What was the rest of the world doing during the six hundred years when the great powers and European states went through their Ages of Dynasties, Religions, Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Ideology; were racked by two world wars; and then fell into a long peace? Unfortunately the Eurocentric bias of the historical record makes it impossible to trace out curves with any confidence. Before the advent of colonialism, large swaths of Africa, the Americas, and Asia were host to predation, feuding, and slave-raiding that slunk beneath the military horizon or fell in the forest without any historian hearing them. Colonialism itself was implemented in many imperial wars that the great powers waged to acquire their colonies, suppress revolts, and fend off rivals. Throughout this era there were plenty of wars. For the period from 1400 through 1938, Brecke's Conflict Catalog lists 276 violent conflicts in the Americas, 283 in North Africa and the Middle East, 586 in sub-Saharan Africa, 313 in Central and South Asia, and 657 in East and Southeast Asia. Historical myopia prevents us from plotting trustworthy trends in the frequency or deadliness of the wars, but we saw in the preceding chapter that many were devastating. They included civil and interstate wars that were proportionally (and in some cases absolutely) more lethal than anything taking place in Europe, such as the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, and the conquests of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa.

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