How would technology possibly change this? Previously empires and power blocks had hard currency (gold, silver etc), whereas now much of this is digitised/tokenized and centralised. The western dominance of global finance is also unprecedented (?) in its reach.
Russia's inability subdue Ukraine in a timely manner and US et als destabilising campaign WW is highly effective. Eg Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America. The US and it's juniors don't need to be completely resilient if they can sow chaos abroad and at home?
Last time the US tried to conquer and rule was in Iraq. And it failed. So now, all they are able to do is to sow dissent. It is what they did in Syria. And what they did between Ukraine and Russia. And it's indeed less and less effective as Russia, instead of collapsing as expected, strengthened its links with the other continental powers....
I don't think Iraq can be described as a failure. True, they do not control it in it's totality as perhaps they would have liked to, however they control the oil fields , fund a range of armed groups who keep the area distabilized. Syria is now controlled by alphabet soup supported puppets and Russia is leaving the region.
But every previous hegemon has done the same things, but has fallen from Olympus. The point is to be able to unite the country to overcome economic difficulties, which none of the previous hegemons ever did.
You've probably right, the degree of retardation within Western bureaucracy is possibly without precident and setting the scene for my magnificent fall.
My concern is the sheer fluidity of global capital. It is supranational. The nation state has been hollowed out with placeholders who's single purpose is to serve transnational corporations and elites. This is true of all nations imho. The geopolitical pantomime is predominantly spectacle. Capital can reside in any country it chooses.
I come to Russia every year, including from 2022. I'm in Russia at the moment actually. And I've seen the mood change from 2022 to a mood of increasing national cohésion. There is the historical base, especially remembering WWII of course to help that mood grow. But it's not just that, it seems to go way deeper.
So I can definitely relate to your description about the resilience of Eurasian empires.
I have a couple of quibbles with this analysis. The maritime empires preceding America had no strategic depth or extensive resource base. If/when the US reversed from being a global hegemon its fallback position is continental hegemon. Secondly, the Eurasian empires of the past dominated sub regions and linkages between them were thin: East Asia (China), West Asia (Persians/Turks), and the subcontinent had regional empires buffered by the no man's land of central Asia and Siberia before the Russians consolidated that landmass. Ocean doesn't have to subdue all these regional formations in order to win, they merely have to "nudge" them into not getting along, which is the naturalmorder if things given Asia's over population and resource needs.
I suspect the Land Empires ability to project their power is not symmetrical to their ability to absorb/reflect/reform from the actions of other powers. The same I suspect applies to Sea Powers.
Could USA power retreat into becoming a Land Power again (19th century version of itself)? It could but would likely give up portions of it's international sea power.
I actually agree with both of you. USA started as a land empire on a steppe frontier (I wrote a lot about it in War and Peace and War). Then, after 1945 it transmogrified into a Sea Power. And now, if "isolationists" have their way, it can retreat back to being a continental power. This would actually be a good outcome for the 90%, or even 99% of Americans.
Ibn Khaldun once wrote quite well about the reasons for the rise and fall of ruling dynasties. A similar scheme probably applies to empires (which may not coincide with specific dynasties). When the stage of the life cycle of an empire or a modern political system is determined by both external circumstances (external environment) and internal ones, of which the quality and effectiveness of the political and economic elite, its management skills, are decisive. Let's try (in a simplified way) to imagine and formalize such an "imperial cycle":
Stage I. Constructive adaptation - the beginning of the cycle, a young, united and solidary elite, ready to consciously limit its interests and small in number. Policy is flexible and adaptive, experience is gained, new management models and decisions are adopted.
Point of superiority. The system is maximally effective in comparison with objects of the external environment.
Stage II. Constructive expansion. The elite is growing in size, but negative personnel selection has not yet gained strength, social elevators and social mobility are in effect. The system begins to develop new resources and territories, doing so primarily in a peaceful, trade and economic way, and exerts cultural and humanitarian influence.
The "plateau" or "Stagnation" point (Long live Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in the USSR!). The elite has grown, cut off communication channels with the rest of society. Outwardly, the empire looks formidable and powerful, but a wave of ineffective political and economic decisions is growing. The new generation of "boyar's children" lacks honor, glory, and prestigious positions. The creative function of the elite is greatly reduced, and managerial competencies are disappearing. "Negative selection" dominates in staffing. In such a system, the suppression of dissent is greatly increasing, but the overall level of violence is low.
