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Chapter 3
State and Empire in Eurasia/North Africa

The great empires of the second-wave era: Persia and Greece, Alexander, Rome and Han China, and why India built fewer big empires.

500 BCE to 500 CE. Book pages 105 to 145.

Notes summary

The chapter in plain words, section by section. Highlighted words are the book's key terms.

Persians and Greeks 3.1
  • The Persian Empire , founded by Cyrus, was the largest empire yet. It ruled many peoples with tolerance, a skilled bureaucracy, and royal roads.
  • Greece was a set of small, independent city-states. Sparta was military and strict, while Athens developed Athenian democracy .
  • In Athens, free adult men voted directly on laws. Women, slaves, and foreigners had no say.
  • In the Greco-Persian Wars , Greek city-states defeated Persian invasions. Athens then built its own empire, which led to war with Sparta.
Alexander and the Hellenistic Era 3.2
  • Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered the Persian Empire and reached the edge of India.
  • His empire split after his death, but the Hellenistic era spread Greek language, cities, and ideas across the region.
  • Cities like Alexandria in Egypt became centers of trade and learning where Greek and local cultures blended.
Comparing Empires: Rome and China 3.3
  • Rome grew slowly from a small republic into a Mediterranean empire, winning wars like those against Carthage.
  • Wealth and inequality brought civil wars, and Augustus became the first emperor. The pax Romana followed.
  • China reunified quickly. Qin Shihuangdi used harsh Legalist rule to standardize writing, coins, and weights.
  • The Han dynasty kept the unified state but ruled more gently and made Confucianism the official ideology.
Consolidating the Empires and Their Collapse 3.4
  • Both empires used strong rulers, bureaucracies, roads, and armies, and gave local elites reasons to cooperate.
  • Rome spread citizenship and law. China trained officials in Confucian learning and claimed the Mandate of Heaven.
  • Empires faced resistance, like Trung Trac 's revolt against Chinese rule in Vietnam.
  • Overspending, corruption, peasant hardship, epidemics, and invasions brought both empires down. China reunified later, but the western Roman Empire never did.
  • Other empires, like the Kushan Empire , linked Central Asia and India and helped spread trade and Buddhism.
Intermittent Empire: India 3.5
  • India built big empires less often than China, partly because of its great diversity and frequent invasions.
  • The Mauryan Empire united much of South Asia. Its emperor Ashoka turned to Buddhism after a bloody war and ruled by moral principles.
  • The later Gupta Empire ruled a smaller area and relied more on local rulers.
  • The caste system gave social order even when there was no strong central state.