Amazing by any standard, what makes Ibn Battuta’s travels significant for us is that almost everywhere he traveled in the mid-1300s was dar al-Islam, “the abode of Islam,” or places in the world where Islam was practiced and educated people spoke (or wrote) Arabic, the language of the Quran (Koran). Everywhere he went, Ibn Battuta encountered familiar cultural and linguistic signposts, much like a North American traveling to western Europe today. Although that part of dar al-Islam that he visited was vast, it was not all of it, for Islam had spread to parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia as well. A fundamental fact of the fifteenth century, then, was the extent of the Islamic world and what that meant for how the world worked

But when the Prince of Yan took the throne (literally) as the Yongle emperor, China was experiencing some economic difficulties. To be sure, his father’s policy of “agriculture is the foundation” had some success as farmers reclaimed land and set about growing food for themselves and to support the empire. But China’s monetary system, based on paper money, had collapsed along with the Mongols. Initially, the Ming (as the new dynasty was called) government simply printed large amounts of paper money, resulting both in inflation and loss of public confidence in the currency. Soon the government decided to abandon paper money altogether, leaving a huge unmet need for currency.

In a civil war that lasted from late 1399 to mid-1402, the Prince of Yan destroyed his nephew’s forces and captured the throne, but not without some ambiguity, for rumors abounded that the nephew had escaped the inferno that had burned down his palace. As the new emperor Yongle, the Prince of Yan sought to extend China’s power and influence in all directions. He campaigned to the north and northwest against the Mongols, trying to push China’s previous rulers so far into the steppe that they would never again threaten China. As part of this policy, he moved the capital from Nanjing (“Southern Capital”) on the Yangzi River farther north to Beijing (“Northern Capital”), less than one hundred miles from the Great Wall and the last defense against Mongol invasions. He sent embassies far into Central Asia to secure the acknowledgment by those rulers of China’s preeminence. He also intervened in affairs in Vietnam, hoping to put rulers favored by China on the throne and to incorporate Annam, as northern Vietnam was then called, into the Chinese empire. And in one of the greatest adventures in world history, he launched massive maritime expeditions into the Indian Ocean.

. That many historians now recognize the existence of this previous world system thus raises questions about the connection between it and the one that developed after 1500: Was the post-1500 system a wholly new creation, or did it arise out of the elements of the preceding one? I tend toward the latter interpretation, as will become clearer in the next chapter.38 The other quite remarkable feature of the thirteenth-century world trading system is that it functioned without a central controlling or dominating force. To those who conceive of the modern world system as growing under the domination of a single state or group of states, the idea that a system could work without a controlling center is somewhat novel.39 To be sure, each of the trade circuits did have a predominating group—the Italians in the European system, Arabs in the Middle Eastern circuit, and Chinese in the East Asian circuit—but no one of these controlled the whole system. Force thus was not used to keep goods flowing throughout the system, although rulers in various parts did offer protection to traders, caravans, or ships. Indeed, most of the rulers recognized that trade was valuable—especially when they could tax it—and hence encouraged and protected it, not wanting to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs by trying to seize by force the goods of traders from another part of the world.

To villagers, these towns and cities were somewhat magical places where people with great wealth ate foods peasants could only dream of and wore clothing of such quality that it put their coarse cloth to shame, all without most of the elite doing any visible work. Of course, the taxes, tithes, and rents the peasants paid supported these towns and cities, and the peasants knew it. This transfer of food from producing farms to consuming cities also had an environmental aspect: the nutrients taken up in the growing of crops were removed from the soil and, if not replaced, could result in the depletion of soils, the collapse of farming, and crisis for the humans in those societies. Some scholars have called this a “metabolic rift” between town and countryside, between consuming cities and farming villages.10

“agricultural surplus”—giving rise to social groups who did not have to produce their own food: priests, rulers, warriors, and outside raiders, usually nomadic people. The existence of this agricultural surplus meant that others could take it, either by force if necessary or more regularly as taxes. In either case, a major schism opened in society between the agriculturists and the non-producing ruling elite: the job of the agriculturists was to produce the food and the surplus, the role of the priests was to explain how and why the world had come to exist in the first place, and the role of the rulers was to protect the agricultural surplus from invading outsiders.

Often these resentments come together in particular individuals who come to power as authoritarian nationalists (such as President Donald J. Trump in the United States and others in Brazil, Hungary, and Poland), and in movements such as Brexit in the United Kingdom, where a slim majority of citizens voted to leave the European Union. Since then, earthshaking events, including the COVID-19 epidemic (2019–2023), Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the latest assessments of the growing dangers of global warming, led me to conclude that a new edition was necessary to place those developments into the long-term global context of Origins. Doing so also led me to re-envision much of parts III and IV of chapter 6, those addressing the post–World War II era. In addition to new sections on COVID and Ukraine, I have added new sections on the China Shock; the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing great recession; deaths of despair; opposition to globalization, deglobalization and re-nationalization; and “a conjuncture.” The conclusion to chapter 6 is new.

Without my family, I would not be the scholar I am. My mother and father, neither of whom graduated high school, nonetheless loved reading and talking, and together they gave me the support and encouragement to follow my dreams out of a small town in northern Wisconsin to the University of Wisconsin. My son Robert received his degree in environmental sciences, is a professional freshwater resource geologist, and reads and critiques my drafts. Joyce Kaufman continues to offer companionship, love, and support, knowing what it means to be a publishing scholar at a college that values teaching effectiveness first and foremost. And as did our faithful and beloved dog companions Budd, Rembrandt, and Stanton, Seger now reminds me to look forward to each new day.

it is to point out that history is living and relevant to current concerns, not the “dead hand of the past,” as some might see it. Both new scholarship and new issues and problems can prompt us to re-examine the past and to rewrite history to take account of changes in both. That way the stories we tell about the past continue to be relevant and helpful to us in the present. For if they weren’t, what would be the point? We need all the help we can get, and historical perspective is an essential aid to living in and through the present to a better future