The World

The Ukrainian war marks the end of an exceptional period: the Seventy-Year Peace, divided into two phases – forty-five years of Cold War, then twenty-five of American unipotency. If the first era was like a chess tournament and the second like a game of solitaire, today is a multi-player computer game.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not a new way of exerting and expanding power. Its flint-hearted ferocity is a return to normality in a way that the dynasts in this book – warlords, kings and dictators – would find routine: normal disorder has been resumed. Many of today’s empire nations seem keen to expand spheres of influence that mimic old empires. The wanton killing of Ukrainian civilians, the bodies in the streets and the escape of families from the war, reminds us what much of history was like in times when there were no mobile phones to record atrocities and refugees, and court historians praised murderous conquerors as heroes. We have met plenty of those in this book, and this is not the only sign that human momentum is not just a march of progress but also a stuttering spasm of contingencies. It is a struggle not just between clashing states and ideologies but between contradictory facets of human nature. If nothing else, the Ukrainian invasion demonstrates the real difference between the open world of the liberal democracies and the closed world where the combination of traditional menace and digital surveillance increasingly allows control states to police their people in a way scarcely imaginable even by a Stalin.

Family power is also resurgent for it too is characteristic of our species. Dynastic reversion seems both natural and pragmatic when weak states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection and loyalties remain to kin not to institutions. Leaders who can trust no one usually trust family. In a growing number of Asian, Latin American and African states, from Kenya to Pakistan and the Philippines, demo-dynasties deliver some of the magical reassurance of family power; others from Nicaragua to Azerbaijan, Uganda to Cambodia, are becoming absolutist republican monarchies. It is certainly a bad way to run a country – even worse than democracy.

But today’s dictators and dynasties are not a return to earlier centuries. Even in iPhone and dagger states, they are part of a new world where events move at unprecedented speed, where contenders and markets are interconnected and where the jeopardy of nuclear catastrophe is ever present.

This, coupled with Covid and global warming, foster fears of apocalypse. A sense of impending eschaton seems to be part of human character, perhaps a recognition of the miraculous but fragile conquest of earth by one species. But the stakes today make the End of Days ever more possible.

Yet in some senses Homo sapiens has never been so healthy, and is living longer and better than ever before; society may, in places, be more peaceful than it ever was. While our forefathers were likely to die of infections, violence or famine, today humans are dying of diseases – coronaries, cancer and neurodegeneration – because we live so long and often eat so much. Many of these diseases will soon be cured by new technologies of genetic modification. These improvements are so striking that even the poorest countries today have higher life expectancies than the richest empires of a century ago. Sierra Leone now has a life expectancy of 50.1 years, which is the same as France in 1910. In 1945, Indians lived until thirty-five; now their life expectancy is seventy. Naturally this has changed the shape of families: parents have many children when they expect most to die; now low child mortality, along with female education and contraception, encourages later marriage and smaller families.