What rises must fall. This seems to most of us almost as much a law in the field of geopolitics as it is in physics. Every western country that has ever won an empire or a superpower status for itself has lived with a consciousness of its own mortality. In Britain, which only a century ago ruled the largest agglomeration of territory the world has ever seen, we have particular cause. Back in , at the seeming pinnacle of the empire on which the sun never set, subject peoples from the across the world gathered in London to mark the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria.
Instead, it looked to the future in sombre and as it turned out prophetic terms:. Far-called our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! American self-confidence seems to have clawed back at least some lost ground since then. Nevertheless, pessimism remains the default setting at the moment in both the US and the west as a whole.
The title was an obvious riff on the ideal of the American dream; but the Chinese equivalent, it turns out, is as much about drawing sustenance from the past as about looking to the future. Unity at home, projection of strength abroad, the organic fusion of soft and hard power: these, according to the colonel, are in the DNA of Chinese greatness.
How does he know this? Why, by looking to ancient history — and specifically to the example of Qin Shi Huangdi, the so-called First Emperor, who back in the 3rd century BC united China, embarked on the Great Wall, and established a template of leadership that even Mao admired.
It is as though US commentators, trying to plot a course ahead for their country, were to look to Caesar Augustus as an exemplar.
The reason they would never do that is obvious. The US, for all that it has a Senate and a Capitol, is self-consciously a young country, planted in a new world.
But China is old, and knows that it is old. Dynasties may have come and gone, waves of barbarians may have washed over it again and again, the emperor himself may have been replaced by a general secretary — but no rupture such as separates Barack Obama from ancient Rome divides Xi Jinping from the First Emperor.
There is a taste here, perhaps — just the faintest, most tantalising taste — of a counterfactual: one in which Rome did not fall. That China was able to survive conquest by the Mongols and the Manchus demonstrates just how deep the roots of a civilisation can reach. What about the Romans in the heyday of their empire: did they have the same kind of confidence in the permanence of their empire the Chinese have always had? And if they did — what happened to that confidence?
People in antiquity were certainly aware that civilisations could rise and fall. It is, in a sense, the great geopolitical theme of the Bible.
In the Book of Daniel, the prophet dreams that he sees four beasts emerge in succession from a raging sea; and an angel explains to him that each beast represents a kingdom. Gold and purple, in the Bible, are cast as merely the winding-sheets of worldly greatness. The Greeks, too, with the example of the sack of Troy before them, were morbidly aware how impermanent greatness might be.
Herodotus, the first man to attempt a narrative of how and why empires succeed one another that did not look primarily to a god for its explanations, bookends his great history with telling passages on the precariousness of civilisations. I will pay equal attention to both, for human beings and prosperity never endure side by side for long.
Then, in the very last paragraph of his history, he provides what is, in essence, the first materialist theory as to why civilisations should succeed and fail. The Persians, having conquered a great empire, want to move from their harsh mountains to a richer land — but Cyrus, their king, forbids it. Implicit in his narrative, written at a time when Athens was at her peak of glory, is a warning: where other great powers have gone, the Athenians will surely follow.
The Romans signalled their arrival on the international stage by fighting three terrible wars with a rival west Mediterranean people: the Carthaginians. At the end of the third war, in BC, they succeeded in capturing Carthage, and levelling it to the ground. Nevertheless, it is said of the Roman general who torched Carthage that he wept as he watched her burn and quoted lines from Homer on the fall of Troy.
Then he turned to a Greek companion. In Spain, there are excellent examples of the influence that the Berbers and Moors, both tribes associated with the Arab Empire, had on the architecture, with the fantastic mosques and castles in various regions of the nation.
Structures built by Arabs found themselves influenced by local peoples in places like Africa, where both conquerors and conquered peoples built structures in slightly modified traditional ways.
Rome had similar experiences. The Roman Empire left its mark all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East with their baths, which were centers for public health and for socialization.
Some of these baths are still in use today. The concept may have led to our modern-day spa. However, one of the most famous Roman edifications, the Roman road, did not start out Roman at all. The art of road building came to the Romans from the Etruscans, another people in Italy, which Rome conquered and fell to over the period of the Roman kingdom and republic.
