Eras

The era spine

Twelve eras, twelve slots each — 144 addressable positions. Eras are sized by event density, not duration, and every boundary is a causal claim about when an organising condition broke.

01. Bronze and Iron c. 3500-500 BC

Bronze and Iron. Three thousand years, from the first cities to Persia. Irrigation makes a food surplus, the surplus feeds people who do not farm, and everything follows — writing, kings, priesthoods, law, empire. For most of it the tools of power are scarce and expensive: bronze needs long-distance tin, and scribal scripts need years of training, so both are monopolies. Then the Bronze Age Collapse clears the board, and iron and the alphabet make both cheap. Ends with Cyrus assembling the first multi-ethnic empire out of the much larger pool of armed, literate people that produced.

peg · A clock made of wet river mud with cuneiform for hours, and half its gears swapped out for cheap iron ones partway round the face.
  1. c. 3500 BCUruk and the urban package
  2. c. 3200 BCWriting is invented
  3. c. 3100 BCEgypt unified
  4. c. 2600 BCPyramids and the Indus cities
  5. c. 2334 BCSargon of Akkad — the first empire
  6. c. 1754 BCDrought, collapse and the written law
  7. c. 1350 BCChariots and the great-power club
  8. c. 1200 BCThe Bronze Age Collapse
  9. 1046 BCThe Zhou and the Mandate of Heaven
  10. c. 900 BCIron, the alphabet, and the machine empire
  11. c. 586 BCThe Axial Age and the portable faith
  12. 539 BCCyrus and the first world empire

02. The Classical Springs 500-200 BC

The Classical Springs. Three hundred years in which four separate traditions — Greek, Chinese, Indian and Roman — work out what a state is for and write the answer down. Small competing states plus cheap iron and cheap literacy produce an explosion of argument: democracy and the republic, the Hundred Schools, Socrates through Aristotle, the Arthashastra. Ends as three of the four are conquered into empires — Alexander's, Ashoka's and Qin's — by the biggest army in their neighbourhood.

peg · A clock with twelve philosophers arguing about what the hands mean, and a soldier quietly bolting the case shut around them.
  1. 508 BCCleisthenes, and the Republic
  2. 490 BCThe Greco-Persian wars
  3. 461 BCPericlean Athens
  4. 453 BCThe Warring States and the Hundred Schools
  5. 431 BCThe Peloponnesian War
  6. 399 BCSocrates, Plato, Aristotle
  7. 336 BCAlexander and the Hellenistic world
  8. 322 BCChandragupta and the Maurya empire
  9. c. 300 BCAlexandria and Hellenistic science
  10. 268 BCAshoka
  11. 221 BCQin unifies China
  12. 218 BCHannibal and the Punic Wars

03. Empires of the Old World 200 BC-AD 200

Empires of the Old World. The arguing stops and the empires start. Rome in the west and Han in the east each absorb everything within reach, linked by the Silk Road, and both discover the same two things: a road system that moves armies also moves ideas and germs, and an empire that has run out of frontier needs something other than conquest to hold itself together. Christianity is made portable in the middle of it. Ends when plague travels the trade road and both empires crack within a generation of each other.

peg · A marble clock on a paved road running the whole width of Eurasia, with a cough audible at both ends of it.
  1. 202 BCThe Han and the examined bureaucracy
  2. 141 BCHan Wudi and the Silk Road
  3. 133 BCThe Gracchi and the Republic's slow tearing
  4. c. 100 BCTeotihuacan and the Americas
  5. 44 BCCaesar, and the end of the Republic
  6. 27 BCAugustus and the Principate
  7. AD 9Teutoburg — the empire finds its edge
  8. AD 30Christianity becomes portable
  9. AD 70The Temple destroyed
  10. c. AD 78The Kushans and Buddhism's road into China
  11. AD 117Rome at its greatest extent
  12. AD 180The Antonine plague, and the first crack

04. The Age of Faith c. 200-1100

The Age of Faith. Nine hundred years in which religion, not the state, is the thing that crosses regions. The empires of era 03 fragment, and what replaces them is not a smaller empire but a different kind of institution — one that survives a state's collapse and then supplies what the state used to: law, learning, literacy, legitimacy, and enough shared trust for strangers to trade. Christianity, then Islam, then a Latin church that is the only pan-western institution left standing. Ends as that authority fractures into rival claimants, all of them religious.

peg · A clock in a monastery and a clock in a mosque keeping identical hours, neither owned by a king — and at the end, two abbots fighting over which one is correct.
  1. 235The empires crack, and the state hardens
  2. 313Constantine and the Christian empire
  3. 320Gupta India and the zero
  4. 410The Huns, and Rome sacked
  5. 476The West fades into successor kingdoms
  6. 527Justinian, and his plague
  7. 581Sui and Tang reunify China
  8. 622The Hijra, the conquests, and Karbala
  9. 750Abbasid Baghdad and the House of Wisdom
  10. 800Charlemagne, the Vikings, and the river road
  11. 960Song China, and the world's other centres
  12. 1054Christendom fractures

