English

The Half Life of Empire

A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits. And on the large scale, we have the long-term evolution of human societies — a scale so sweeping that the actions of individuals are as insignificant as the shifting grains of desert sand. The task of social science is to somehow connect these two scales — to show how the characters of history act on a stage that they do not fully control. Looking at the present political spectacle, it’s clear that the world order is changing. In a matter of months, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the US-led regime that reigned since the end World War II. But here is an interesting question: if Trump had not been re-elected, to what extent would things be different? The answer depends on our choice of scale. In a world without Trump, the eddies of small-scale history would surely be altered. There would be no ‘department of government efficiency’, for example. Nor would their likely be an unfolding US-led trade war. But on the scale of long-term history, many tides would remain the same. Chief among them would be the i

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