Stage III. Destructive expansion. The overproduced elite lacks resources. The bosses do not have enough subordinates, and the feudal lords do not have enough peasants. The elite is fragmented, internal struggle is growing, "counter-elites" and a greater number of "superfluous people" appear. The easiest way out is to send these people to expansion, to seize new territories, to another Crusade, Conquest, or to arrange the First World War, for example. The latter is especially relevant when several world empires approach this stage at once. It is this stage that Vladimir Lenin, for example, called "the aggravation of inter-imperialist contradictions." The level of violence is growing.
The point of "overstrain" or "imperial overstrain." The system does not have enough resources, primarily because of their irrational use. It loses the competition to the external environment (other systems).
Stage IV. Destructive adaptation (crisis). What we call "civil war", "Trouble", then "revolution". Radical simplification, primitivization of political and economic life. Catastrophic growth of violence. A war between opposing social groups claiming power and elite status. If we take Russia as an example, this is 1914-1917, with some assumptions - 1989-1993. In the USA, this is the conditional period of 1861-1865.
The point of death/restart of the system. The empire either dies or is reborn, but with a new (victorious) elite, based on a new ideology.
Stage Ia. Constructive adaptation.
Of course, the scheme is still very conditional, but it can be formalized and used to study history and global forecasting if we model the interaction of several "empires" or "political systems" using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm - like the MADDPG algorithm or its analogue with a decentralized "actor-critic" model. What if we additionally place inside each AI agent that makes decisions for one “empire” an additional algorithm capable of changing its architecture and code? According to the principle of the so-called “Darwin-Godel machine”, which Japanese researchers from SAKANA.AI recently tried to implement.
We can try to train such a model on Seshat: Global History Databank, CNTSDATA and other databases.
Probably, “imperial cycle” settings will be required for different states and types from “maritime” to “continental” empires.
You can read about how my ideas were influenced by Ibn Khaldun in War and Peace and War. As to your proposal above, my team is in process of doing something similar, except (1) we have an explicit theory that has been translated into mathematical models and ABMs, (2) I prefer to use human intelligence rather than artificial one, as AI is a long way from matching anything that a good scientist can do, and (3) the time scale of data in Seshat is too coarse (with a time step of a century) and we are extending the Databank by increasing sampling rate of key variables.
Ibn Khaldun really has a strong influence! "War and Peace and War" is scheduled for reading this weekend.
I have not worked with Seshat databases, but I have studied CNTSDATA. From my limited experience in predictive film analytics, I see the following scheme: 1. Using the simplest ensemble models like XGBoost to predict the fact of an event (revolution, other crisis) 2. Extracting "model weights" and creating meta-features based on them corresponding to a particular political theory. If I am not mistaken, together with Goldstone, we already have five generations of revolution theory. 3. Then test these features. 4. Then create a multi-agent deep learning algorithm with reinforcement like MADDPG or MAPPO, modeling the relationship between several political actors within one state or the interaction between several states in order to calculate the probabilities of revolutions and military conflicts, their duration and consequences.
Artificial intelligence is unlikely to replace a good scientist in the near future, and will rather allow many to “become stupid”. But still, the future belongs to hybrid human-machine intelligence. It is worth trying to retrain a modern LLM using LoRA, prompting or other methods on real historical data (both quantitative and textual), so that it can make a forecast, classify future events, and derive their probability. Of course, in the case of LLM, we are faced with the phenomenon of a “black box” and the consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Unlike a conventional machine learning algorithm, LLM is difficult to interpret, it is not clear “what is under the hood”. And it is limited in generalization to new data. It would be very interesting as an outside observer to get acquainted with the official and published results of your team's research, perhaps I will be able to offer a couple of productive ideas.
Plutocracy was very well described by Mancur Olsen in “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (1982).
He basically attributed Germany’s and Japan’s post WW II rise to the fact that special interest groups (eg the fascist industrialists) were broken up. This again gave newcomers opportunities and while politics focused more on the general public as traditional special interest groups were rare. Italy, the US or the UK did not experience anything like that.
Ironically, we witness the return of special interest group policies to a degree not seen in the West for 80 years–little permeability into the upper classes and therefore true innovation.
For Finland and other countries in Eastern Europe, the Mirror Empire effect works the other way round.
