this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
63 points (95.7% liked)
Asklemmy
51663 readers
427 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A global hegemon on the scale of the British and then US empire is kind of a blip historically though — it's not obvious that another state will continue in the same role
There were many empires throughout the history. Of course there were very few at the scale of your examples. We didn’t had internet or ability to fly and sail bunch of tanks across thousands of kilometers within days. But history shows that intend was always there
You can't separate imperialism from its economic basis. The ability for a country to take on the mantle of empire post-US is extremely mitigated. Imperialism isn't a magical force but a material process.
'intent' is a bit of a devious notion in this context though, isn't it? Whose intent?
We didn't have these when the current global power structure was established. We didn't have AK-47S either, and much of the world had yet to industrialize. It was a very specific context.