States founded here: San Marino 301, Bulgaria 681, France 843, Denmark 950, Poland 966, Hungary 1000

05. Connected Eurasia c. 1100-1400

Connected Eurasia. Eurasia knits together — Crusades, the Mongol conquests opening a single trade corridor from Korea to Hungary, Italian maritime republics, universities. Then the connection turns lethal: plague travels the same roads, and the Black Death kills perhaps a third of Europe. Ends with plague and Mongol collapse together, and with the Ming closing the road at the far end.

peg · A clock whose hands are trade roads, and something is riding along them in both directions.
  1. 1099The First Crusade
  2. c. 1140The twelfth-century renaissance
  3. 1187Saladin retakes Jerusalem
  4. 1204The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople
  5. 1206Genghis Khan, and the Delhi Sultanate
  6. 1215Magna Carta
  7. 1258The Mongols sack Baghdad
  8. 1271The Pax Mongolica
  9. 1291Acre falls
  10. 1324Mansa Musa's hajj
  11. 1347The Black Death
  12. 1368The Ming close the road

States founded here: Portugal 1143, Andorra 1278, Switzerland 1291, Monaco 1297

06. Oceans and Print c. 1400-1600

Oceans and Print. Two technologies change the scale of everything — ocean-going ships and movable type. Portuguese and Spanish expansion, the Columbian Exchange and the collapse of the American population, Ming treasure voyages and their abandonment, the Reformation carried by printed pamphlets, the Ottoman and Mughal peaks. The organising condition is that ideas and disease now cross oceans faster than authority can regulate them.

peg · A clock with a sail for a minute hand and a printing press for an hour hand, spinning much too fast.
  1. 1405Zheng He's treasure fleets
  2. 1415Portugal starts down the African coast
  3. c. 1440Gutenberg's press
  4. 1453Constantinople falls
  5. 14921492
  6. 1498Da Gama reaches India
  7. 1517Luther and the Reformation
  8. 1520Suleiman and the Ottoman peak
  9. 1521The fall of the American empires
  10. 1526Babur founds the Mughal empire
  11. 1543Two books and a mountain
  12. 1588The Armada, and the Atlantic shift

States founded here: Spain 1479, Sweden 1523, Netherlands 1581

07. Sovereigns and Science c. 1600-1750

Sovereigns and Science. The state hardens into the sovereign form — Westphalia, standing armies, taxation bureaucracies, public debt — while the scientific revolution establishes a method that does not defer to authority. The two are connected: the same century that decides truth is settled by evidence decides that borders are settled by treaty, and both are answers to a hundred years of killing over who gets to say. Chartered companies and Atlantic slavery pay for all of it.

peg · A clock in a marble hall, wound by a king, being quietly taken apart and measured by a man with a notebook.
  1. 1600The chartered companies
  2. 1610Galileo turns the telescope upward
  3. 1618The Thirty Years War
  4. 1644The Qing take China, and the general crisis
  5. 1648Westphalia
  6. 1649The English Revolution
  7. 1687Newton's Principia
  8. 1688The Glorious Revolution and the Bank of England
  9. 1707Aurangzeb dies and Mughal India fragments
  10. 1709Poltava — Peter turns Russia west
  11. 1713Utrecht and the Atlantic system
  12. 1740Enlightenment and enlightened despots

States founded here: Oman 1650, United Kingdom 1707, Liechtenstein 1719, Afghanistan 1747

08. Revolutions c. 1750-1850

Revolutions. Industrial, political and colonial revolutions inside a single century, each feeding the others: war debt triggers political revolution, revolution spreads the idea of the sovereign nation, and industry supplies the means — and is then turned outward, on China at the era's eleventh hour. Britain, America, France, Haiti, Latin America. Ends with 1848 — the wave that fails everywhere and thereby sets the terms for the next era.

peg · A clock on a factory wall, its glass cracked, with a tricolour tied to the pendulum.
  1. 1756The Seven Years War
  2. 1760The Industrial Revolution begins in Britain
  3. 1776The American Declaration of Independence
  4. 1789The French Revolution and the Terror
  5. 1791The Haitian Revolution begins
  6. 1799Napoleon seizes power
  7. 1804Napoleon crowns himself Emperor, and Haiti declares independence
  8. 1810The Latin American wars of independence
  9. 1815Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna
  10. 1833The British Slavery Abolition Act
  11. 1839The First Opium War
  12. 1848The Springtime of Nations

States founded here: Nepal 1768, Belgium 1830, Greece 1830, Luxembourg 1839

09. Empire and Nation c. 1850-1914

Empire and Nation. The two forces left over from 1848 — nationalism and industry — stop opposing the state and get absorbed by it. States deliver from above what the barricades demanded from below, and in exchange get conscript armies and taxable industry. Pointed outward, that combination produces the largest land grab in history. German and Italian unification, the scramble for Africa, Meiji Japan, the second industrial wave. Ends when the alliance system built to manage the rivalry executes itself in 1914.

