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. River Cities c. 3500-1200 BC

The first states form on irrigated floodplains — Sumer, Egypt, the Indus, Shang China. The organising condition is agricultural surplus large enough to feed people who do not farm, which produces writing, priesthoods, kings and standing armies. Ends with the Bronze Age Collapse, when the whole eastern Mediterranean palace system fails at once.

peg · A clock made of wet river mud, its hours scratched in cuneiform. Every hour drips.
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02. Iron and Alphabet c. 1200-500 BC

Collapse resets the board. Iron is common where bronze needed long-distance tin, so weapons and tools democratise; alphabets replace scribal scripts, so literacy escapes the palace. This is when the foundational religious and philosophical texts begin to be written down. Ends as Persia assembles the first genuinely multi-ethnic empire.

peg · An iron clock with letters instead of numerals — cheap, hard, and anyone can read it.
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03. Empires and Philosophers c. 500 BC-AD 200

Large states linked by roads, coinage and law — Persia, Greece, Alexander's successors, Rome, Maurya, Han. The organising condition is that an empire can move goods and orders faster than a rebellion can spread. Ends with the third-century crises hitting Rome and Han within a few decades of each other.

peg · A marble clock on a paved road, with a philosopher arguing with the hands about whether they really move.
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04. The Long Unravelling c. 200-700

The great empires fragment. Rome's west subcontracts itself out of existence, Han China splinters, steppe peoples move west, and religion institutionalises into the structure that outlasts the states — Christianity, then Islam. Ends as the Arab conquests settle into a new order.

peg · A clock coming apart, its gears being carried away one at a time by people who then use them to tell the time in their own villages.
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05. Faith as Order c. 700-1100

Where states are weak, religion supplies the transregional order — Abbasid Baghdad, Carolingian Europe, Tang and Song China, Viking and Rus networks. Law, learning, trade and legitimacy all run through religious institutions. Ends as commercial and military expansion resumes and states begin re-forming around it.

peg · A clock in a monastery and a clock in a mosque, both keeping the same hours, neither owned by a king.
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06. Connected Eurasia c. 1100-1400

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.

peg · A clock whose hands are trade roads, and something is riding along them in both directions.
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07. Oceans and Print c. 1400-1600

Two technologies change the scale of everything — ocean-going ships and movable type. Portuguese and Spanish expansion, the Columbian Exchange, Ming treasure voyages and their abandonment, the Reformation carried by printed pamphlets. 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.
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08. Sovereigns and Science c. 1600-1750

The state hardens into the sovereign form — Westphalia, standing armies, taxation bureaucracies, absolutism — while the scientific revolution establishes a method that does not defer to authority. Chartered companies and Atlantic slavery build the fiscal base. Ends as that base funds industrialisation and the sovereign form starts being challenged from below.

peg · A clock in a marble hall, wound by a king, being quietly taken apart and measured by a man with a notebook.
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09. Revolutions c. 1750-1850

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. 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 begins
  5. 1791The Haitian Revolution begins
  6. 1793The Terror
  7. 1799Napoleon seizes power
  8. 1804Napoleon crowns himself Emperor, and Haiti declares independence
  9. 1810The Latin American wars of independence
  10. 1815Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna
  11. 1833The British Slavery Abolition Act
  12. 1848The Springtime of Nations

10. Empire and Nation c. 1850-1914

The two forces left over from 1848 — nationalism and industry — combine into the nation-state and then into empire. German and Italian unification, the scramble for Africa, Meiji Japan, the second industrial wave of steel, chemicals and electricity. 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.
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11. The Thirty-One Years Crisis 1914-1945

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.
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12. Divided and Networked 1945-present

A bipolar order, then a networked one. Decolonisation across Asia and Africa, the Cold War fought through proxies under a nuclear ceiling, the computing and container-shipping revolutions, 1989 and after, and the arrival of problems — climate, pandemics, information flow — that are structurally beyond any single sovereign state.

peg · A clock with no hands, showing the time on a screen instead, and everyone in the world is looking at the same one.
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