All The World's A Stage ..

Partially borrowing from Shakespeare's verses in, "As You Like It", the original metaphor was, of course, referring to the fate and fortune of men and women on their birth and death - entering and exiting the stages of life. 

And we can also say, "All the world’s a stage, And all the" empires of men  "merely players; They have their exits and their entrances" .. referring to the emergence and collapse of empires at various places around the globe in just the last four thousand or so years.

This is a lightning fast look at history.  Our world, a tiny dot afloat and confined in a tiny space of an endless universe,  contains only a finite area of land and sea that historians euphemistically call the theaters of war. Indeed, "the world's a stage" for human conquest after conquest, followed by collapse after collapse - disintegrating into ashes in one place, followed by birth and emergence in another.

As much as we try to make sense of a world that seems to be always on the brink of plunging into conflict, always on the verge of a chaotic future, its past history - replete with pages that are easily the lesson plan for us to learn from - is merely a reminder that it will only repeat, as it had time and time again, into an endless loop.

We hear about existential threats from a lot of sources or for any number of reasons but "wars and rumors of war", quoted from from the New Testament's Matthew 24:6, had been and will always be the most alarming of all fears.

Why we are not learning from history is one mystery we may never be able to answer. And here we are; but how did we get here? What is the reason for this quick historical summary? If we are not able to learn from history, nations today, including the USA, must prepare for the inevitable.  Readers, you be the judge.

About 2,300 years before Christ's birth was when the first "formally" recognized empire begun. The Akkadian Empire arose from the region we know today as Iraq. As trajectories of empires go, that empire collapsed to be followed by others but always from another region.  The Hittite empire came into being in what is now Turkey, in 1600 B.C. The Assyrians from northern Iraq took it all back about three centuries later. Around that time, or maybe two generations later Rome was founded in 750 B.C.

Persia, what is now Iran, had its turn but not for very long, as historical timeline goes, when the Greeks defeated its army in the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. So much fighting went on in that region until Alexander The Great put an end to the fighting when, true or not, he cried when there was no more kingdom to conquer - at age 30 or so.  But the lull lasted only for so long.

But "the glory that was Greece" was put aside by "the grandeur that was Rome".  There was war after war, bloodshed and carnage, when just before half a century before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar put the exclamation point to what was to be the Roman Empire.

Many more empires came and went by way of more bloodshed, wars and conquest, that produced a list of many more empires.  Some were regional in scope as to not have expanded beyond neighboring border kingdoms. 

Past civilizations, if we must call them that, were molded out of empires expanding and contracting - an empire rising as another is collapsing.  It was a zero sum game.  It had been the rule.  Whenever one empire rose, it was always at the expense of another.

After Alexander's death, the Greek empire shattered into pieces, divvied up among several of his generals.

From among those pieces, from India to Africa and Europe rose several pretenders to absolute rulership. From what is now Tunisia, a Carthaginian general named Hannibal ventured out of Africa into Europe via Spain, over the Alps with his famous elephants, but he failed to take Rome. Out of that came more battles but it was from that when another empire begun. Europe and  across the English Channel and through the Middle East and Africa, about three centuries B.C., saw the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire.

In 395 A.D. the Roman Empire split into two.  The western empire collapsed entirely while the eastern part became the Byzantine empire.  It ended in 1071 A.D.

Filling the void were the Gupta empire in India and several others came out of the Middle East. The Moors invaded Spain in 711 A.D. but were stopped in their tracks by the Franks in 732 A.D.  A good part of Western Europe consolidated under Charlemagne. Almost three hundred years after his death the crusaders ventured into the middle east and captured Jerusalem. Four generations later the Moors under Saladin recaptured it.

While the so-called religious war was going on, the Far East consolidated their various factions and from that arose Genghis Khan who united the Mongols to form a huge empire. Their mastery of the horse and archery while on horseback exemplified rapid and sweeping deployment of the so called Mongol horde that swept across Northern China, then India.  History repeated again but before such an empire collapsed, the Mongols managed to invade Russia, all the way to Hungary and Poland, where it retreated upon the death of Ogedei, one of Genghis Khan's sons. An attempt to re-consolidate was made by invading Southern China but the failure to conquer Japan sealed the Mongol empire's fate into oblivion.

In 1325 A.D. in what later became the Americas, the Aztec empire rose to dominate that continent, albeit in complete isolation from the rest of the world.  Meanwhile, the Ottoman empire from the region of what is now Turkey put an end to the Byzantine empire.  

Out of Europe, separate kingdoms took to the sea with sailing ships.  Ships replaced marching armies over land and in the name of exploration, Spain, England, France, Portugal and the Dutch set sail to the seven seas.  Explorations turned to colonization of the "new world" and places never before visited by land-bound armies of old.  The British empire colonized North America, some Caribbean islands, all the way to Australia and New Zealand and some Pacific islands.  The Dutch were traders but they did have Indonesia and Aruba.  Portugal took a chunk of South America in Brazil.  But the most prolific colonizer of them all was Spain.

Cortes conquered the Aztecs in Mexico, Pizzaro bested the Incas.  Magellan went to Asia and claimed the Philippines, so named in honor of King Felipe (Philip) of Spain.  Portugal may only have one colony in South America but Brazil is about half the continent.

Eleven of the twelve sovereign countries, all to the west, from Venezuela to Chile and Argentina, and all in between speak Spanish and an amalgam of native languages, a little of English, French and Dutch.  Portuguese is, of course, spoken in Brazil.

Extending that region to include Mexico and the Caribbean, lumping them altogether into what is generally known as Latin America, the original Spanish colonies included Cuba and Puerto Rico.  That is 20 million square kilometers (almost 8 million square miles) of land area.

History deals harshly with Spain's track record when it came to managing its colonies. Fairly or not, by comparing colonies that later became independent nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and of course, The United States, did very well over those colonies under Spain.  Furthermore, the French colonies didn't too well either.  As a reader, you be the judge on what was then the Belgian Congo, South Africa and Indonesia (Dutch) and all  Asian countries that were colonized by the French and the British, and include the Philippines from Spain. And keep in mind that it took three to four centuries before colonies were let go to become independent.

Here we are today.  Old empires from the East, one in particular is re-emerging, will likely collide with the west.  From the latter is a new empire, if you will call it that, that rose from the "new world" - once a colony of an earlier empire.  

So, in a nutshell, that is the story.  "All the world's a stage" .. And all the" empires of men  "merely players; They have their exits and their entrances". 

Coming next:  "USA, Don't Try to be Argentina"