In July of 2007, during a speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy infamously said: “The tragedy of Africa is that the African ...

This piece is part of a series of articles covering the medieval and early modern great powers of each of Asia’s regions: East Asia, Central and North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia ...