as some past setbacks indicate, these technical advances do not make continued progress inevitable: most notably, the first half of the 20th century saw a significant retreat from economic globalization and hence also from the accompanying international movement of people. The reasons for this retreat are obvious, as the decades were marked by an u

Despite Rome’s dominance of technology and population, the political stability of the Roman Empire waned over time. In 285 CE, the Roman emperor Diocletian divided the rule of the vast empire between the Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Byzantium, later Constantinople, and the Western Roman Empire ruled from Rome. While the governance of the Roman E

The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the

The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly.