A Concise History of the Global Empire

Like all past empires, the Global Empire has gone through its parable of growth and glory and is now starting to decline. There is not much we can do about it; we must accept that this is how the universe works.

For everything that exists, there is a reason, and that's true also for that gigantic thing that we sometimes call "The West" or perhaps "The Global Empire." To find that reason, we may examine its origins in an older but similar empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did), "Geography is the mother of Empires." So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. It was kept together by a "Lingua Franca,” Latin, and by a financial system based on coinage, in turn based on the availability of gold and silver mined from the Empire’s mines in Spain. More than all, it was based on a powerful military system created by the Roman wealth.

Like all empires, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction: the limited amount of its mineral resources. Roman gold and silver were used to pay not just for the legions but also for expensive commodities coming from China that the Empire couldn’t produce in its territory. As long as the Romans could keep producing precious metals, the amounts lost to China to pay for silk and spices didn’t matter so much. But that couldn’t last forever, and the mines’ production peaked during the 1st century CE. From that moment onward, the Empire was bleeding gold. In a couple of centuries, the impoverished Empire couldn’t pay any more for its huge military apparatus. It could only collapse, and it did. It started sliding down along the “Seneca Cliff” in the second century AD, disappearing forever by the 5th century AD.

There came the time we call the "Dark Ages," a misnomer if ever there was one. With the old Empire gone, Northern Europe was building a new civilization that exploited some of the cultural and technological structures inherited from Rome and developed original ones. Cultural unity was ensured by Christianity and by using Latin as the Lingua Franca that allowed Europeans to understand each other. The Middle Ages were a period of intelligent adaptation to difficult conditions where art and literature flourished.

During the Middle Ages, the European population and the European economy were growing together, exploiting a relatively intact territory. Soon, the gentle civilization of the early Middle Ages gave way to something that was not gentle at all. With the turn of the millennium, Europe was overpopulated, and Europeans started looking for areas where to expand. The Crusades were the first attempt, but were an expensive failure. The military effort of the Crusades had to be supported by the main economic resources of the time: forests and agricultural land. Both were badly overstrained, and the 14th century was an age of famines and pestilences that nearly halved the European population. It was bad enough that we may imagine that the descendants of Sultan Salah ad-Din, the conqueror of Jerusalem, could have stricken back and conquered Europe had they not been stabbed in the back by the expanding Mongol empire.

The European Population: graph from William E Langer, "The Black Death" Scientific American, February 1964, p. 117.

But Europeans were stubborn and kept using the trick they knew to rebuild after a disaster: patterning new structures on the old ones. They were good warriors, skilled shipbuilders, excellent merchants, and always willing to take risks in order to make money. They kept doing what they were good at doing. If the Crusades had shown that they couldn't expand East, why not expand West across the Atlantic Ocean? It was a wildly successful idea.

Europeans imported gunpowder technology from China and used it to build fearsome weapons. With their newly mastered gunnery skills, they created a new kind of ship, the cannon-armed galleon. It was a dominance weapon: a galleon could sail everywhere and blast away all opposition. A century after the great pestilence, the European population was growing again, faster than before. And, this time, the Europeans were embarking on the task of conquering the world.

Over a few centuries, Europeans behaved as worldwide marauders: explorers, merchants, pirates, colonists, empire builders, and more. But who were they? Europe never gained political unity, nor did it embark on an effort to create a politically unified empire. While fighting non-European populations, Europeans also fought each other for the spoils. The only supranational governing entity they had was the Catholic Church, which was an obsolete tool for the new times. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church was not anymore a keeper of relics, it was a relic itself. The final blow to it came from the invention of the printing press, which enormously lowered the cost of books. That led to a market for books written in vernacular language, which was the end of Latin as a European lingua franca. The cultural unity of Europe was broken forever.

As a result, the European states jumped at each other's throats, engaging in the "30-year war" (1618 – 1648). Half of Europe was laid waste; plagues and famines reappeared; food production plummeted down, and with it, population. Europeans were not just fighting against each other in the form of warring states. European men were fighting against European women: it was the time of witch-burning, and tens of thousands of innocent European women were jailed, tortured, and burned at the stake. With its forests cut and the agricultural land eroded by overexploitation, the age of the European world empire could have ended in the 17th century. It didn’t.

