History

The first genuinely global war — fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa and India. Britain wins Canada and effective control of Bengal, becoming the dominant maritime empire. Both winner and loser end enormously in debt, and that debt is the fuse for slots 3 and 4.

Coal, steam and cotton compound: cheap energy makes cheap cloth, cheap cloth funds more machinery. Britain has the coal, the capital from slot 1, and the legal framework. This is the era's economic engine and it runs underneath every other slot.

Britain tries to make the colonies pay for slot 1 and the colonies refuse. The break matters less for the territory than for the claim: that legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed, written down and successfully defended. It becomes the template every later independence movement cites.

France is bankrupt from slot 1 and from funding slot 3. Calling the Estates-General to fix the finances instead reopens the question of who rules, and within months the Bastille falls and feudal privilege is abolished. The nation, not the king, becomes the unit of sovereignty.

Enslaved people in France's richest colony take the Declaration of the Rights of Man literally. The only large-scale slave revolt in history to found a state, independent in 1804 — and the reason the revolutionary claim could not be quarantined to Europeans. France's response, and the indemnity it later extracted, shape Haiti to this day.

Revolution under foreign invasion and internal revolt turns to emergency government — the Committee of Public Safety, mass conscription, and tens of thousands executed. The lesson later revolutions take from it, in both directions, is that a revolution defending itself becomes something else.

The coup of 18 Brumaire ends the Republic's parliamentary phase. Napoleon keeps the revolution's administrative content — legal equality, the Civil Code, careers open to talent, metric measures — and discards its politics. That combination is what actually exports across Europe.

The same year runs both ways: the revolution's heir takes a crown in Paris while the revolution's most literal reading founds a black republic in the Caribbean. Napoleon takes the crown from the Pope's hands to signal that legitimacy now comes from the nation, not the Church.

Napoleon deposing the Spanish king removes the legitimacy the colonies were governed by, and creoles govern in the king's name until they stop bothering. Bolivar and San Martin convert the vacuum into a continent of republics by the mid-1820s — the largest transfer of sovereignty in the era.

The settlement tries to put the era back in its box — restore legitimate monarchies, balance the powers, suppress nationalism and liberalism. It succeeds at preventing a general European war for a century, and fails completely at suppressing the ideas, which resurface at slot 12.

Britain abolishes slavery across most of the empire, having ended the slave trade in 1807. Driven by evangelical campaigning, slave resistance across the Caribbean, and the fact that industrial Britain no longer needed the plantation model as badly. Compensation went to the owners, not the enslaved — a debt Britain finished paying in 2015.

Revolutions across France, the German and Italian states, Austria and Hungary, on demands for constitutions, national self-determination and suffrage. Almost all are defeated within eighteen months. But the demands do not go away — they are absorbed by states and delivered from above in era 10, which is why unification happens by Bismarck rather than by barricade.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conquest paid for itself in loot and slaves; defence did not. Once the frontier settled roughly on the Rhine, Danube and Euphrates, the army became a permanent cost with no income attached, so the empire had to fund it out of taxation instead of plunder.

Emperors met the shortfall by raising taxes and debasing the silver coinage. Debasement drove inflation, inflation drove tax collection in kind rather than coin, and collection in kind tied producers to their land and trade to local exchange.

Because the army was the only institution that could pay itself, and legions learned they could install an emperor who would reward them. Legitimacy moved from the Senate to whichever field army acted first, so the throne changed hands roughly every two years through the Crisis of the Third Century.

One man could not hold frontiers on the Rhine, Danube and Persian border at once, and every absent emperor invited a usurper. Splitting command put an emperor near each threat. It solved the military problem and created a permanent institutional seam between east and west.

The east held the richer tax base — Egypt, Syria, Anatolia — and a shorter, more defensible land frontier behind Constantinople's walls. The west had longer borders, thinner revenue, and had to buy off or settle the peoples crossing them.

Short of money and manpower, the west settled Goths, Vandals and Franks as federates — allied peoples given land and pay in return for military service. Each settlement transferred tax revenue and armed force to a group that kept its own leaders, so the state progressively subcontracted itself out of existence.

Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and simply stopped appointing a western emperor, sending the imperial regalia east. Roman law, Latin, taxation and the Senate carried on under Germanic kings. Contemporaries did not experience it as an ending — the institutions decayed over generations, not in a year.

It was the one imperial-era institution with literacy, a diocesan structure mapped onto Roman provinces, and property that survived the tax system's collapse. As secular administration failed, bishops absorbed record-keeping, law, charity and negotiation with incoming kings.

With long-distance trade thinned and coinage unreliable, rulers could not pay soldiers in cash. They paid in land instead, granting estates in return for service. Power therefore attached to whoever physically held ground and the people working it.

Expansion stops, so defence must be taxed for; taxation debases the currency and localises the economy; the army becomes the kingmaker; the empire splits to hold its frontiers; the poorer west subcontracts defence to federates; imperial administration decays while the Church survives; without coin, service is paid in land; land-for-service, held personally rather than by the state, is feudalism.