1The Rise of the Western World In the
Citations (1)
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers whole source · open book
1The Rise of the Western World In the year 1500, the date chosen by numerous scholars to mark the divide between modern and premodern times,1 it was by no means obvious to the inhabitants of Europe that their continent was poised to dominate much of the rest of the earth. The knowledge which contemporaries possessed about the great civilizations of the Orient was fragmentary and all too often erroneous, based as it was upon travelers’ tales which had lost nothing in their retelling. Nevertheless, the widely held image of extensive eastern empires possessing fabulous wealth and vast armies was a reasonably accurate one, and on first acquaintance those societies must have seemed far more favorably endowed than the peoples and states of western Europe.
chapter: Chapter 1 . The Rise of the Western World