Shifting Global Power, 500 CE to Present: Introduction

We can see the historic pattern of shifting global power by looking at one nation: China. From the powerful Han Dynasty over two thousand years ago through the Opium Wars of the 1800s, where the British navy humiliated the Chinese, destroying their fleet and burning down the emperor’s palace, and from Mao Zedong’s 1949 Communist revolution to present, China seems to have come full circle in terms of global power–going from a powerhouse as great as the Roman Empire to a near-colony of the European powers and reemerging again to become one of the most powerful nations on earth. I wonder where the balance will be one hundred years from now (?). See chart below.

My point? The shifting power balance is a continuing concern, one that has had a profound impact on all of our lives (shaping the present in countless ways) and is likely to continue in the decades ahead. In other words, we are living through a power shift of historic proportions now. We can look at history to better understand this process.

Here is a recent New York Times article re: China’s new role in world affairs (click here).

We will trace this trend back to the Classical Empires, particularly the collapse of the Roman Empire and Han China. We will see how Islam under the Abbasid Dynasty expanded Islamic power; this was followed by the Mongols, and then the rise and fall of the European Empires and finally, during the Cold War, the emergence of two superpowers (the US and USSR). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has been the lone superpower; but that position in the world seems uncertain as the chart above shows.

Here are images of this process:

Rise of Islam after the fall of the Classical Empires

The Mongols

British Empire

Bi-Polar World/ US vs the USSR

Shifting Power Today

Where is the process going? We will examine the current debate about the balance of power in the world after we’ve traced the historic pattern of rise and fall of empires starting with Rome and Han China.

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