Empire Anyone?

My this year's Christmas Day discovery is Sir John Glubb, aka Glubb Pasha, a British officer at 18 in WWI, and for nearly 20 years before WWII the leader of the Jordanian army. When he quit that, he took to writing books and did a number of them. I have only read the longish essay linked to below and am enormously impressed by it. It turns out Empires over the millennia have had eerily similar lifetimes and eerily similar cultural evolutions despite fantastically different kinds of people running them and utterly different physical circumstances. Below I quote from an email I sent today to someone I wanted to get to read Glubb, as I would very much like to have you, Dear Reader, to read him. All I'll permit myself to say beyond this is that the 250 years, which seem to be an Empire's lasting time, equal ten generations of people, a generation being 25 years in Glubb's reckoning. And I'll also say this: empires start out strong, militaristic, vigorous, crude, even barbaric and they come from nowhere places. They end up, after a number of clearly defined stages, sophisticated, dissolute, argumentative, variegated, weak, and incapable of defending themselves against the next "Empire."


Dear ______:

Here is the link to Glubb's essay. I've read a few commentaries on Glubb and can now say that Glubb is himself surprisingly more modern and "broad minded" (as 'twere) than his commentators. Worth reading. He says Br Emp lasted from 1700 to 1950. 1700 is a few years after the formation of the Bank of England, which made possible the whole thing. By 1950 the Empire was well along on becoming what a Russki named Panarin (qv on Wikipedia) calls the "New British Empire." I'd say that got its start in about 1914 to 1917 when the U.S. got itself into WWI, a horror we could (IMHO should) have stayed out of. In 1913 we went under the Br-Rothschild banking thing (Fed Res), which made possible WWII and has brought us to our present wonderful state.  So how long are we good for? We might last longer than most, because we are so technical and all, even though GLubb says all that kind of stuff is not determinative. Anyway 1700 to 1950 is 250 years. If we last till 2020 it will have been 320 years. I mean as an EMPIRE, God save the mark, which I would be utterly delighted to see us stop being ASAP. Of course the correct thing to say is, Who the hell knows what the future will bring?