Finland is not an empire and there will be no imperiogenesis of cource but the understanding is clear. If we do not protect ourselves from Russia and instead let polarization of the type USA/Germany/France take over, we will not exist as a nation. There is no room anymore for the appeasement policy (Finlandization). Putin wants more than Finlandization. He wants to end our nation and annihilate our culture.
Pretty much possible we do not succeed. But at least we will try.
We succeeded in 1939 with "Talvisodan henki" (Spirit of the Winter War). Even if we had a Civil War in 1918, from the very outset of the war 1939, working-class Finns stood behind the legitimate government in Helsinki. Not the communist puppet regime (Quisling goverment) in Terijoki.
I would rather be a neighbor to the USA and probably a huge majority of Finns and Estonians do, but I understand people, e.g. in Latin America, see things in their own way based on their own experiences. I do not want be murdered, I do not want my son to die in a war against Russia, a war they are at least planning.
But as for us all, the knowledge on Russia and the USA is not 100% accurate for the people in Latin America, either.
Circumstances change. I was working with Finns 1987-1989, when the Soviet Union was next door and they were doing very well by doing all the hi-tech which the Russians could not do for themselves.
This piece offers a compelling reminder: history doesn't just explain the present—it often predicts it. The resilience of Eurasian empires like China, Iran, and Russia isn’t an accident but part of a recurring historical pattern. In contrast, maritime powers such as the United States tend to rise fast—and fade faster. The central argument is bold: the more pressure the West applies, the more likely Eurasia is to consolidate and grow stronger. It’s an uncomfortable message, but a necessary one if we want to truly understand today’s global balance of power.
Let’s not overlook the invention of “pants”. Most people traditionally wore robes, not the best thing for horseback riding, unless u wanna go sidesaddle.
Outsourcing Empire by Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman is a history of company states. They sought profit from trade not hegemony. Military conflict and administration of trading ports was an expense they hated. They had no qualms about displaying submission to the Mughal Emperor or Native American fur traders or African slave traders in order to do business without conflict. The disintegration of the Mughal empire was a business disaster for the East India Company. Inter European competition became ruinously expensive everywhere but Hudson Bay. Hegemony became too expensive and without monopoly profits it wasn’t worth fighting for.
Peter’s conclusion seems to be just that. If he’s right, perhaps the simplest explanation is that “gunboat” hegemony is inherently less stable than “iron-horse” hegemony, being rooted in control of the sea rather than the land. Just a thought
Keep in mind that "antifragile" were only the agrarian empires on steppe frontiers. The imperial confederations of pastoralists were quite fragile and their cycles of consolidation and fragmentation were much shorter. I've written about such Ibn Khaldun cycles a lot in several publications, including War and Peace and War.
Greetings Peter, I’ve been following your work for a little while, and I really appreciate the depth you bring to these topics.
I explore something similar, but from a slightly stranger angle: forgotten travel narratives, old geographies, and the ideas they obscured from modern history.
My latest piece dives into an obscure book that records giant beings with a clarity that raises more questions than it answers.
If that kind of thing interests you, here’s the link:
It is also worth noting that maritime empires can be quite resilient. The British Empire survived major external threats in the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, World War One and World War Two.
I would like to actually test the hypothesis that Eurasian empires reconstruct themselves and Maritime empires don't. China has often been fragmented while India has usually been fragmented.
I am working on compiling the data needed to test this as a byproduct of a project I am working to create annual GDP figures by polity.
Astute article! Long time fan of Mr. Turchins bigger picture analyses. I was wondering whether with the rise of railway transport (in addition to recent geopolitical coordination and alignment), resources could be moved across the Eurasian heartland at a much faster rate than using maritime transport. Perhaps this could force another reversal in global power dynamics?
I have recently written a post on the recent historical reversal of the Eurasian steppe‘s impact (instead of invading from the heartland, pushing outwards, since the Great Game, the outer rim has been encroaching inwards). Perhaps we are approaching another tipping point, leading to another reversal?
You see, when the West applies pressure, it expects fracture.
But pressure, in the Eurasian core, becomes myth,
and myth becomes state again.
How would technology possibly change this? Previously empires and power blocks had hard currency (gold, silver etc), whereas now much of this is digitised/tokenized and centralised. The western dominance of global finance is also unprecedented (?) in its reach.
Russia's inability subdue Ukraine in a timely manner and US et als destabilising campaign WW is highly effective. Eg Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America. The US and it's juniors don't need to be completely resilient if they can sow chaos abroad and at home?
One can see it the other way around.
Last time the US tried to conquer and rule was in Iraq. And it failed. So now, all they are able to do is to sow dissent. It is what they did in Syria. And what they did between Ukraine and Russia. And it's indeed less and less effective as Russia, instead of collapsing as expected, strengthened its links with the other continental powers....
I don't think Iraq can be described as a failure. True, they do not control it in it's totality as perhaps they would have liked to, however they control the oil fields , fund a range of armed groups who keep the area distabilized. Syria is now controlled by alphabet soup supported puppets and Russia is leaving the region.
But every previous hegemon has done the same things, but has fallen from Olympus. The point is to be able to unite the country to overcome economic difficulties, which none of the previous hegemons ever did.
You've probably right, the degree of retardation within Western bureaucracy is possibly without precident and setting the scene for my magnificent fall.
My concern is the sheer fluidity of global capital. It is supranational. The nation state has been hollowed out with placeholders who's single purpose is to serve transnational corporations and elites. This is true of all nations imho. The geopolitical pantomime is predominantly spectacle. Capital can reside in any country it chooses.
I come to Russia every year, including from 2022. I'm in Russia at the moment actually. And I've seen the mood change from 2022 to a mood of increasing national cohésion. There is the historical base, especially remembering WWII of course to help that mood grow. But it's not just that, it seems to go way deeper.
So I can definitely relate to your description about the resilience of Eurasian empires.
I haven't been to Russia since before the SMO, but I see the same shift.
I have a couple of quibbles with this analysis. The maritime empires preceding America had no strategic depth or extensive resource base. If/when the US reversed from being a global hegemon its fallback position is continental hegemon. Secondly, the Eurasian empires of the past dominated sub regions and linkages between them were thin: East Asia (China), West Asia (Persians/Turks), and the subcontinent had regional empires buffered by the no man's land of central Asia and Siberia before the Russians consolidated that landmass. Ocean doesn't have to subdue all these regional formations in order to win, they merely have to "nudge" them into not getting along, which is the naturalmorder if things given Asia's over population and resource needs.
The next big hegemon will be the one who controls space, and controls the moon. Whoever does that will control the Earth.
I suspect the Land Empires ability to project their power is not symmetrical to their ability to absorb/reflect/reform from the actions of other powers. The same I suspect applies to Sea Powers.
Could USA power retreat into becoming a Land Power again (19th century version of itself)? It could but would likely give up portions of it's international sea power.
I actually agree with both of you. USA started as a land empire on a steppe frontier (I wrote a lot about it in War and Peace and War). Then, after 1945 it transmogrified into a Sea Power. And now, if "isolationists" have their way, it can retreat back to being a continental power. This would actually be a good outcome for the 90%, or even 99% of Americans.
Ibn Khaldun once wrote quite well about the reasons for the rise and fall of ruling dynasties. A similar scheme probably applies to empires (which may not coincide with specific dynasties). When the stage of the life cycle of an empire or a modern political system is determined by both external circumstances (external environment) and internal ones, of which the quality and effectiveness of the political and economic elite, its management skills, are decisive. Let's try (in a simplified way) to imagine and formalize such an "imperial cycle":
Stage I. Constructive adaptation - the beginning of the cycle, a young, united and solidary elite, ready to consciously limit its interests and small in number. Policy is flexible and adaptive, experience is gained, new management models and decisions are adopted.
Point of superiority. The system is maximally effective in comparison with objects of the external environment.
Stage II. Constructive expansion. The elite is growing in size, but negative personnel selection has not yet gained strength, social elevators and social mobility are in effect. The system begins to develop new resources and territories, doing so primarily in a peaceful, trade and economic way, and exerts cultural and humanitarian influence.
The "plateau" or "Stagnation" point (Long live Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in the USSR!). The elite has grown, cut off communication channels with the rest of society. Outwardly, the empire looks formidable and powerful, but a wave of ineffective political and economic decisions is growing. The new generation of "boyar's children" lacks honor, glory, and prestigious positions. The creative function of the elite is greatly reduced, and managerial competencies are disappearing. "Negative selection" dominates in staffing. In such a system, the suppression of dissent is greatly increasing, but the overall level of violence is low.
Stage III. Destructive expansion. The overproduced elite lacks resources. The bosses do not have enough subordinates, and the feudal lords do not have enough peasants. The elite is fragmented, internal struggle is growing, "counter-elites" and a greater number of "superfluous people" appear. The easiest way out is to send these people to expansion, to seize new territories, to another Crusade, Conquest, or to arrange the First World War, for example. The latter is especially relevant when several world empires approach this stage at once. It is this stage that Vladimir Lenin, for example, called "the aggravation of inter-imperialist contradictions." The level of violence is growing.
