Case studies: society and economy across regions

Educated, landowning officials who passed the civil service examinations and staffed the imperial bureaucracy.

Candidates were tested on the Confucian classics, at local, provincial and imperial levels; only a small fraction passed.

Nomadic Jin armies conquered northern China, so the Song court fled south to Hangzhou, where fast-ripening rice could feed far more people.

A vast network of waterways over 1,000 miles long linking northern and southern China, moving grain, goods and troops between the two regions.

In the 1120s, building on merchant promissory notes that had already been used for large transactions.

The painful binding of young girls' feet, mainly among elite Song families, to keep them small as a mark of status and beauty.

Elite women were more likely to have bound feet and stay secluded at home; peasant women usually went unbound and kept working the fields and looms.

Bi Sheng, in the 1040s during the Song dynasty, using individual reusable characters made of baked clay.

Carving a whole page of text into a wooden block to print copies, widely used to spread Buddhist texts and calendars.

First made by Chinese alchemists seeking immortality potions; by the Song period it was used in bombs, fire-lances and early rockets against northern invaders.

It became one of China's most valuable exports along the Silk Road and maritime trade routes, spreading Chinese craftsmanship and wealth abroad.

Song China: partly merit-based, through civil service exams open in theory to able men. Feudal Europe: power passed mainly through birth and land grants within a fixed nobility.

A raised, artificial farming bed built from lake mud and reeds, used by the Aztecs to grow food on Lake Texcoco.

It was a city of up to 200,000 people built on a lake island, fed by chinampas and linked to the mainland by causeways and aqueducts.

Regular payments of goods (maize, cloth, cacao, gold, captives) that conquered peoples owed the Aztec state, while keeping their own local rulers.

A hereditary class of Aztec long-distance merchants who traded in luxury goods and also gathered intelligence on distant towns.

Emperor (tlatoani) at the top, then nobles (pipiltin), then commoners (macehualtin) who farmed and fought, then slaves (tlacotin), often war captives.

Camel caravans carrying gold north (from West Africa) and salt south (from Saharan mines), taxed by Mali's rulers.

The Mali emperor whose 1324 hajj to Mecca showcased vast wealth — he reportedly gave away so much gold in Cairo that its value fell for years.

It grew into a major centre of Islamic learning in the Mali Empire, home to mosques, libraries and the Sankore university.

Aztecs: chinampa farming plus tribute extracted from conquered peoples. Mali: taxing trade routes carrying gold and salt, without directly mining the gold.

Aztecs relied on tribute enforced by fear of the army; Mali relied more on trade networks and shared Islamic faith binding rulers and merchants.

Timbuktu's Sankore university and libraries, which attracted scholars from as far as Cairo and Mecca to study and copy manuscripts.

Because examiners require explicit engagement with two named regions throughout — the Aztec or Mali empire can serve as a strong non-European second region alongside Western Europe or the Islamic Middle East.