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Chandragupta Maurya becomes a Buddhist and combines the expansive powers of a world religion, trade economy, and imperial armies for the first time. Alexander the Great sues for peace with Chandragupta in 325 at Gerosia, marking the eastward link among overland routes between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and Central Asia.

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Makes its first major appearance in China under the Han dynasty, and consolidates cultural links across the Eurasian Steppe into India -- the foundation of the silk road.

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The expansion of Islam from the western Mediterranean to India

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Divided into the Northern Song (960-1127) and Southern Song (1127-1279). During the Song dynasty, China became the most advanced country in the world.

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The Song Dynasty in China (and contemporary regimes in India) which produced the economic output, instruments (financial), technologies, and impetus for the medieval world economy that linked Europe and China by land and sea across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean.

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The Rise Genghis Khan and the integration of overland routes across Eurasia -- producing also a military revolution in technologies of war on horseback and of fighting from military fortifications.

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The creation of the Ottoman Empire spanning Europe, North Africa, and Middle East, and connected politically overland with Safavids and dynasties in Central Asia and India -- creating the great imperial arch of integration that spawned a huge expansion of trade with Europe but ALSO raised the cost for trade in Asia for Europeans - a side effect of this was the movement of Genoese merchant wealth to Spain to search for a Western Sea route to the Indies.

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A scene of Christopher Columbus bidding farewell to the Queen of Spain on his departure for the New World, August 3, 1492.

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Columbus and da Gama travel west and east to the Indies, inaugurating an age of European seaborne empires.

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Expansion was dramatic during the seventeenth century -- and it sustained the expansion of Atlantic Economy, giving birth to integrated economic/industrial systems across the Ocean -- with profits accumulating in Europe during the hey day of mercantilism and rise of the Enlightenment. (estimates of slave trade population)

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The national state thus became both a mechanism for the control of territory within its own borders and for the expansion of national enterprise around the world. The US expanded over land and into Latin America by the expansion of the enterprise of its citizens and expansion of its military power, as the British empire expanded into Asia and then Africa -- along with the French and Dutch. In the discourse of nationalism, the "nation" and "empire" lived in their opposition to one another; but "economic imperialism" was standard practice for economically expansive nation states, and "gun boat diplomacy" became a typical feature of economic transactions among hostile states.

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History of the United States (1776–1789)

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US and French Revolutions mark the creation of modern state form based on alliances between military and business interests and on popular representation in aggressively nationalist governments -- which leads quickly to new imperial expansion under Napoleon and in the Americas -- the economic interests of "the people" and the drive to acquire and consolidate assets for economic growth also lead to more militarized British, Dutch, and French imperial growth in Asia. These national empires expand during the industrial revolution, which also provokes class struggles and new ideas and movements of revolution within the national states and subsequently in their empires as well. The historical chronology of modernity coincides with the chronology of globalization from the eighteenth century.

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How Britain Went to War With China Over Opium

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The 1840s form a watershed in the institutionalization of a world regime of national expansion and international economic organization -- when the British navy forced open the interior of China to British merchant settlements with military victories waged during the Opium Wars to protect the right of British merchants to trade in opium in China; and when the US Admiral Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports to American trade.

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General Act of the Conference of Berlin Signed February 26, 1885

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Treaties of Berlin mark a diplomatic watershed in the age modern imperial expansion by European and American overseas empires, beginning the age of "high imperialism" with the legalization of the Partition of Africa, which also marks a foundation-point for the creation of international law. In the last decades of the 19th century, the global "white man's burden" became a subject of discussion. (Here is an old syllabus for an undergraduate course on "US Empire" with some useful links.)

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The great depression hits all parts of the world at the same time -- in contrast to depression of late 19th century, but following rapid, simultaneous price rise in most of the world during the 1920s. Preceded by first event called World War and followed by first really global war across Atlantic and Pacific.

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Decolonization of European empires in Asia and Africa produces world of national states for the first time and world of legal-representative-economic institutions in the UN system and Bretton Woods.