The Age of Empires

The concept of Empire has its roots in the limited means of production in the agricultural society: land and trade, in that order, were the basis of power and indeed survival. Tribute sustained and greatly stimulated economies with relatively little effort on the part of the conquerors (this factor, due to complacency, tends to ultimately lead to their fall). For that reason, the idea of Empire through conquest has had an almost primitive hold on political activity for the last 3000 years, only really dying – or perhaps evolving – in the 20^th AD. Empires die for a great many reasons, chiefly that they became politically, militarily, economically and even culturally unsustainable. Their deaths are more frequently the result of implosion than shrinkage. But their growth is a large part of what occupies us in the study of history, and tends to frame much of the content we find of most interesting in history. The ancient empires will be explored in this section