Europe seemed to have an incredible capability of bouncing back from the worst disasters and a nearly miraculous event saved it again from collapse. The event had a name: coal. It was extracted first in England, and then all over Central and Northern Europe. Coal could be used instead of wood to smelt metals and make weapons. This saved the European forests that could be used to build warships to ferry armies overseas to conquer new lands and enslave their inhabitants. The slaves would then cultivate plantations and produce food to be shipped to Europe. It was the time when the British developed their habit of tea in the afternoon: the tea, the sugar, and the flour for the cakes were all produced in the British plantations overseas.

The European population restarted growing during the 18th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the feat of conquering the world was nearly complete. The 20th century saw a consolidation of the entity we can now call the "Western Empire," with the term "West" denoting a cultural entity that by now was not just European: it encompassed the United States, Australia, South Africa, and a few more states, including even Asiatic countries such as Japan. In 1905, Japan gained space among the world powers by force of arms at the naval battle of Tsushima, soundly defeating a traditional European power, Russia. From a military viewpoint, the Western Empire was a reality. There remained the need to turn it into a political entity. All empires need an emperor, but the West didn't have one, not yet, at least.

The final phase of the building of the Western World Empire took place with the two world wars of the 20th century. Those were true civil wars fought for imperial dominance, similar to the civil wars in ancient Rome at the time of Caesar and Augustus. Out of these wars, a clear winner emerged: the United States. After 1945, the Empire had a common currency (the dollar), a common language (English), a capital (Washington DC), and an emperor, the president of the United States.

The only rival empire left, the Soviet Empire, collapsed in 1991, leaving the American Empire as the sole dominant power in the world. That was seen as proof of the American Empire's inherent goodness. Then, Francis Fukuyama wrote his "The End of History" (1992), correctly describing the events he witnessed. Just like when Emperor Octavianus ushered in the age of the "Pax Romana," it was the beginning of a new golden age: the "Pax Americana."

But history never ends, and all empires carry the seeds of their own destruction. Just a few decades have passed from when Fukuyama claimed the end of history and the Pax Americana seems to be already over. Just like Rome had followed the decline of its gold mines, the West is following the decline of the fossil fuels it controls. Just as the ancient Silk Road was at the basis of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the nascent Belt and Road Initiative, sometimes referred to as the “New Silk Road,” will connect all the regions of Eurasia into a single commercial region. It may give a deadly blow to the Globalized dominance of the West.

But the Western Empire is not dead yet. It still has its wondrous propaganda machine working. The great machine has even been able to convince most people that the empire doesn't actually exist, that everything they see being done to them is done for their good, and that foreigners are being starved and bombed with the best of good intentions. It is a remarkable feat that reminds something that a European poet, Baudelaire, said long ago: "the Devil's best trick consists in letting you believe he doesn't exist." It is typical for all structures to turn nasty during their decline, and it happens even to human beings. So, we may be living in an "Empire of Lies" that's destroying itself by trying to build its own reality. Except that the real reality always wins.

And there we are today. Just like the old Roman Empire, the Western Empire is going through its cycle, and the decline has already started, even though, right now, it seems to be flaring in a fierce display of power and bloodlust. It may be the last convulsion of an Empire already in its death throes.

The Western Empire is not dead yet, but we could already hazard a moral judgment: was it good or bad? In a sense, all empires are bad: they tend to be ruthless military organizations that engage in all kinds of massacres, genocides, and destruction. The Western Empire provides us with many examples of wanton destruction, possibly the evilest one being the genocide of the North American Natives during the 19th century. But the extermination of civilians by aerial bombing of cities and that of ethnic minorities during WW2 were also impressively evil feats. And the (evil) Empire doesn't seem to have lost its taste for genocide: it is happening right now.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that Westerners are more evil than people belonging to other cultures. If history tells us something, it is that people tend to become evil when they have something to gain by doing so. So, all empires in history are more or less the same: they are temporary structures that grow and decline with the availability of the natural resources that created them. They are like waves crashing on a beach: some are large, some small, some do damage, and some just leave traces on the sand. The Western Empire did more damage than others because it was larger, but it was not something different.

The universe never moves smoothly, it is always going up and down, and, often, going through abrupt collapses, as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca noted long ago. But the Seneca Collapse is not the end of the world. If humankind can survive the climate disaster it is creating, the future may be a gentler and saner age than the current one. Or maybe there will be new large empires supposed to be eternal and whose rulers will see themselves as divinely appointed. But the universe will go on as it has always done.

On this subject, see also a previous post of mine, "Why Europe Conquered the World."