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One of most interesting things I have found is all the Empires, in the old sense of word, has disappeared. Here I am talking about Empries like the Mongol Empire or the British Empire not like the American Imperialism/world policeman type empires.
For most of the world's history has had Empires as the power and large nations of the day. It possibly started in the 24th BC with the Akkadian Empire. Many different empires grew and disappeared over next 4000 years. Most of these Empires thrived on conquering new lands and expanding as means of power. Then after WWII, in 1945, last of the empires fell apart.
Today what you have is independent nations who attempt to trade with each other. Power is usually gained through trading and maybe the threat of military force. But you don't see countries going out to conqueror and annex another nation as a part of their Empire.
Why is it now that all the large land Empires has disappeared into history?
Was the old form of Empires just not possible to keep up in modern times?
One of most interesting things I have found is all the Empires, in the old sense of word, has disappeared. Here I am talking about Empries like the Mongol Empire or the British Empire not like the American Imperialism/world policeman type empires.
For most of the world's history has had Empires as the power and large nations of the day. It possibly started in the 24th BC with the Akkadian Empire. Many different empires grew and disappeared over next 4000 years. Most of these Empires thrived on conquering new lands and expanding as means of power. Then after WWII, in 1945, last of the empires fell apart.
Today what you have is independent nations who attempt to trade with each other. Power is usually gained through trading and maybe the threat of military force. But you don't see countries going out to conqueror and annex another nation as a part of their Empire.
Why is it now that all the large land Empires has disappeared into history?
Was the old form of Empires just not possible to keep up in modern times?
The US, China, Russia, India, Brazil are empires in every sense of the word. They just have Presidents and not Emperors.
The US, China, Russia, India, Brazil are empires in every sense of the word. They just have Presidents and not Emperors.
One of my main points was these countries are different that old Empires. They go conqueror and annexing news lands to grow. Instead of they take part in trade and get richer.
Also, these country mostly composed of the same people. US might be most multi-cultural but not like old empires. Before British ruling various African tribes, Indian subcontinent (with Hindus and Muslims), etc.
The US, China, Russia, India, Brazil are empires in every sense of the word. They just have Presidents and not Emperors.
I disagree. In all of those examples, the bulk of the present day territory consists of lands that have, for centuries before, been occupied by people who had a common cultural identity.
In the case of the USA, it was once a part of the British, French or Spanish empire, and was converted into a nation with an internal identity, free of the influence of empires. Similarly, Brazil.
China today, and for a very long time, has been simply "the place where the Chinese people live", and in no sense of the word is an Empire. Except for Tibet, there has been no territorial expansion at all for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, outside the traditional lands of the Chinese. The fact that all Chinese live under a unified governance does not make it an empire.
the US just took over from the british but they are one in the same since I would call US, Canada, Uk and Australia are all contected. the US is the most poweful nation that leads the westren world and NATO & EU hold 80% of the worlds wealth, resoruces and military power and influnece.
the US is the leader of the westren world and NATO/EU if faced with WW2 type situation would have a huge force that would be of epic size. I mean WW2 was not about money it was about stopping the world from being taken over from nazi germany on the atlantic to the japanese on the pacific they were closing in on us and threated to cut north america off from europe, asia and north africa.
as the west goes we are losing some influence but china is not able to take over simplt because they don't know how to create new technolgy and only copy american, japanese, EU and russian designs they don't innovate anything. so it limits them in what they can do and that will prevent them from become a modren empire plus they don't have enough resources to create the advaced infastucture, factories for R&D and porduction that we have. since just to build a Gerald R. Ford class super aircraft carrier it takes alot of materials, advanced technology and energy to create and they just have the manpower.
China today, and for a very long time, has been simply "the place where the Chinese people live", and in no sense of the word is an Empire. Except for Tibet, there has been no territorial expansion at all for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, outside the traditional lands of the Chinese. The fact that all Chinese live under a unified governance does not make it an empire.
To a large extent, but China does have some internal divisions. There are several languages in China that natively spoken by millions of speakers (part of the reason they can't abandon a character based writing system since a lot of these languages use the same written symbols which does help unify people across languages). Many people in the Muslim areas of China
do want to break away and form separate nations. China has a lot of ethnic groups with not insignificant populations, and this last is an important one as China's great success has been in getting so many people from their ethnic minorities to adopt the belief that they are Han Chinese in far larger numbers than objective studies would bear out. Thus they have no need to desire their own nation-state as they believe China is their nation-state.
All that said I think China and Russia are great examples of empires that have survived this long because they were able to create empires that were largely culturally homogenous although in Russia.
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