The Global Tapestry (c. 1200–1450)
What you must know
Between 1200 and 1450 the world contained several thriving, differently organized states rather than a single system. In China, the Song and then the Yuan and early Ming built a bureaucracy staffed by examination-selected scholar-officials, legitimated by Confucian revival and the Mandate of Heaven, with printing, gunpowder and Champa rice supporting a commercialized economy. The Abbasid Caliphate fragmented into successor states even as Islam expanded through merchants, Sufi missionaries and scholars across Africa and the Indian Ocean; the Delhi Sultanate ruled much of South Asia with a Muslim minority and Hindu majority, mixing jizya taxation with cultural borrowing. Mali and later Songhai drew wealth from trans-Saharan gold and salt, with Mansa Musa's pilgrimage advertising that wealth; Swahili city-states, Great Zimbabwe and the Hausa cities linked interior production to coastal trade. Mesoamerican and Andean states ran on tribute and corvée labor - the Aztec tribute system, Inca mit'a and quipu records, Maya city-states - without the coin economies of Eurasia. Europe developed manorial feudalism, the three-field system, rising towns and a powerful Latin Church. Japan's shogunate rested on a comparable lord-vassal arrangement but with a different logic.
Traps
Do not treat "feudalism" as one thing: European vassals received land in exchange for military service, while Japanese daimyō owed loyalty tied to honor, bushido and the shogun's grant of authority. Do not assume Islamic expansion in Africa or Southeast Asia came primarily from conquest - merchants and Sufis did more. Do not confuse the Inca mit'a (labor obligation) with similarly named Mesoamerican tribute systems. Watch "all" and "only" phrasing.
Worked example
Asked to compare political centralization in Song China and feudal Europe, first name the mechanism - exam-based bureaucracy versus decentralized vassal armies - then the consequence: merit recruitment versus hereditary landholding.