Military developments in Inner Asia lay at the basis of the rise of a number of Ancient and Early Modern Empires. This is the first scholarly work to embrace Inner Asian military history across a broad spatial and chronological spectrum, from the Turks and Uighurs to the Pechenegs, and from the Mongol invasion of Syria to the Manchu conquest of China. Based on previously unknown and until now underestimated sources, the contributors to this volume explore the context, development, and characteristic features of Inner Asian warfare, making original contributions to our understanding of Asian and world history.

Documents the rise and fall of a market economy in China from 1000–1500. Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, the Chinese economy has boomed and is poised to become the world’s largest market economy, a position traditional China held a millennium ago. William Guanglin Liu’s bold and fascinating book is the first to rely on quantitative methods to investigate the early market economy that existed in China, making use of rare market and population data produced by the Song dynasty in the eleventh century. A counterexample comes from the century around 1400 when the early Ming court deliberately turned agrarian society into a command economy system. This radical change not only shrank markets, but also caused a sharp decline in the living standards of common people. Liu’s landmark study of the rise and fall of a market economy highlights important issues for contemporary China at both the empirical and theoretical levels.

This book addresses the global history of technology, warfare and state formation from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Using a combination of top-down and bottom-up methodologies, it examines both interstate and intrastate conflicts with a focus on Eurasian technology and warfare. It shows how human agency and structural factors have intertwined, creating a complex web of technology and warfare. It also explores the interplay between technological and non-technological factors to chart the evolution of warfare from its origins to the present day, arguing that the interactions between civilian and military sectors have shaped the use of technology in warfare. Given its scope and depth, it is a valuable resource for researchers in fields such as world history, history of science and technology, history of warfare and imperialism and international relations.

This book is a history of firearms across the world from the 1100s up to the 1700s, from the time of their invention in China to the time when European firearms had become clearly superior. It asks why it was the Europeans who perfected firearms when it was the Chinese who had invented them, but it answers this question by looking at how firearms were used throughout the world.

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

A substantial amount of work has been carried out to explore the military systems of Western Europe during the early modern era, but the military trajectories of the Asian states have received relatively little attention. This study provides the first comparative study of the major Asian empires' military systems and explores the extent of the impact of West European military transition on the extra-European world. Kaushik Roy conducts a comparative analysis of the armies and navies of the large agrarian bureaucratic empires of Asia, focusing on the question of how far the Asian polities were able to integrate gunpowder weapons in their military systems. Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400-1750 offers important insights into the common patterns in war making across the region, and the impact of firearms and artillery.

This volume brings together a set of key articles, along with a new introduction to contextualize them, on the role of Turkish peoples in the Western Asiatic world up to the 11th century. Such topics as the geographical and environmental original milieux of these peoples in the forest zone and steppelands of Inner Asia, the formation and breakup of tribal confederations within the steppes, and the evolution of tribal structures, are examined as the background for the appearance of Turks within the Islamic caliphate from the 9th century onwards. These came first as military slaves, then as movements of peoples, such as the tribal migrations of the Oghuz, leading to the establishment of the Seljuq sultanate, whilst from within Islamic society, individual Turkish commanders were able at the same time to build up their own military empires such as that of the Ghaznavids. In this way was put in place a Turkish dominance of the northern tier of the Middle East, with attendant changes in demography and land utilisation, which was to last for centuries.

Placing eighteenth-century warfare in a truly global context, Jeremy Black challenges conventional accounts and offers a reappraisal of debates in Western and Asian history. This concise, up-to-date survey assumes little prior knowledge and provides cutting-edge historical insights into a crucial period of world history.

Asia as we know it today is the product of a wide range of polity expansions over time. Recognising the territorial expansions of Asian polities large and small through the last several millennia helps rectify the fallacy, long-held and deeply entrenched, that Asian polities have been interested only in the control of populations, not in expanding their command of territory. In countering this misapprehension, this book suggests that Asian polities have indeed been concerned with territorial control and expansion over time, whether for political or strategic advantage, trade purposes, defence needs, agricultural expansion or increased income through taxation. The book explores the historical experiences of a set of polity expansions within Asia, specifically in East and Southeast Asia, and, by examining the motivations, mechanisms, processes, validations and limitations of these Asian territorial expansions, reveals the diverse avenues by which Asian polities have grown. The chapters draw on these historical examples to highlight the connections between Asian polity expansion and centralised political structures, and this aids in a broader and more comprehensive understanding of Asian political practice, both past and present. Through these chapter studies and the integrative introduction, the book interrogates key concepts such as imperialism and colonialism, and the applicability and relevance of such terminology in Asian contexts, both historical and contemporary. Comparisons and contrasts with European historical expansions are also suggested. This book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Asian history, as well as by those with an interest in Asian interactions, international relations, polity expansion, Asia--Europe historical comparisons and globalisation.

Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History provides a wide-ranging examination of war in human history, from the beginning of the species until the current rise of the so-called Islamic State. Although it covers many societies throughout time, the book does not attempt to tell all stories from all places, nor does it try to narrate "important" conflicts. Instead, author Wayne E. Lee describes the emergence of military innovations and systems, examining how they were created and then how they moved or affected other societies. These innovations are central to most historical narratives, including the development of social complexity, the rise of the state, the role of the steppe horseman, the spread of gunpowder, the rise of the west, the bureaucratization of military institutions, the industrial revolution and the rise of firepower, strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, and the creation of "people's war."