Asia is a changing center of power, survival, and human renewal across the book’s account of successive civilizations. Its role shifts from the home of influential Eastern cultures to one half of a polarized global order, then to a region swept by civilizational collapse and repopulated by later human species. The continent’s history repeatedly shows that political unity, economic interdependence, and cultural influence do not necessarily overcome rivalry or protect a society from catastrophe.

An Eastern center of power

In the era of the First Men, Asia’s importance lay partly in the different social and intellectual traditions of its great peoples. China drew on Russian social ideals after the Russian state collapsed, while India was influenced by Russian mysticism. China did not adopt communism as doctrine or practice; instead, it increasingly entrusted power to a devoted and authoritarian party and understood society in collective terms. Individualism nevertheless persisted beneath that political order, alongside a desperate class of wage workers. India, in contrast, was associated with a tendency to seek ultimate reality beyond the visible world, a perspective that could make practical social problems seem less than fundamental.

These differences did not prevent China and India from being drawn together by their shared fear of the United States. In the later world order, Asia and Africa formed one of two vast political and mental systems, opposed to a wealthy American-centered federation and its associated territories. That division gave renewed force to the old distinction between East and West. It did not make the Eastern system culturally uniform: Chinese attention to sensory appearance, practical life, and social order contrasted with Indian concern for a reality beyond appearances. Their political alignment rested less on sameness than on a common apprehension of American power.

Finance, rivalry, and the world conflict

Asia’s political position was inseparable from the movement of capital and resources across the world. Russia’s industrial organization became dependent on American finance, which spread across its territory, from the Baltic toward the Himalayas and the Behring Straits. Russia continued to identify Germany, rather than the United States, as the emblem of capitalism; resentment toward Germany thus displaced anger at the financial influence on which Russia relied. This contradiction contributed to the Russo-German War and helped reshape Europe, while illustrating how economic dependence could distort political hostility.

Later, fuel again made regional rivalry global. The League of Nations had established cosmopolitan control over existing oil and coal fields, but newly workable fuel deposits in Antarctica lay beyond the World Fuel Control Board’s jurisdiction. The United States sought to exploit them; China, fearing the spread of American influence, demanded that they come under international control. At the same time, a dispute over child labor in Indian factories became an occasion for accusation and intervention. China attempted to mediate between its rival and partner, but after an American bank in China was raided and its manager killed, war began between the West and the East.

Asia, together with North Africa, formed the more geographically compact side of the conflict, while the United States and its dependents were more economically organized. Neither side possessed substantial armaments, since war had been outlawed, but civilian aircraft could carry poison, explosives, disease microbes, and other destructive agents. The quarter-century struggle devastated regions far beyond its original point of tension. China imposed military rule over Europe, while South African forces poisoned the Nile’s sources, making Egypt uninhabitable. The war’s scale exposes the weakness of a world whose economy was connected but whose political loyalties remained divided.

Collapse and the return of disorder

Asia’s vulnerability did not end with the war between East and West. The First World State’s apparent success depended on finite energy supplies, and its collapse came when even the deepest Antarctic coal borings revealed no further deposits. The civilization had preserved fuel and explored wind, water, volcanic, and subterranean power, but coal remained indispensable. Its depletion exposed the danger of allowing an energy system to become a foundation for institutions that could not adapt when that foundation failed.

The resulting breakdown was worsened by an epidemic of insanity and diminished intelligence after the use of microbes. When revolt and civil war spread, China and India declared themselves free national states, but neither could achieve internal unity. The American continent succumbed to disease after its government used microbes it could no longer control; the epidemic known as American madness then spread to Asia and Africa. For a time, some order remained in those regions, but soon the living traces of their civilization vanished. Asia thus appears not as a secure counterweight to Western power but as part of a world-wide ruin, where political independence could not by itself restore social order.

Settlement and human renewal

Much later, after the Patagonian disaster and nearly ten million years of planetary change, a group of human survivors adrift on an iceberg was blown southward across the sea to the mainland of Asia. They settled there and expanded slowly into the continent’s interior. The setting they entered differed radically from the geography of earlier human history: Russia and Europe had become a shallow sea warmed by Atlantic currents, while temperate conditions, well-watered volcanic soil, abundant plants and game, and renewed mineral deposits made the land favorable to settlement.

The newcomers were infertile and inflexible, so their growth was initially slow. Over a few hundred thousand years, however, their descendants multiplied from a handful of individuals into many races. Their recovery of vitality came through the interaction and intermixture of those peoples and through the absorption of chemicals from the volcanic soil. Asia is therefore also a landscape of biological renewal: a refuge where survivors persist, diversify, and eventually supply the conditions for a new human flourishing.

A corridor for successive peoples

The later Second Men spread rapidly across the region from Afghanistan to the China Sea, overran India, and advanced into the new Australasian continent. Their expansion was described as cultural more than military. The remaining First Men, unable in general to interbreed with the new species and unable to sustain the higher culture surrounding them, gradually disappeared. Asia’s importance here lies in the way it becomes the field of a transition between human species, not merely a prize held by competing states.

Across these epochs, the continent connects several different historical scales: the local conditions of settlement, the movement of finance and fuel, the formation of political blocs, and the rise and disappearance of civilizations. Its recurring role is not a simple one of ascendancy or decline. It is at once a center of cultural difference, a participant in global systems of power, a casualty of worldwide catastrophe, and a route through which human life begins again.