To reassure my potential reader who thinks anxiously, ‘not another typical book on the rise of the West’, let me say this is not one such book. For unlike almost all the books on this topic this one does not recount all the familiar themes according to the standard European, ethnocentric frame of reference. In place of the usual story, I produce one that brings the East into the limelight. Accordingly, though my purpose differs in certain respects to that of Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Millennium, nevertheless I, like him, take delight in surprising the reader. I focus on the many Eastern discoveries, peoples and places that enabled the rise of the West, all of which are ignored in the conventional accounts. If I may be permitted I would like to draw on the phraseology found in the prologue to Millennium to convey a sense of what my book is and is not about.

In this book the reader will find nothing about the Investiture Conflict, the Thirty Years War or the Treaty of Westphalia. While the Italian merchant communes are discussed, they are at all times revealed as derivative of the wider innovative developments pioneered in the Eastern-led global economy. The European Renaissance and scientific revolution are considered more from the perspective of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa than Tuscany. Da Vinci, Ficino and Copernicus kneel before the likes of al-Shātir, al-Khwārizmī and al-Tūsī. Vasco da Gama fades into the marginalised shadows cast by the brilliance of Asia.