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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, historical analogies are good mostly for suggesting possibilities you hadn't thought of. They don't prove anything.

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Empires having a rise and fall or increase/decrease in power/land is probably the most evidence supported grand narrative of history there is, although the specifics are always going to be different the general problems are perhaps universal (see also: The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter)

Maybe I'm missing what you're saying, but I think that by itself, the bare statement that "sometimes empires get larger and sometimes they get smaller" is about as useless as saying that stock markets fluctuate? But the reasons why it happened in various cases are often worth reading about. That's why we read history.

The trend is secular, so fluctuations are not the point.

"Things change" is unconvincing to me as a "grand narrative." More an evidence-supported obvious fact.

"Things change" is not the point, rather that empires always have a secular trend of expansion and eventually decline. I was responding to someone who claimed that historical examples don't prove anything, but this trend is as good as proven as one can get in history.

If they all started at zero and the ones that are no longer in existence end at zero, then roughly speaking, wouldn’t that have to happen?

But in slightly more detail, not every empire has ended, yet, if you count Russia and the Chinese as empires. Also, some empires have had declines that reversed again for a while, such as Byzantine Empire.

There are plenty of empires in history that have had growth trajectories far more complex than "rise -> final fall".

Of particular note is China, which made falling and then regaining territorial extent a practical sport.

By that logic, Europe, Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Byzantine Empire, Roman Empire, and whatever kingdoms that were there and in all of Europe during and before that are all one empire that kept rising and falling all the time.

The history of China is perhaps not the history of AN empire, but rather a bunch of states/kingdoms, some of which every now and then managed to subjugate their neighbors and build an empire, for a while.

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