Review 16: After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 by John Darwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though without a doubt a great achievement (six-hundred years of global history in as many pages), Darwin's work feels often more rambling than history writing. There is no overarching theme, no theory upon which the conclusions are founded. This makes for a read which is easy to read in a sense (if one does not agree with one conclusion, one might more readily agree with another), it can also be hard to follow as you are thrown from one end of the world to another by the flip of a page. As such, it is only after page 250 or so, that some consistency comes into the story. By focusing more on the European-style imperialism and how some areas resisted and others more easily succumbed to the system, how it seemed an inevitability that the world entire would someday be part of the system, Darwin has a sense of a foundation on which to pay the rest of the book. This improvement in the second half is why I gave it three instead of two stars. In conclusion, it is a great birds-eye view of the world, what made empires work, how they differed from one another and eventually, how they will not last. By conveniently not going into either world wars, Darwin retains a better focus, again in the latter half of the book. In the end, I would not recommend it for those who are looking for a stronger methodological work into the essence of what makes an empire, but rather as an overview work.