Greek literature had a great impact on Roman literature and mythology, literature that later had an impact on the medieval and modern worlds. Both these tales come to the modern world through various translations. The Odyssey and the Aeneid are classic journey stories that some modern novelists look to for inspiration.
Not only did the Iliad have an impact on the literature of Rome and the modern world, it also had an impact on the mythology of Rome. In the Aeneid , Virgil writes:. Predestined exile, from the Trojan shore To Italy, the blest Lavinian strand.
And from her hills wide-walled, imperial Rome. The Roman Empire in the West can be dated from 27 B. It ended when Constantinople was established as a rival capital with the death of the Emperor Theodosius in , making a total of years. The Roman Empire in the East can be dated from then until, at the latest, the sack of Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks in , a total of 1, years.
The Holy Roman Empire — the successor to the Western empire — lasted from , when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans, until Napoleon ended it in The "average" Roman empire therefore lasted years. Such calculations, though crude, allow us to compare the life spans of different empires. The three Roman empires were uncharacteristically long lived. By comparison, the average Near Eastern empire including the Assyrian, Abassid, and Ottoman lasted a little more than years; the average Egyptian and East European empires around years; the average Chinese empire subdividing by the principal dynasties ruled for more than three centuries.
The various Indian, Persian, and West European empires generally survived for between and years. After the sack of Constantinople, the longest-lived empire was clearly the Ottoman at years. The East European empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries.
The Mughals ruled a substantial part of what is now India for years. Of an almost identical duration was the reign of the Safavids in Persia. It is trickier to give precise dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, because these had multiple points of origin and duration. But the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires can all be said to have endured for roughly years. The life span of the Portuguese empire was closer to The empires created in the 20th century, by contrast, were comparatively short.
Technically, the Third Reich lasted 12 years; as an empire in the true sense of the word, exerting power over foreign peoples, it lasted barely half that time. Only Benito Mussolini was a less effective imperialist than Hitler. Why did the new empires of the 20th century prove so ephemeral?
The answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control, and social homogeneity to which they aspired. The new empires that arose in the wake of the First World War were not content with the successful but haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old empires, including the messy mixtures of imperial and local law and the delegation of powers and status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; these were more like "empire states" than traditional empires.
The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures.
They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler accused the British of excessive softness in their treatment of Indian nationalists.
The empire states of the midth century were to a considerable extent the architects of their own downfalls. In particular, the Germans and Japanese imposed their authority on other peoples with such ferocity that they undermined local collaboration and laid the foundations for indigenous resistance. That was foolish, as many people who were "liberated" from their old rulers Stalin in Eastern Europe, the European empires in Asia by the Axis powers initially welcomed their new masters.
At the same time, the territorial ambitions of these empire states were so limitless — and their combined grand strategy so unrealistic — that they swiftly called into being an unbeatable coalition of imperial rivals in the form of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Empires do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to unite against them. Publicly, the leaders of the American and Chinese republics deny that they harbor imperial designs. Both states are the product of revolutions and have long traditions of anti-imperialism. Yet there are moments when the mask slips. Even if they do not, it is still perfectly possible for a republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in denial about its loss of republican virtue.
The American empire is young by historical standards. Its continental expansion in the 19th century was unabashedly imperialistic.
Yet the comparative ease with which sparsely settled territory was absorbed into the original federal structure militated against the development of an authentically imperial mentality and put minimal strain on the political institutions of the republic.
Virgin Islands, which remain American dependencies, U. During the course of the 20th century, the United States occupied Panama for 74 years, the Philippines for 48, Palau for 47, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands for 39, Haiti for 19, and the Dominican Republic for 8.
The formal postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan continued for, respectively, 10 and 7 years, though U. Troops were also deployed in large numbers in South Vietnam from , though by they were gone. This pattern supports the widespread assumption that the U. Empire — especially unstated empire — is ephemeral in a way that makes our own age quite distinct from previous ages.
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