The Ottoman Empire tried to modernize in other ways as well, but fell behind its European neighbors in the nineteenth century and finally met its end during the First World War. We’ll return to that story in a few chapters.

One of the major changes in Europe in the early modern period, which we take for granted today, is the beginning of a tendency toward people organizing themselves as nations rather than empires. Although some European rulers like Napoleon, Queen Victoria, and later Hitler tried to expand the scales of their realms into empires, these were exceptions that proved the rule (and Victoria’s British Empire was outside Europe). Europe's nations were organized around and identified by factors like ethnicity, language, customs, and religion. Often these nations fought neighbors that were defined by different identities. This made European nations unlike the empires of Asia and the Near East that typically included and even welcomed wide varieties of cultures and ethnicities within their borders.

But before we do that, it’s important to understand that the histories of China and India are as old as western history if not older, and Asia has always been the center of world population.

Ending China’s navy was one of the major changes made by Yongle's descendants. The burning of the Chinese fleet left a power vacuum in the South China Sea, which was filled by Japanese and Chinese coastal pirates.

As historians have rediscovered these expeditions, the superiority of Chinese naval technology has challenged the traditional belief that western nations were the first to establish maritime power