The point of "overstrain" or "imperial overstrain." The system does not have enough resources, primarily because of their irrational use. It loses the competition to the external environment (other systems).
Stage IV. Destructive adaptation (crisis). What we call "civil war", "Trouble", then "revolution". Radical simplification, primitivization of political and economic life. Catastrophic growth of violence. A war between opposing social groups claiming power and elite status. If we take Russia as an example, this is 1914-1917, with some assumptions - 1989-1993. In the USA, this is the conditional period of 1861-1865.
The point of death/restart of the system. The empire either dies or is reborn, but with a new (victorious) elite, based on a new ideology.
Stage Ia. Constructive adaptation.
Of course, the scheme is still very conditional, but it can be formalized and used to study history and global forecasting if we model the interaction of several "empires" or "political systems" using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm - like the MADDPG algorithm or its analogue with a decentralized "actor-critic" model. What if we additionally place inside each AI agent that makes decisions for one “empire” an additional algorithm capable of changing its architecture and code? According to the principle of the so-called “Darwin-Godel machine”, which Japanese researchers from SAKANA.AI recently tried to implement.
We can try to train such a model on Seshat: Global History Databank, CNTSDATA and other databases.
Probably, “imperial cycle” settings will be required for different states and types from “maritime” to “continental” empires.
You can read about how my ideas were influenced by Ibn Khaldun in War and Peace and War. As to your proposal above, my team is in process of doing something similar, except (1) we have an explicit theory that has been translated into mathematical models and ABMs, (2) I prefer to use human intelligence rather than artificial one, as AI is a long way from matching anything that a good scientist can do, and (3) the time scale of data in Seshat is too coarse (with a time step of a century) and we are extending the Databank by increasing sampling rate of key variables.
Ibn Khaldun really has a strong influence! "War and Peace and War" is scheduled for reading this weekend.
I have not worked with Seshat databases, but I have studied CNTSDATA. From my limited experience in predictive film analytics, I see the following scheme: 1. Using the simplest ensemble models like XGBoost to predict the fact of an event (revolution, other crisis) 2. Extracting "model weights" and creating meta-features based on them corresponding to a particular political theory. If I am not mistaken, together with Goldstone, we already have five generations of revolution theory. 3. Then test these features. 4. Then create a multi-agent deep learning algorithm with reinforcement like MADDPG or MAPPO, modeling the relationship between several political actors within one state or the interaction between several states in order to calculate the probabilities of revolutions and military conflicts, their duration and consequences.
Artificial intelligence is unlikely to replace a good scientist in the near future, and will rather allow many to “become stupid”. But still, the future belongs to hybrid human-machine intelligence. It is worth trying to retrain a modern LLM using LoRA, prompting or other methods on real historical data (both quantitative and textual), so that it can make a forecast, classify future events, and derive their probability. Of course, in the case of LLM, we are faced with the phenomenon of a “black box” and the consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Unlike a conventional machine learning algorithm, LLM is difficult to interpret, it is not clear “what is under the hood”. And it is limited in generalization to new data. It would be very interesting as an outside observer to get acquainted with the official and published results of your team's research, perhaps I will be able to offer a couple of productive ideas.
Plutocracy was very well described by Mancur Olsen in “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (1982).
He basically attributed Germany’s and Japan’s post WW II rise to the fact that special interest groups (eg the fascist industrialists) were broken up. This again gave newcomers opportunities and while politics focused more on the general public as traditional special interest groups were rare. Italy, the US or the UK did not experience anything like that.
Ironically, we witness the return of special interest group policies to a degree not seen in the West for 80 years–little permeability into the upper classes and therefore true innovation.
For Finland and other countries in Eastern Europe, the Mirror Empire effect works the other way round.
Finland is not an empire and there will be no imperiogenesis of cource but the understanding is clear. If we do not protect ourselves from Russia and instead let polarization of the type USA/Germany/France take over, we will not exist as a nation. There is no room anymore for the appeasement policy (Finlandization). Putin wants more than Finlandization. He wants to end our nation and annihilate our culture.
Pretty much possible we do not succeed. But at least we will try.
