Too much focus on wars in history?

China could have lost all of her wars with her neighbours without significant alterations in the history's course

I get your point, but I'd strongly disagree here. Most invading powers may have sinicized historically, maintaining the basis of a unified Chinese cultural and political sphere (or "civilisation"), but this wasn't some sort of historical inevitability, especially outside of the northern flatlands. "Losing all of her wars" would entail a level of political, economic, technological/material, and cultural/religious fragmentation and divergence far beyond anything seen in China historically in the past two millennia, with completely unpredictable but certainly enormous consequences in every one of those areas, likely no less profound than those which followed the collapse of Roman authority outside of Greece and Anatolia over the 5th-8th centuries.

/r/history Thread Parent