Though usually depicted as an aspect of the "European miracle", it is argued that imperial expansion is better understood as a world-wide phenomenon of the late medieval and early modern period, in which expanding societies grew outwards and collided from widely separated centres. This first volume in the Expanding World Series examines the potential for worldwide expansion by any region, whether it was China, the Middle East, Africa or the Americas, at the end of the Middle Ages and then explores why these nations failed or gave the initiative to the Europeans.