Declines, falls and greater rises (c. 3200BC - c. 500AD)

The empires faced common problems associated with maintaining huge armies and supporting a central bureaucracy. These costs fell most heavily on the peasantry, while land-owning magnates increasingly evaded centralised control and its costs. Barbarian pressure on the frontiers hastened internal dissolution. China's Han Empire fell into civil war in 220 CE, while its Roman counterpart became increasingly decentralized and divided about the same time. The great empires of Eurasia were all located on temperate and subtropical coastal plains. From the Central Asian steppes, horse-based nomads (Mongols, Turks) dominated a large part of the continent. The development of the stirrup, and the breeding of horses strong enough to carry a fully armed archer, made the nomads a constant threat to the more settled civilizations.

The gradual break-up of the Roman Empire, spanning several centuries after the 2nd century CE, coincided with the spread of Christianity westward from the Middle East. The Western Roman Empire fell under the domination of Germanic tribes in the 5th century, and these polities gradually developed into a number of warring states, all associated in one way or another with the Roman Catholic Church. The remaining part of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, would henceforth be the Byzantine Empire. Centuries later, a limited unity would be restored to western Europe through the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 962, comprising a number of states in what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy, and parts of France.

In China, dynasties would rise and fall but, by the sharp contrast to the Mediterranean/European world, the Great Unity would be restored. After the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the demise of the Three Kingdoms, nomadic tribes from the north began to invade in the 4th century, eventually conquering areas of Northern China and setting up many small kingdoms. In 581 the Sui Dynasty successfully re-unified the whole China and laid the foundation for the Chinese golden age under the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Over the course of history, polities have tended to develop by accretion or by takeover, variously amicable or hostile, and have often disintegrated. The histories even of now small countries often show earlier periods of imperialist expansion. The Roman Empire is merely one of the more memorable and paradigmatic examples of political expansion and contraction. The Chinese Empire is an example of political expansion and persistence, Empire which recovered from all falls and declines and broke the Eurocentric paradigm of inevitable imperial fall.

HISTORY