The years of rice and salt

Imagine a world without Europe. A vanguard of the Mongol horde rides west across the steppe, into an eerily silent world. People lie dead in villages and in the streets of towns. The Black Death has struck Europe. There are virtually no survivors. Into this empty land pour merchants, warlords and refugees, from China, India and the Arab nations. They fill a world without the ancestors of Columbus and Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein and Hitler. Nothing will ever be the same again. From that day forward, history is shaped by the East instead of the West.