End of Empire

It is, perhaps, more accurate to simply say the age of empire building is likely over. It has become exceeding difficult to build an empire. By empire I mean the worse type if dictatorship where the majority of people have few rights and are exploited for the benefit of a few. It is also more accurate to say Putin and Jinping are very unlikely to succeed at establishing empires. Even so they may try and in so trying cause much suffering.

The claim that the classic style of political empire building has ended can be demonstrated in a few graphs. The graph to the right shows how many empires were operating in any given year.

Wikipedia lists 840 empires that have existed. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires.) The graph to the right shows how many existed in a given year. The time scale is from 12,000 years ago to the present. The first empire started 9,000 years ago.The maximum number operating concurrently was 58. The number of empires was growing at an exponential rate and them in the middle of the 20th century they all disappear. What happened is easy to see. They were replaced with the nation-state based upon a constitution. This is clear in the next graph.

If we plot the number of empires existing in a given year and do the same for nations, it is clear what has happened. The nation state simply replaced empire. Note the change in time scale, 1600 to the present. We can see more detail during the transition.

If we change from counting numbers of empires and states to population or land area ruled, we get the same pattern.

This tells us what happened. Why it happened is more complex. The organizational structures we use are part of a complex evolutionary system. For the nation state to have replaced the empire, it must provide a greater survival benefit. Political power elites who followed the empire plan lost in the competition for survival. What is it about a nation state that provides this advantage? The only thing I have found in the Star Bright Civilization Simulation that can drive this transition is the increasing complexity of society. The benefits of the industrial-technological-scientific complex are better achieved with the more distributed decision making of the nation state versus the empire.

Empires are forged by military might and the taking of wealth from the loser. Today’s military capability requires an increasingly strong commercial and technology capability. The nation state with its relatively free market has demonstrated a greater capacity for managing the complexity of this environment. As the Civilization Sim is further developed there will likely be more to say on this subject.