The World Before: A Planet of Separate Neighborhoods

On a winter morning in the year 1400, somewhere in the plains of what is now Mongolia, a lone traveler might have stood at the top of a gentle hill and surveyed the world as it then existed. What that traveler would have seen would have been extraordinary: a vast tapestry of human civilization stretching across the face of the Earth, yet strangely fragmented, like a mosaic whose pieces had never been placed together. From this imaginary vantage point, the traveler could have looked east toward the Pacific coast of China, where the great Ming dynasty was beginning its long reign, or west toward the Islamic cities of Persia and Arabia, with their magnificent mosques and bustling bazaars. To the south lay the kingdoms of Africa, with their gold and their mysteries, while across the great ocean to the west—though the traveler would have had no way of knowing this—existed an entirely different world of empires built on mountain peaks and in jungle valleys, empires that would never hear of Genghis Khan or Marco Polo or the Prophet Muhammad.

This was a world of separate neighborhoods, each one remarkable in its own right, yet each one largely ignorant of the others' existence. The Maya had completed their great pyramids and watched their cities fall to ruin a thousand years before Columbus was born. The Chinese had invented gunpowder, the compass, and paper centuries before these technologies reached Europe. The Islamic scholars had preserved and advanced the knowledge of the ancient Greeks while Europe languished in relative ignorance. And yet, for all their achievements, the peoples of these different regions might have traveled for years without meeting someone from a truly different civilization, someone who worshipped different gods, spoke a different tongue, and looked upon the world with entirely different eyes.

Understanding this world of separate neighborhoods is essential to understanding what happened next—why sailors and ships and dreams would soon begin to tear down the walls between these neighborhoods and create, for the first time in human history, a truly global world. The Age of Exploration that began in the fifteenth century was not simply a matter of adventurous captains sailing into unknown waters. It was the culmination of forces that had been building for centuries in different parts of the world, forces that would finally converge in a great surge of exploration, conquest, and exchange that would transform every civilization on Earth. To appreciate the magnitude of this transformation, we must first understand what the world looked like before it changed, and why the people of that world had every reason to believe that their own neighborhood was, in fact, the center of everything.

Let us begin our journey in the east, in the land that many observers of the fourteenth century would have identified as the most powerful and prosperous on Earth: China under the Ming dynasty.

The Ming dynasty had come to power in 1368, after years of chaos and rebellion that had shattered the rule of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century had been devastating—millions had died, entire cities had been razed, and the traditional Chinese way of life had been disrupted by the demands of alien rulers. But the Mongol period had also opened China to the wider world in unprecedented ways. Chinese products flowed westward along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean. Chinese sailors and merchants traveled to Southeast Asia, India, and even East Africa. And perhaps most remarkably, under the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, Chinese sailors had participated in the great voyages of exploration led by Marco Polo's famous friend.

When the Ming dynasty took power, it inherited this legacy of openness and ambition. The new emperors were determined to restore Chinese prestige and power on the world stage, and they pursued this goal with characteristic Chinese vigor and organization. In 1405, just five years into our story, the Yongle Emperor, the third Ming ruler, would launch the first of what would become the greatest series of maritime expeditions the world had ever seen. His admiral, a Muslim eunuch named Zheng He, would command fleets of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men, sailing across the Indian Ocean to India, Arabia, and East Africa. These treasure fleets would return with exotic animals, precious gems, and ambassadors from distant kingdoms, all bearing witness to Chinese power and wealth.

And yet, just as the Chinese were reaching the height of their maritime achievement, forces were already at work that would lead them to abandon the seas almost entirely. The Yongle Emperor died in 1424, and his successors were far less interested in foreign adventures. Confucian scholars, who dominated the imperial bureaucracy, viewed the voyages as wasteful and unnecessary. The cost of maintaining the treasure fleets was enormous, and the benefits seemed unclear. What did China need from foreign lands when it had everything it needed at home? By 1449, China had turned away from the sea, burning the great ships and abandoning the voyages. China would not seriously return to oceanic exploration for nearly five hundred years, until the twentieth century.

This retreat from the seas would prove to be one of history's great turning points, but in the year 1400, no one could have predicted it. The China that the Ming dynasty was building was genuinely magnificent. Beijing, which the Yongle Emperor had made his capital, was being transformed into the most impressive city in the world. The Forbidden City, the great imperial palace complex, was rising from the ground, its halls and gates and walls a perfect expression of Chinese power and civilization. The Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in the world, stretched for over a thousand miles, linking the rice-growing south with the political center in the north. Paper money was in widespread use, facilitating commerce and trade. Printing had been common for centuries, spreading knowledge and literature throughout Chinese society. And above it all presided the emperor, the Son of Heaven, whose authority was believed to derive from the cosmic order itself.

Daily life in Ming China was regulated by traditions that stretched back thousands of years. The family was the fundamental unit of society, organized around ancestor worship and strict hierarchies of age and gender. Education was highly valued, and the competitive examinations that tested candidates for positions in the imperial bureaucracy were among the most meritocratic institutions in the premodern world. Art and literature flourished, with scholars painting landscapes in ink and composing poetry about the beauties of nature and the passing of time. Tea drinking had become an elaborate art form, with its own rituals and aesthetics. And commerce was thriving, with markets full of silk, porcelain, and all manner of goods.

Yet for all this sophistication, the Chinese of 1400 had little reason to venture far beyond their own world. They were, after all, at the center of it—or so they believed. The emperor ruled all under heaven, and all other rulers were merely lesser kings who acknowledged his superiority. The civilized world ended at the shores of the Middle Kingdom, and beyond lay only barbarians: the nomads of the steppes to the north and west, the jungle peoples of Southeast Asia, and the various "barbarian" nations whose tribute missions came to Beijing bearing exotic gifts. The Chinese had no concept of equal civilizations beyond their borders, no framework for understanding that there might be other worlds as complex and sophisticated as their own. This was not mere arrogance, though arrogance certainly played a part. It was the natural consequence of a civilization that had, for thousands of years, seen itself as the model for all human achievement.

The same sense of self-sufficiency and civilizational c