Tamerlane for the Twenty-First Century

Several months ago, I read John Darwin's book "After Tamerlane".  It chronicles the history of empire-building from the Central-Asian-controlled world empire paradigm to the coastal-powers paradigm with which the world is now most familiar.  China, India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the West all originated or suffered sweeping dynastic and social changes from this paradigm shift.

Money to be made by controlling the Silk Road had before 1399 created an incentive for consolidation.  The conventional wisdom is that, as sea power became more important for global trade, control of the Silk Road became obsolete.  Naval powers such as Portugal, Britain, Japan, and the United States took over, while cities such as Samarkand, once the cultural, military, and commercial center of the world, were forgotten.

Many people today couldn't name a single country among "the stans" of central Asia.  They are the world's newest, most mysterious, and seemingly most irrelevent nations, and (besides Borat) don't have much of a presence in the world of the coastal powers.  Even the infamous Great Game, wherein Britain and Russia vied for control of Central Asia, was born out of British fear that the Russians would use Afghanistan as a staging ground for an invasion of India, and not actually related to any perceived value of Central Asia itself. 

This all changed when huge deposits of natural gas were discovered in Central Asia in the 1990s, just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the remapping of that region into the five countries Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev proposed in 2007 form the Central Asian Union. 

I was reminded of all this when I saw Parag Khanna's recent TED lecture on a borderless world.  Khanna singles out Central Asia as a very important geostrategic area for the future because of its massive natural gas deposits and the fact that the region borders nearly every global power. 

Indeed, China is aggressively subduing its western colonies Tibet and Xinjiang to gain leverage in the region.  There is an ongoing dispute over Kashmir between China, India, and Pakistan.  America seems to be preparing for permanent presence in Afghanistan and Iraq to supplement its existing bases in Central Asia.  Iran is flexing its muscles in the Caspian Sea.  Turkey and Russia are vying for control of pipelines from Central Asia to European markets, as the European Union continues to extend its influence eastward.  

Central Asia will certainly be an important region to watch in the near and distant future.  It was only 600 years ago that empires ceased to base their capital cities there, but the same empires created by that paradigm shift now seem to be following the money back to their birthplace.          

Comments

[Andrew]

Interesting post - I am going to have to read this book now... Nothing better than a huge sea of change from one 'small' event.