In modern history, four great empires have risen and fallen: Ottoman, Mughal, Qing China and British. A fifth stands at its apogee but also at a precipice: the United States. Can America’s fall be foretold? Crucially, why do empires rise and fall?
The Ottomans were at the forefront of global science and medicine for six hundred years. Their decline was gradual. The Ottomans ruled over a vast swathe of Eurasia — from Spain and Portugal in the west and the Balkans in eastern Europe to Africa in the south and Central Asia in the east.
By 1924, it was all over. Defeated in World War I, the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished. Only the Ottomans’ rump, Türkiye, remained.
The Mughal Empire in India rose and fell because it was debauched, destructive and divided. The British Empire replaced it, conquering province by Indian province, till India became Britain’s milch cow. India’s vast resources and markets fuelled the Industrial Revolution and built Britain’s infrastructure.
Just as the First World War spelt the death knell of the Ottomans, World War II hastened the end of the British Empire. Exhausted and in deep debt, Britain could no longer hold on to the colonies it had exploited for centuries.
What now for the American Empire? As the world’s hegemon, the seeds of America’s steady decline have been sown. US President Donald Trump has divided America into two mutually hostile ideologies. He has befriended Chinese President Xi Jinping, leaving the Pacific hemisphere to China’s geopolitical jurisdiction while shrinking American influence to the Western hemisphere. In effect, that means the two Americas, North and South.
Europe has been cast adrift. NATO no longer counts as the world’s most formidable military alliance. The Middle East is simply lucrative real estate to be monetised by the extended Trump family.
The US was built on three centuries of free slave labour and free Native American land. Prosperity under such circumstances was guaranteed. And yet the United States was ravaged for over a hundred years after independence in 1776 by infighting, poverty, illiteracy, disease and conflict.
As recently as the 1920s, white-hooded Ku Klux Klan mobs lynched Black Americans at will. There was law but, for Blacks, no enforcement.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression gripped America. The stock market crashed 75 per cent. Hundreds of distraught Americans committed suicide. Wall Street traders jumped off New York’s skyscrapers.
While the Second World War had driven the British Empire to bankruptcy and exhaustion, it did the exact opposite to the US. It was a lifeline.
US factories churned out weapons, munitions, tanks, ships and fighter jets, helping to end the Great Depression. By the end of World War II, as Europe lay prostrate and Asia and Africa under colonial rule, America emerged as the hegemon of the free world.
But America’s global ascent hid deep divisions at home. Black Americans were still not allowed to vote freely in the southern states. Schools and restaurants practised segregation till the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed into law.
President Trump has turned the clock back to the openly racist decades of the mid-20th century. It could signal the beginning of the end of American hegemony.
But like all other destitute empires of the past — Ottoman, Mughal, Qing and British — America’s decline will be gradual. The rise of Asia, led by China and India, will restore the world to the era before colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the massacre of indigenous people in the Americas and Australia.
As I wrote in my new book, Era of India: From Impoverished Colony to the World’s Third Largest Economy, a 400-year-long tide has turned: “In 2050, the world will be integrated economically in a way we could have scarcely imagined a generation ago. Two of the world’s three largest economies will be Asian: China and India. In 1950, two of the world’s three largest economies were European: Britain and the Soviet Union. The third, and the biggest, the US, comprised an overwhelming majority of people of European descent. In 2030, for the first time in over 300 years, there won’t be a European country among the world’s three largest economies. That is a lesson history teaches nations.”
“Only one of the three Great Powers of 2050 — India — will have the unique distinction of achieving pre-eminence without violating the integrity of other territories as European nation-states did on their way to global power. Europe’s contribution to democracy for itself and dictatorship for its colonies sits uneasily with the violence it inflicted on its Asian and African possessions.”
“Could Europe have achieved its level of technological, cultural, political and economic development without the critical mass of resources from the colonies that fuelled the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s? It was only after the era of colonialism and transatlantic slavery began, followed by the Industrial Revolution, that Britain and the rest of Europe wrenched themselves out of relative poverty and frequent plagues, creating within 200 years modern, wealthy societies across Europe and North America.”
“Did the means justify the ends? Was European colonialism in Asia and Africa and the brutal centuries-long transatlantic slave trade to the Americas justified by the wealth it brought to the West and the order it imposed on the rest? The balance of global power in 2050 will have shifted decisively. History teaches us that, eventually, nations rise and fall to their natural level.”
“If Western wealth and power came at the expense of other peoples and other nations, what does natural justice require? Germany was forced to pay reparations for both world wars. It has still not recovered its cultural self-confidence even though it is Europe’s largest economy. Britain has escaped both reparations and opprobrium. The English pillaged around the world for three centuries on a scale dwarfing Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch colonial atrocities and slavery. Britain has not — yet — paid the price.”
(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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