peg · A clock made of steel and telegraph wire, with flags planted on every hour.
  1. 1851The Great Exhibition, and the Taiping
  2. 1857The Indian Rebellion
  3. 1859Darwin's Origin of Species
  4. 1861The American Civil War, and the serfs freed
  5. 1868The Meiji Restoration
  6. 1871German unification
  7. c. 1879The second industrial revolution
  8. 1884The Scramble for Africa
  9. 1885The colonised adopt the national form
  10. 1898America becomes an empire
  11. 1905Japan beats Russia
  12. 1911The Qing falls, and the alliances run

States founded here: Romania 1859, Italy 1861, Germany 1871, Norway 1905, Bhutan 1907, Albania 1912

10. The Thirty-One Years Crisis 1914-1945

The Thirty-One Years Crisis. Best read as one crisis with an interval, not two wars. Industrial capacity applied to killing, empires collapsing into revolution, an economic depression that discredits the liberal order, and ideologies built to replace it. Ends in 1945 with two superpowers, a ruined Europe, and nuclear weapons.

peg · A clock with only thirty-one hours on it, all of them at once, and the glass blown out.
  1. 1914The war begins
  2. 1916Total war, and the carve-up of the Ottoman lands
  3. 1917The Russian Revolution
  4. 1919Versailles, and the promise withheld
  5. 1922Fascism invented, and the Ottoman end
  6. 1929The Crash and the Depression
  7. 1933Two answers to 1929
  8. 1937The war starts in Asia
  9. 1939The Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland
  10. 1941The war becomes global — and total
  11. 1942Stalingrad and Midway
  12. 19451945

States founded here: Finland 1917, Austria 1918, Estonia 1918, Lithuania 1918, Latvia 1918, Ireland 1922, Turkey 1923, Vatican City 1929, Iraq 1932, Saudi Arabia 1932, Lebanon 1943, Iceland 1944

11. The Divided World 1945-1989

The Divided World. Two superpowers divide what is left, and find almost immediately that they cannot fight each other — so the contest runs through clients, coups, aid and rockets under a nuclear ceiling neither will break. Underneath it, the thing that moves the most people: the European empires are dismantled in twenty-five years and two thirds of humanity becomes independent, then is asked to pick a side and largely declines. Ends when one superpower decides not to send the tanks.

peg · A clock with two hands that can never touch, and a hundred small clocks around it being wound by whichever hand got there first.
  1. 1947Independence, Partition, and containment
  2. 19481948
  3. 1949Mao wins China, and Korea sets the pattern
  4. 1955Bandung and the non-aligned world
  5. 1956Suez, and Hungary
  6. 1957Sputnik and the space race
  7. 1960The Year of Africa, and the Pill
  8. 1962The Cuban Missile Crisis
  9. 19681968
  10. 1971The postwar economy breaks and re-forms
  11. 19791979 — three answers to the seventies
  12. 1985Gorbachev and the Soviet endgame

States founded here: Jordan 1946, Syria 1946, India 1947, Pakistan 1947, Israel 1948, Sri Lanka 1948, Cyprus 1960, Kuwait 1961, Malta 1964, Maldives 1965, United Arab Emirates 1971, Bangladesh 1971, Bahrain 1971, Qatar 1971, Iran 1979, Palestine 1988

12. The Networked World 1989-2020

The Networked World. The bipolar order ends and what replaces it is not a single power but a single network — capital, goods, people, disease and information moving faster than any state can regulate. The era's first half believes the network makes everyone converge on one model; its second half, from the financial crisis onward, is the discovery that it does not. Closes at 2020 by deliberate choice, because the condition has not visibly broken and an era boundary is a claim you cannot honestly make from inside.

peg · A clock with no hands, showing the time on a screen instead, and everyone in the world looking at the same one and reading it differently.
  1. 19891989
  2. 1991The Soviet Union dissolves
  3. 1992Globalisation institutionalised
  4. 1994Mandela, and Rwanda
  5. 1995The commercial internet
  6. 1997The limits of the nineties consensus
  7. 20012001
  8. 2003Iraq, and the genome
  9. 2007The iPhone
  10. 2008The financial crisis
  11. 2011The Arab Spring
  12. 2020The populist turn, and the pandemic

States founded here: Yemen 1990, Armenia 1991, Azerbaijan 1991, Belarus 1991, Georgia 1991, Croatia 1991, Kyrgyzstan 1991, Kazakhstan 1991, Moldova 1991, North Macedonia 1991, Russia 1991, Slovenia 1991, Tajikistan 1991, Turkmenistan 1991, Ukraine 1991, Uzbekistan 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992, Czechia 1993, Slovakia 1993, Montenegro 2006, Serbia 2006, Kosovo 2008