We succeeded in 1939 with "Talvisodan henki" (Spirit of the Winter War). Even if we had a Civil War in 1918, from the very outset of the war 1939, working-class Finns stood behind the legitimate government in Helsinki. Not the communist puppet regime (Quisling goverment) in Terijoki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Winter_War
I worked with Finns on tech for the Russians 1987-1989 and developed a very healthy respect for them.
The people I worked with knew very well how to “play” the Russians to their advantage.
They had nothing but contempt for Russia, but made sure the Russians didn’t know that.
I have never found “Finlandization” to be a plausible account of just how brilliantly the Finns played the Russians.
The people I knew used to ask rhetorically whether it was better to be Finland next door to Russia or Mexico next door to the USA.
I think we all know what the answer is 😉
Except that I do not know the answer? :)
I would rather be a neighbor to the USA and probably a huge majority of Finns and Estonians do, but I understand people, e.g. in Latin America, see things in their own way based on their own experiences. I do not want be murdered, I do not want my son to die in a war against Russia, a war they are at least planning.
But as for us all, the knowledge on Russia and the USA is not 100% accurate for the people in Latin America, either.
Circumstances change. I was working with Finns 1987-1989, when the Soviet Union was next door and they were doing very well by doing all the hi-tech which the Russians could not do for themselves.
This piece offers a compelling reminder: history doesn't just explain the present—it often predicts it. The resilience of Eurasian empires like China, Iran, and Russia isn’t an accident but part of a recurring historical pattern. In contrast, maritime powers such as the United States tend to rise fast—and fade faster. The central argument is bold: the more pressure the West applies, the more likely Eurasia is to consolidate and grow stronger. It’s an uncomfortable message, but a necessary one if we want to truly understand today’s global balance of power.
What about Phoenicia? Its the definition of a maritime empire.
Punic wars served as useful litmus tests
Let’s not overlook the invention of “pants”. Most people traditionally wore robes, not the best thing for horseback riding, unless u wanna go sidesaddle.
Indeed!
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants/
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants-ii/
Outsourcing Empire by Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman is a history of company states. They sought profit from trade not hegemony. Military conflict and administration of trading ports was an expense they hated. They had no qualms about displaying submission to the Mughal Emperor or Native American fur traders or African slave traders in order to do business without conflict. The disintegration of the Mughal empire was a business disaster for the East India Company. Inter European competition became ruinously expensive everywhere but Hudson Bay. Hegemony became too expensive and without monopoly profits it wasn’t worth fighting for.
So, the eurasian empires have evolved to be antifragile.
Peter’s conclusion seems to be just that. If he’s right, perhaps the simplest explanation is that “gunboat” hegemony is inherently less stable than “iron-horse” hegemony, being rooted in control of the sea rather than the land. Just a thought
Keep in mind that "antifragile" were only the agrarian empires on steppe frontiers. The imperial confederations of pastoralists were quite fragile and their cycles of consolidation and fragmentation were much shorter. I've written about such Ibn Khaldun cycles a lot in several publications, including War and Peace and War.
Greetings Peter, I’ve been following your work for a little while, and I really appreciate the depth you bring to these topics.
I explore something similar, but from a slightly stranger angle: forgotten travel narratives, old geographies, and the ideas they obscured from modern history.
My latest piece dives into an obscure book that records giant beings with a clarity that raises more questions than it answers.
If that kind of thing interests you, here’s the link:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/the-history-of-giants?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios
It is also worth noting that maritime empires can be quite resilient. The British Empire survived major external threats in the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, World War One and World War Two.
I would like to actually test the hypothesis that Eurasian empires reconstruct themselves and Maritime empires don't. China has often been fragmented while India has usually been fragmented.
I am working on compiling the data needed to test this as a byproduct of a project I am working to create annual GDP figures by polity.
That would be interesting.
Astute article! Long time fan of Mr. Turchins bigger picture analyses. I was wondering whether with the rise of railway transport (in addition to recent geopolitical coordination and alignment), resources could be moved across the Eurasian heartland at a much faster rate than using maritime transport. Perhaps this could force another reversal in global power dynamics?
I have recently written a post on the recent historical reversal of the Eurasian steppe‘s impact (instead of invading from the heartland, pushing outwards, since the Great Game, the outer rim has been encroaching inwards). Perhaps we are approaching another tipping point, leading to another reversal?
https://open.substack.com/pub/deepnoetics/p/eruptions-from-the-heartland?r=wq55o&utm_medium=ios