much of the population and the economy.
>the Chinese dynasty still had the technology, man power, and resources to begin their own age of global expedition and colonialism before Europe
That's true for the Chinese as well as just about any major civilization in Eurasia. But no other civilization really had any need to go about conquering the world. Most of the big empires were land-based and were focused on either maintaining what they had or expanding to neighboring regions. The Chinese had reason to expand into Central Asia, always threatening them with nomadic invasions, and they did just that, but they had no reason to attempt to cross the Pacific or colonise Indonesia. Similar is true of all the Eurasia's civilization; they were interested in local affairs, and if they were going to expand they'd expand into neighboring regions, not somewhere on the other side of the world. The Chinese with their treasure voyages were only looking for tribute, not attempting any kind of colonisation or conquest.
>>1418185
The only thing that really made the West (and specifically Iberia) different is that they were cut off from the Indian Ocean trade; Islamic, Indian and Chinese civilizations all had direct access to it (and where they didn't they were still connected to the Silk Road or Trans-Saharan trade), while the West only had access through Egyptian and Venetian middlemen who charged highly for things the spices that everyone in Europe wanted. The Portuguese saw that if they could cut out these middlemen by rounding Africa it would make them rich, which combined with the search for Prester John and Christian rivalry with Islam (cutting off the Mamluks/Ottomans trade was a strong ideological justification for their conquests in the Indian Ocean) was a huge motivation for the exploration of the Indian Ocean and the colonisation of it's main commercial centers. Ultimately the Portuguese failed in their endeavors within a century despite the initial success of their conquests, but they 'opened the floodgates' and were soon followed by every other Atlantic European nation. The Spanish colonised America searching for the same place the Portuguese were. Westerners were soon influential everywhere, and after the Industrial Revolution were able to militarily dominate the world.
Notice that what lead the West to colonise and conquer wasn't it's huge resources or technological superiority (initially), but the fact that the motivation to do so existed. That motivation to just didn't exist before; nobody before the 15th century Iberians, whether in Asia or Europe, had any actual need to round Africa or cross the Atlantic. It was only the economic and ideological pull of the Indian Ocean (which every civilization in the first and second millennium AD felt), combined with an inability to access that Ocean (which only the West had) that lead to the age of exploration and everything that followed on from it.
