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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

The first that comes to mind is the Ottoman empire. World power in the 1600-1700s, but it failed to develop the institutions mentioned in this article and fell to Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Britain over the latter half of the 1800s.

Lithuania. Largest country in Europe in the 14th century. Lost large sections of its territory to Sweden and Russia in the late 1600s and 1700s.

All of the Native American nations that were swept aside by the United States. Much of that was because of disease, but a lot was also because the U.S. was better organized and could pick off individual tribes one-by-one.

Mongolia. Genghis Khan's empire, once one of the largest on earth. Great fighters, poor administrators. Eventually overshadowed by China.

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Agree with you on all but the last example; I think the Mongol Empire was one of the marvels of human history, in terms of sheer size and coordination. It succeeded in uniting friendly tribes and warring tribes alike by allowing them to retain their cultural traditions and self-administrate, so long as it didn't violate Mongol law.

Unfortunately, the government that developed was mostly a dictatorship, and as usual it was relatively short-lived once some key family members died off and left an opportunity for others to squabble.

I think the other thing is that governments rot: almost every state begins cohesive and ends decadent. The Mongols went from cohesive to decadent in less than a generation; the North African groups that ibn Khaldun lived among tended to last 2-3 generations; the western Roman Empire lasted somewhere around 1400 years.

The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.

Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.

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