What period or figures form history are you more interested about? I love big travellers like marco polo and ibn battutah.
>>18455335Ever since I read about him in Migration: A World History, I've been fascinated by Zheng He simply because he bucked the trend of China's perennial isolationism.If you're interested in historical explorers then you should definitely lcheck him out.
>>18455335I'm not so much interested in individual figures as the broader developments of statecraft, politics, warfare and economy. And here I'm mainly focusing on the 16th and 17th century. For example the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which ought to solve the religious and political problems that came about in the wake of the Reformation - but which partly also laid the groundwork for the 30 Years War, due to certain unclear formulations and the unwillingness of certain actors to uphold it. Or the regional history of my region when it comes to waterpowered hammer- and grindworks.
>>18455510China didn't really isolate itself from outsiders, it treated and accepted delegations from many different nations and peoples all around it. They just didn't see any reason to travel to those places, because obviously they'd come to China, because China was the center of the world. Anybody worth knowing, anything worth having, would wind up in China without the Chinese having to leave home. That's just how they saw the world.Actually, a lot of the Muslim world has a similar attitude, after the initial wave of conquests stalled out, they just adopted this attitude that Dar-al-Islam was perfect at its current borders and the stuff outside it wasn't really worth conquering anyway. Which is why the Arabs were content to just rule over what the original Caliphs conquered until freshly converted Turks in their zeal decided to expand the borders of Islam again.
