This chapter argues that in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the early Ming and the Timurid Empire can very much be thought of as post-Chinggisid polities. Timur (Tamerlane) very deliberately fashioned himself after Genghis Khan, but the early Ming rulers such as Hongwu and Yongle also very much understood sovereignty in the manner of their Chinggisid predecessors. As a result, both the Timurid and the early Ming manifested ambitions of world empire and recognition as well and came close to constructing a world order we may call 'bipolar' in our time. This is the story told in this chapter, as well the demise of this would-be world order in the middle of the fifteenth century – the Timurids lost control over their realm and the Ming jettisoned Chinggisid norms, turning increasingly isolationist. The chapter speculates whether the fragmentation of this world order may have something to do with a period of continental crisis in the middle of the fifteenth century, which caused a coin shortage and disrupted trade flows.

This chapter engages with the normative implications of the grand narrative developed in this book, as well as its methodological choices. It gets at the questions of where macro-historical narratives can go wrong by sympathetically discussing scholars at the end of turn of the twentieth century who attempted their own versions of such macro-histories of Asia and Eurasia: Kencho Suematsu, Ziya Gökalp and George Vernadsky, on the one hand; and Arnold J. Toynbee, Karl Wittfogel and Owen Lattimore on the other. It concludes by offering a spirited defence of the use of macro-history in IR theorising. If we dismantle Eurocentric grand histories that have animated our modern international order without replacing them with anything but micro-oriented work, those macro-historical accounts that we think we have dismantled will simply live on as zombie common-sense versions of themselves, filling in the blanks wherever there are some, and every account has blanks.

This chapter shows that the sixteenth century was not dominated by European actors but rather by three post-Timurid empires in west Asia, that expanded the reach of the Chinggisid sovereign norm and world ordering into new territories. These empires were the Ottoman, the Mughals and the Safavid, and together they ruled over a third of the world's population and controlled much of the world's resources. They also developed their own version of the Chinggisid sovereignty model, inflected by Timurid influences and varying according to local cultural repertoires. This was the notion of 'millennial sovereignty' as captured by the concept of sahibkıran, essential a ruler marked by conjunction astrology for great distinction. Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rulers competed with each other (and Charles V) for the title of sahibkıran. Their world order was connected through intellectual network of astrologers and other occult scientists who legitimised universal empire projects. This chapters develops a comparative narrative of these three empires and their rulers' universal empire dreams in the sixteenth century.

This chapter draws lessons from the historical account offered in Part I of Before the West for contemporary debates in International Relations, especially those having to do with the crisis of the modern international order. It argues that broadening our temporal and geographical horizon helps us think about how ‘world orders’ come about and how they are replaced. IR has focused too much on the decline of ‘great powers’ and, until recently, barely thought about the decline of ‘world orders’. The story of Eastern world orders show us that orders often decline not because of what great powers do but because of larger, more structural crises. Furthermore, we should pay more attention to the health of the social fabric that holds our order together: 'the East' did not decline materially until much later but lost its social cohesion. This chapter shows that the 'decline of the East' has been misconstrued as being material. The chapter also offers a defense of using macro-historical narratives in service of IR theory and some guidance for how to approach such comparisons (e.g. in thinking about the transhistoricity of fundamental concepts).

This chapter traces Chinggisid influences throughout the globalising world order of the sixteenth century. It shows that the European timeline – so foundational to IR – cannot be thought of as free from influences from Asia. As this chapter clearly demonstrates, Charles V and the Habsburgs were very much shaped by their competition with the Ottomans. The chapter then moves to the north and discusses the influences of Chinggisid sovereignty model on Muscovy, specifically on Ivan IV. It also catches up with sixteenth-century developments in Inner Asia and Ming China. The sixteenth-century order, with its centre of gravity in the post-Timurid empires of west Asia, fragmented in the seventeenth century, during the long period of 'general crisis' (often associated with climate change) which frayed both the material and ideational connections across Eurasia. Though some Asian polities were relatively unaffected by this period of crisis and others bounced back economically, no world ordering projects were successfully launched out of the East after this period. This was a major contributor to the perception of Eastern decline.

This chapter advances a new and non-Eurocentric theoretical framework for understanding the concepts of 'sovereignty' and 'world order' in international relations. Before the West is focused on a particular type of sovereignty – labelled Chinggisid sovereignty – which was influential throughout parts of Asia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuriess. This understanding of sovereignty was extremely centralised around the person of the ruler and was legitimated by the notion of world empire. The empire of Genghis Khan disseminated this sovereignty norm and its associated institutions across Asia. Before the West thus argues that Asia was dominated by world-ordering projects in this Chinggisid mould from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and their loss (as well the connections they facilitated) contributed to the perception of ‘the decline of the East’ from the seventeenth century onwards, even though Asia was not surpassed materially by the West until much later. This reconstructed grand narrative of the history of Asian International Relations also has significant implications for contemporary debates on crisis and decline.

This chapter argues that the empire of Genghis Khan made 'Asia' and/or 'the East'. Genghis Khan not only politically unified most of Asia in the thirteenth century but also changed the conception of sovereignty throughout the continent by disseminating, through his own example, the norm of the political ruler as the exclusive supreme authority, legitimised by world domination. This chapter gives an overview of the rise and decline of the Chinggisid world order (as constructed by the Mongol world empire and later maintained by the successor khanates: Yuan, Chaggataid, Ilkhanate, Jochid/Golden Horde). At its peak this world order covered most of Asia, from present-day China in the East to present-day Russia in the North and the present-day Middle East in the West. However, even the areas offically out of the reach of the Mongols (e.g. the Indian subcontinent) were very much influenced by them. This chapter also introduces institutions associated with the Chinggissid sovereignty norm – such as tanistry and astronomy/astrology – that will be traced to subsequent world orders. It also speculates about the possible causes for the decline of this world order, including the plague.