Chapter Thirteen: Political Transformations

"Ways of the World"

Chapter Thirteen: Political Transformations

Empires and Encounters

1450-1750

While this chapter of Robert Strayer's global history textbook covers great topics such as The Great Dying, the Colombian Exchange, the Aztecs and Incas, and the Russian Empire, I could not help but to become fixated on one section in particular. I have to first admit that even throughout my first world history course in high school I was always more curios and had an overall fascination with the Asian Empires. A feasible question one might ask would simply be 'why?" And of course, sarcastically, I would respond with a "why not?"
I find it more than mildly interesting to see history of this civilization essentially be told fore-knowingly through text. It is not at all hard to argue that during this time frame, and even years following after, the Asian Empires where among the most advanced and abundantly resourced civilizations on the planet (although it can as easily be counter argued that they did not know what to do with all of that at once leading to their ultimate demise). Between the Qing Dynasty Empire, the Mughal Empire, Tibet, and Xinijang there is more than enough history, culture, and knowledge to go around. I think it is more than fulfilling to take a look back on the Empires and see their successful peak as an empire transform into an abrupt but inevitable downward spiral. How do some of the most populated, educated, and materially rich civilizations as Strayer puts it "[turn the] Silk Road trading network, welcoming all of the major world religions, and generating an enduring encounter between the nomads of the steppes and the farmers of settled agricultural regions...[into] the backward and impoverished region known to nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers" (pg 641). This chapter makes me wonder, in a more generalized perspective, about the characteristics these fallen empires had that countries today posses and if those countries of such wealth, power, and resources will take a similar downward spiral as these once flourishing empires.