1 John H. Goldthorpe, ‘The uses of history in sociology: reflections on some recent tendencies’, British Journal of Sociology, 42, 2, 1991, pp. 211–30.

2 Frederic Wakeman, Jr, The great enterprise: the Manchu reconstruction of the imperial order in seventeenth-century China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985; Perdue, Peter, China marches west: the Qing conquest of Central Eurasia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Ping-ti Ho, ‘The introduction of American food plants into China’, American Anthropologist, 57, 2, 1955, pp. 191–201, and Studies on the population of China, 1368–1953, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959; Waley-Cohen, Joanna, The sextants of Beijing: global currents in Chinese history, New York: Norton, 1999Google Scholar, and The culture of war in China: empire and the military under the Qing dynasty, London: I.B. Tauris, 2006; and Levenson, Joseph R., Confucian China and its modern fate: a trilogy, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968.Google Scholar

3 Spence, Jonathan D., The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York: Penguin Books, 1985Google Scholar; and Minamiki, George, The Christian rites controversy: from its beginning to modern times, Chicago: Loyala University Press, 1985.Google Scholar

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5 Elvin, Mark, ‘The high-level equilibrium trap: the causes of the decline of invention in the traditional Chinese textile industries’, in W. E. Wilmott, ed., Economic organization in Chinese society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972Google Scholar, pp. 137–72.

6 For a prominent example of this line of argument, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

7 Ringrose, David, Expansion and global interaction, 1200–1700, New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, Inc., 2000.Google Scholar

8 Crosby, Alfred, The Columbian exchange: biological and cultural consequences of 1492, Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1972Google Scholar, and Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Philip Curtin, The image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780–1850, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, and Death by migration: Europe’s encounter with the tropical world in the nineteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; and Melville, Elinor, A plague of sheep: environmental consequences of the conquest of Mexico, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Scott, James C., Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.Google Scholar

10 Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996Google Scholar; Brett, E. A., Colonialism and underdevelopment in East Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972Google Scholar; Bundy, Colin, The rise and fall of the South African peasantry, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979Google Scholar; John Morrow, Jr, The Great War: an imperial history, London: Routledge, 2004; and Marc Michel, L’Appel à l’Afrique: contributions et reactions à l’effort de guerre en A.O.F.,1914–1919, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982.

11 Darwin, John, Britain and decolonization: the retreat from empire in the post-war world, New York: St. Martin’s, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The end of empire: the historical debate, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

12 McNeill, William, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982Google Scholar; Parker, Geoffrey, The military revolution: military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

13 For a concise overview of these developments, see Hew Strachan, European armies and the conduct of war, London: Allen and Unwin, 1983, pp. 32–4.

14 These issues are treated with insight and at some length in Frank McLynn’s 1759: the year that made Great Britain the master of the world, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004. The war in the decisive North American theatre is covered in greatest detail in Fred Anderson’s Crucible of war: the seven years’ war and the fate of empire in British North America, New York: Vintage, 2000.

15 See Strachan, European armies, chs 4–8; McElwee, William, The art of war: Waterloo to Mons, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974Google Scholar; and Falls, Cyril, A hundred years of war, New York: Macmillan, 1953, chs 1–10.Google Scholar

16 The more revealing of the works that deal extensively with the imperial dimensions of the origins and conduct of the war of empires that raged from 1914–1918 include Morrow, The Great War; Kennedy, Paul, The rise of the Anglo-German antagonism, 1860–1914, London: Allen & Unwin, 1980Google Scholar; the second volume of Gerhard Ritter’s magnum opus, The sword and the scepter, trans. Heinz Norden, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970; Fuller, L. C. F., Origins of the First World War, New York: Norton, 1970Google Scholar, and Steiner, Zara, Britain and the origins of the First World War, London: Macmillan, 1977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 New York: Random House, 1987.

18 Landes, David S., The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are so wealthy and some so poor, New York: Norton, 1998Google Scholar; and Jones, E. L., The European miracle: environments, economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.Google Scholar

19 Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: global economy in the Asian age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.Google Scholar

20 Pomeranz, The great divergence.

21 Joseph Bryant has mounted the most thorough and cogent critique of these interpretive moves: see, ‘The West and the rest revisited: debating capitalist origins, European colonialism, and the advent of modernity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahier Canadiens de Sociologie, 31, 4, 2006, pp. 403–44. Also useful on these issues is Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘The great convergence from a West-European perspective: some thoughts and hypotheses’, Itinerario, 24, 3 and 4, 2000, pp 9–29.

22 Perhaps the boldest corrective was offered decades ago in Patrick O’Brien’s pioneering (and much debated) essay on ‘European economic development: the contribution of the periphery,’ Economic History Review, 35, 1, 1982, pp. 1–18.

23 The seminal works on each of the main clusters of these late medieval and early modern transformations are, respectively, Lynn White, Jr, Medieval technology and social change, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 and Nef, John, The conquest of the material world, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.Google Scholar Neither is referenced in After Tamerlane.

24 Of the many fine works on scientific investigation and altered worldviews in early modern Europe, those dealing extensively with the pivotal transitions suggested above include A. Rupert Hall, The revolution in science 1500–1750, London: Longman, 1983; Allen G. Debus, Man and nature in the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978; Merchant, Carolyn, The death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Allen Lane, 1983Google Scholar; and Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behavior and the household economy, 1650 to the present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

25 Fredrickson, George, White supremacy: a comparative study in American and South African history, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981Google Scholar, and Black liberation: a comparative history of black ideologies in the United States and South Africa, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

26 Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.

27 New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

28 Bloch, ‘A contribution towards a comparative history of European societies’, originally published as ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, Revue de Synthèse Historique, 46, 1928, pp. 15–50. The English version, translated by Jelle C. Riemersma, was first published in Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and secular change: readings in economic history, Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953, pp. 494–521.