Empires on the edge of chaos

This year, on the 200th anniversary of Lachlan Macquarie’s appointment as the Governor of New South Wales, it is appropriate that the annual Centre for Independent Studies John Bonython Lecture should have an imperial theme.

Just 10 years after Macquarie’s death, American painter Thomas Cole produced one of the great visual representations of the life cycle of an empire titled The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings that now hang in the New York Historical Society. They depict:

• The Savage State
• The Pastoral State
• The Consummation of Empire
• Destruction
• Desolation

The message is clear: All empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall.

That is precisely what we have been raised to think of the historical process – as an essentially cyclical one. This approach has a long tradition in Western civilisation, stretching back more than 2,000 years.

Yet it is possible that this whole cyclical framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole’s artistic representation of imperial birth, growth and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process.

What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic – at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organised, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid.

Regardless of whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority – either a hereditary emperor or an elected president – but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides.

As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems, including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognised because of our addiction to cyclical theories of history.

This is an extract from Professor Niall Ferguson’s John Bonython Lecture given on Wednesday July 28 2010.