China, Russia, and Iran—what is the common denominator? Most obviously, they are the main geopolitical rivals of the United States today. As Ross Douthat recently wrote in an NYT opinion, Who Is Winning the World War?, “it’s useful for Americans to think about our situation in global terms, with Russia and Iran and China as a revisionist alliance putting our imperial power to the test.”
Today’s post is about a much less appreciated similarity, having to do with deep history of these Eurasian empires.
As I have argued in a series of publications over the past 20 years, and most comprehensively in the forthcoming book, the main driver of “imperiogenesis” (processes underlying the rise of empires) is interstate competition. The intensity of this competition, in turn, is dialed up by advances in military technologies. Each military revolution, thus, generates a set of mega-empires. Today we live in the historical shadow of two most consequential military revolutions.
The iron-cavalry revolution dates to about 1000 BCE. Although horse riding and iron smelting were invented independently (and in different regions, see the infographic below), by 500 BCE they were spreading together (for the spread maps, see Figures 2 and 3 in our article, Rise of the War Machines). And the detailed story of this military revolution and its profound effects on world history are in my book Ultrasociety.
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