Introduction

Summary

HUMAN HISTORY WAS CONTINENTAL HISTORY

To my mind, World History is an emergent subject made possible by the recent passing of the unipolar political world of colonial times and by the even more recent closing of the bipolarizing Cold War. The ideas found in this book should be taken as a cogent contribution towards the development of global perspectives that are at once inclusive of and sympathetic to the endless struggles of civilizations, against themselves and against each other.

Allow me here to simplify the content of this book, whose basic aim is to recognize and acknowledge a forgotten key actor in world history. With the traditional fetish for dividing the world into East and West — where for the West, the East started at its very doorstep; and for the East, the West was a much vaguer concept — the most important factor connecting these was often ignored, or was treated as a supplementary story. This is Central Asia.

The human dynamics exploding out of the Eurasian geographic core throughout the centuries did indeed configure the nature of the many civilizations settled around its edges. This is obvious to anyone knowledgeable about Chinese history, where the importance of Central Asia was testified to by the occasional successful conquest of imperial lands by nomadic groupings. For India, endless streams of conquerors would flow in from the north through the narrow passes of Afghanistan. It is undeniable that the history of Western civilization is strongly coloured by struggles against Eastern invaders, be they Persian troops, Arab horsemen, Turkish armies, or the hordes of the Huns and the Mongols.

The imperative for civilizations at the edges of the Euroasian landmass to resist military threats from within the depths of the continent has left dramatic legacies for modern man to observe. On physical landscapes, the elements, given enough time, clearly distinguish major terrestrial fault lines from minor ones. And so, rift valleys, volcanic cracks, grand canyons and growing mountain ranges reveal to us the persistent pressures that the Earth has to suffer. Human history does the same, conjuring over time political and cultural fault lines that express the tensions between peoples and reiterate the obstinacy of these conditions.