The Other Pax's the West won't Talk About

In The Great Tech Game, Anirudh Suri made an interesting list that got me thinking about how distorted Western versions of history are. He writes:

“In recent history, the world has lived through Pax Romana, Pax Islamica, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica and Pax Americana.”

Pax Islamica? Pax Mongolica? I’d only heard of the other three Pax’es…

 

Pax Islamica is Suri’s term for the era when the Muslims controlled the global trade routes, both on land and via the sea. Until the Muslims took over, each region on these routes had its own trading practices and different legal traditions. The Muslims standardized a lot of that – from Arabia to Malaysia, the same tax and import-export rules were followed. This made things stable, predictable and trade increased. The West won’t mean even mention this phase since they were locked out of these routes by the Muslims who weren’t interested in the “backwaters of Europe”…

 

While the era of Muslim dominance is ignored in Western narrative, the Mongol era is actively vilified. Even though at 9 million square miles of territory, it was the world’s largest contiguous land empire. Even though it lasted for centuries. Even though the Mongols created and secured land-based trade routes via bridges, protection, and low taxes. Even though, unlike other empires of the day, the Mongols didn’t promote a particular religion or political ideology.

 

Or was it perhaps Europe’s resentment of the Mongols’ almost cosmopolitan practices that they are despised so much? After all, the Mongols didn’t lock anyone out of their trade routes – Europe could again trade with China. Perhaps there is an unwillingness to acknowledge the benefits the West reaped, via the flow of ideas, learnings and technologies from the East to the West (they’d rather believe they achieved everything themselves, from scratch), not that:

“The Silk Road began to emerge as a well-guarded conveyor belt of goods, people, and ideas.”

Perhaps, the West resents that while they ensured race-based division wherever they went, the “twain between East and West seemed to finally be meeting” during Pax Mongolica. Or perhaps, the West is too ashamed of the contrast that Marie Favereau mentions in The Horde:

“The Mongols did not try to extract value from subjects no matter the cost to the subjects -- that is, the Mongols did not enslave their subjects and work them to death, as much later colonial regimes in the Atlantic world did.”

 

Ignore the facts (as with Pax Islamica) or vilify the other side (Pax Mongolica) – that’s how the West writes it history books.