Il grande impero costruito da Tamerlano nella seconda metà del Trecento continua ad affascinare gli europei di oggi, così come accadeva con i suoi contemporanei.
La storica Maya Jasanoff recensisce il libro di John Darwin After Tamerlane in cui l’autore persegue un ambizioso obiettivo: delineare una storia globale dell’imperialismo da Tamerlano fino ad oggi.
Il risultato è uno spostamento dell’attenzione dall’Europa, quale centro dei destini del mondo, all’Asia centrale come perno strategico dell’equilibrio internazionale. Darwin giunge così a postulare un ridimensionamento dell’importanza dell’imperialismo europeo.
Maya Jasanoff evidenzia i punti di forza, ma anche le debolezze di un simile approccio.
In the autumn of 1399, Tamerlane embarked on what would be his last campaign. Just a few months earlier he had returned to Samarkand flush with spoils from his recent sack of Delhi. Now - while the elephants he had brought from India were put to work hauling stone for a spectacular new mosque - he marched southwest to fight the Ottoman sultan. He laid waste to the Near East in the gruesome style for which he would become notorious: in Baghdad, his soldiers stacked up the heads of 90,000 victims in 120 towers around the city. But this savage leader could also make peaceful impressions. While Tamerlane besieged Damascus, the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, who was inside the city, asked to be lowered over the walls so that he could speak with the world-conquerer. The philosopher enjoyed numerous conversations with this “greatest and mightiest of kings”, whom he found knowledgeable, curious and “addicted to debate and argument”. Tamerlane was the last individual to command the “world island”, a land-based empire extending from the central Asian steppes to India, the Middle East and the borders of Russia. He was not the last to try. In the centuries that followed, European states built empires more wide-ranging than Tamerlane could have imagined, energised by capitalism, new technologies and ideologies. The intercontinental networks they established laid the foundations for today’s “globalised” world.
Or did they? It may seem natural to trace the origins of current globalisation back to the history of European imperialism. The trouble is that this is not very accurate. In After Tamerlane, the Oxford historian John Darwin proposes a different version of how the world took on its present contours. Chronicling the history of empires since Tamerlane’s death, Darwin argues that the course of world history has been a fitful, complex process of competitive empire-building - driven as much by forces outside Europe, particularly Asia, as it has been by western ambitions. A work of massive erudition, After Tamerlane overturns smug Eurocentric teleologies to present a compelling new perspective on international history.
Though the subject of empire stirs partisan passions these days, Darwin exudes fairmindedness. On the one hand, he roundly rejects a view of world history “as the brutal saga of predatory imperialism, the West’s invasion of the hapless non-West”. On the other, he argues with equal force against “rise of the West”-style narratives that present history as a Europe-led march to “modernity”. After all, the qualities associated with modernity - industrialisation, rising individualism, nationalism, secularism - are “really a description of what was supposed to have happened in Europe”. Instead, he stresses, world history has always witnessed multiple versions of modernity, just as it has for centuries been shaped by rival empires.
The strongest parts of this book stem from Darwin’s decision to set Tamerlane’s Eurasia at the heart of his narrative, in place of Europe. Unusually, Russia, Iran, China and Japan are given as much attention as Britain or the United States. Darwin brilliantly delineates a “global pattern” of imperial “competition, collaboration and coexistence”, in which Middle Eastern and Asian empires remained important players. Indeed, seen on this transcontinental canvas, “the case could be made that the real story in Asia” since 1750 “was one of Asian persistence and not of Asian defeat”. The recent economic surge of China, in particular, points back to long-standing features such as its territorial unity - and points forward to the continuation of imperial contests, in which no single power is likely to maintain global dominance.
At first blush, Darwin’s recentering of world history evokes calls by postcolonial critics to “provincialise” Europe, diminishing its importance in relation to the rest of the world. But a deeper resonance lies with the work of a scholar of decidedly different stamp: the early 20th-century geographer and ardent imperialist Sir Halford Mackinder. In his pioneering work on geopolitics, Mackinder identified Eurasia as the “heartland” of global empire. “Who rules East Europe rules the Heartland”, he wrote in 1919. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World”. [...]
Darwin’s sweeping approach does raise a few difficulties. After Tamerlane tends to paper over the differences - and striking similarities - between imperial styles, cultures, and modes of rule. Curiously for a book about global empires, different concepts of imperialism get rather little attention. Nor do the various ways that empires have managed their intrinsically diverse subject populations; or the ways empires have physically presented or legitimated themselves - for instance by establishing splendid capitals, as Tamerlane did in Samarkand. [...]
After Tamerlane firmly prefers statistics on imperial trade, production and aggregate populations to the kinds of vivid personalities and incidents that animate recent narrative history. But in the end that is its great achievement. Big topics demand big treatments, yet few are brave or knowledgeable enough to hazard them. Darwin has provided an ambitious, monumental and convincing reminder that empires are the rule, not the exception, in world history. What their passage has meant - and will continue to mean - for the people who live within them remains for others to explore. But of their persistence, their variety and their global power, this book leaves no doubt.
John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, pp. 592, Allen Lane, £25. | |
