One sentiment you see arising a lot in the study of history is a marveling at the sheer contingency of historical affairs. And certainly, I find this sentiment more than sympathetic. Gazing back over the unfolding of past events with the benefit of hindsight, one is struck by the fragile arrangement of historical developments and events of sheer chance, with one minor chance occurrence making a whole other cascade of occurrences possible.
But then stacking these fragile sequences of occurrences on top of each other, and then juxtaposed next to each other, there arises a durability in their arrangement too. At larger scales and timeframes, you begin to see a cold, grinding determinacy that was there all along: the slow and steady march of a vast glacier following gravity, within which exists the multitude of contingent ice chips that calve off of it in unpredictable directions.
And to make use of another naturalistic metaphor, the world's oceans do not suddenly disperse nonsensically in every direction, occupying every possible space at once. They occupy what they can and flow where they can in accordance with gravity and how much naturally cohering water makes up their bodies, and they rise and disperse into vapor only where there is the heat to animate it in such a way, and the empty space for it to move to.
At this larger historic scale, you could see the successive waves of human migration radiating out from the steppes, crashing into the settled kingdoms both in the east and the west and transforming them at different points in time, with these staggered transformations advancing consequences unique to their regions, which nevertheless radiated outwards in turn, connecting with each other and affecting each other over time.
To the west, the movement of the Huns from the steppes in the east and then the cold from the north pushed the Germanic tribes west and down into the Roman Mediterranean kingdom, breaking that decaying settled empire in half under the pressure, with the Western half fragmenting into ever finer grain, with the increasingly exposed surface area of the finer fragmenting grain serving to accelerate the intermixing of the Germanic and Roman constituent elements, with that region violently and explosively transforming as successive waves of migration fed into that process.
Further to the east, you had that hard shell of Byzantium holding itself shut as the Arab Conquests exploded into the east side of the Mediterranean world, knocking apart and transforming the Persian empire and then large swathes of the African and southern Mediterranean sides of what was previously the unified Roman world.
As those worlds continued to transform, you had the Mongol empire later emerge out of the steppes to the east and to the north of China, eventually knocking apart large swathes of China, and then as it expanded it moved west into India, the Arab Middle East, and Russia, among other regions, transforming those regions in turn, and then seeding transformations much further out due to the Mongol proclivity for investing in trade.
It was the same basic antagonism of movement and inertia that led to the destruction and transformation of countless kingdoms from west to east over centuries, with the relentless engine of the steppe wilderness pushing countless nomadic tribes further and further west, those tribes eventually crashing into settled kingdoms as far out as the Roman Mediterranean world, these seemingly geographically remote and disconnected spheres transformed by the restless waves of nomadic peoples migrating over vast distances and acting on each other, pushing outwards.
This is a crude simplification, but mechanically it worked like this: deeper in the steppe regions, further away from settlements and favorable geographies and climates, there was a general harshness of geography and climate that bred particularly tough peoples, who had to survive and claw their way to more favorable conditions, coming into contact with other tribes and oftentimes warring with them, pushing people further and further out.
Though we should remember, it was not only the steppe doing the heavy lifting, but also the spectacular perturbations set in motion by people moving, seeking out more favorable conditions, and then settling, with that settling and territorialization becoming chronic and durable, and even eventually augmenting, becoming colossal obstructions to free movement, with the continually moving peoples then coming into conflict with them.
Once those fertile and favorable regions started to fill with people, and people started to stay put and settle and then look for new ways to extend the size and duration of their settlements, you had these expanding settled zones, or kingdoms, that the nomadic peoples came into contact with, which steadily transformed them as they did so, so that as their movement slowed as they themselves became more settled-like, they too would clash with the still-nomadic and more steppe-like peoples radiating out from the heart of the steppe itself.
The settled societies too would bleed out peoples into the steppes: those who would fail to be absorbed into their societies and who were drawn back out to the nomadic life. Despite the hardships and dangers involved in the nomadic life, a lot of nomadic peoples would often report high levels of satisfaction and happiness in their lives, which came out in the historical record. For example, the Lakota fought ferociously to maintain their way of life, and expressed their love of the open plains in articulating their commitments. And the Mongols would often express a disdain of the settled towns and capitols they came across, with Genghis Khan often refusing to enter conquered territories of this kind, citing the stultifying conditions of settled life.
To simplify, you had the sphere of the steppe wilderness and the sphere of the settlement existing as distinctly separate and at odds with another, but also connected through a constant traffic between the two, a traffic that could become quite kinetic indeed, and explode into empire-spanning crises which resulted in profound transformations that grew in scale and scope in the last couple of thousand years. And over time, the nature of those transformations could create path dependencies of their own, carving out the conditions for the subsequent unfolding of world history.
To put some of this together, and render it in more specific terms, I want to look at a fascinating argument advanced by Paul Cooper in his excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast, this time focusing on the sweeping history of the Mongol Empire.
After steadily pollinating Western Europe with technologies like Chinese paper, the compass, and gunpowder (with the eventual evolution of firearms and cannon) through its extensive trade networks, the Mongol Empire reached its zenith and then cracked apart into multiple Khanates, which further disintegrated, leaving behind a galaxy of weakened powers in the regions of its previous operation.
Persia and the Arab Middle East did revert to previous cultural and political forms, and enjoyed resurgences of wealth and power in some cases, but the powers there were diminished and further weakened as the Silk Road trade networks dried up, as the European oceanic trade networks gained ascendance. Mughal India broke away as well, as well as powers in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia.
The collapse of the Yuan dynasty gave way to a weakened, isolationist, and paranoid Ming China, which turned away from world trade and technological innovation, sinking an enormous amount of resources in building the Great Wall in response to the steppe land invasions, diverting a lot of those resources from their naval capabilities, which are also traditionally resource-intensive.
You could make out this process of successive selection playing out in Western Europe itself in Big Serge's excellent History of Naval Warfare series, where he describes an ascendant France - and to be fair, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Spain had their days in the sun as well - that exhausts its substantial endowments in extensive land wars, fighting on its own against coalitions of other European powers, with Britain eventually pulling away from the pack with its particular character of naval conquest, headlined with the cannon-armed sailing ship, and supported by the oceanic trade networks that were made possible by these ships, and which sustained and expanded these ships as well.
You can see how in this cauldron of centralizing nations, teasing out and discovering their own particular characters, a dominant character was eventually selected for through warfare and conquest, a dominant character ready-made to seize upon the rest of the world's resources.
Further back, the Black Death was weakening everyone at once: one theory has it that it started out of somewhere in China, where it was spotted during a Mongolian siege, during which it was carried back to Europe via fleeing Genoese traders. China, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, all too were hit by the plague.
But the Little Ice Age and then the Great Famine and Black Death only seemed to piss off and agitate an ascendant Western European world, which coalescing around cannon-backed sea power, exploded onto a world stage filled with a galaxy of weakened powers to the east, who had just been knocked down and burned out by the raging inferno that was the Mongol Empire, as well as powers in the New World that were suffering from multiple material and historical disadvantages.
Western expansion would eventually be supercharged by the first Industrial Revolution, which beginning in England, spread like wildfire to the rest of the Continent due in part to its clear demonstrations of absurd power, and to its voracious market nature, among many other factors.
To be fair, this was a much more complicated story that had a number of other important dynamics going on which culminated in today's results. But simplifying the story to this extent does allow us to see the ebb and flow of some of the titanic forces of history at work globally over longer timeframes, which relate to each other and whose interrelationality makes their manifold movements possible in any given direction.
