Why didn't China dominate the globe?

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Perhaps it's because up until a few hundred years ago or so, a lot of China was still broken up into different kingdoms and territories.

For hundreds of years, each province had it's own army, it's own king (of sorts.) To go off and invade and then occupy another country would have meant unity and that wasn't something many of the warlords were ready to do.

Reply 21

OllieS

My Dad often mentions this, saying they built all these ships way before Europe/etc and could have ruled the world, but the emperor told them not to for some reason, and it all stopped.

Reply 22

gladders

I think much of it has to do with (as someone already said) the fact that China was one single country. European was a cluster of competing, warring nations, which meant that they were undergoing a continuous battle to get the edge in technology and tactics to outdo their opponents. Consider how the Chinese invented gunpowder but the Europeans took the gun and turned it into a major weapon of war, then into siege artillery - which in turn led to the development of ever more advance defensive and fortress technology. Castles gave way to multilinear defensive fortifications.

Wars prevented the state from having an unbreakable hold on the individual as it needed the cooperation of the home front to fight wars - unlike in China where a huge army could just move in and crush opposition more or less at will. This meant the state in europe could not have such untrammelled control over the individual as in China, allowing for explorers and commerce to develop, in search of riches and resources with which to develop new ways to fight wars.