The eagle and the dragon. European disproportion and globalization in the sixteenth century is a historical comparison of the conquest of Mexico and China by the Spanish and Portuguese respectively. Through the analysis of forms of government, infrastructure, geography and society, Gruzinski confronts the two civilizations that had contact with the expansionist machinery of the Iberian Peninsula and through this comparison shows the reaction of each civilization against it. The author analyses how the Aztec eagle got knelt and how the Chinese dragon resisted before the Europeans and the implications that these reactions had for a global history of the XVI century.
