Hint: China was in charge of things for thousands of years, its dynasties and empires made anything in the west look feeble, compared to Chinas history the USA is not even in the game.
It's a snippet in history when talking about the dominance of the coastal European empires. Western Europe started to come into power in the renaissance, when all the technology was finalized for square rigging and gunpowder. Colonialism + slave trade. It's just perfect timing and unique wealth. Dominant for a few hundred years, along with France, Spain, etc, because of gunpowder and ships.
But, colonies rebel, and gunpowder + wooden ships only works when the colonies were chilling with sticks and stones. That all fades, and it spanned about a quarter of the Roman Empire, so if global dominance is the subject than that might be attributed to Italy. Regardless, today they are not even taken into consideration in the contest of superpowers.
Territorial empires always fall, homogeneous cultures endure. That's why colonizers like to eradicate existing cultures. It's also why they rarely keep those colonies. The Romans kept theirs 4x longer at least.
They were rarely unified under a strong enough government, and the few times they were, they weren’t driven to explore and conquer because they had expansive territory and natural territorial barriers (mountains, deserts, etc…). The closest they may have been able to was around 1400 with the Ming dynasty and Zheng, but they focused on tributaries and inward because the massive size of the empire they thought expansion would destabilize them
Yep the Ming sailed to Africa with their blue water navy hundreds of years before the West achieved the same size of ships. They came back and burnt the ships - they could have expanded but they didn’t see the point.
It wasn’t that they didn’t see the point, they saw it as destabilizing. They had a massive expanse of land already, and history had shown that overreaching would cause fracturing of what they already had. Cb
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u/mattreyu 4d ago
from City of God to Cyberpunk 2077