Introduction
The Fate of Empires by Sir John Bagot Glubb is an essay I often seen cited by people loudly bemoaning about the decline of Western civilization today, and I have only seen one good, but short critique on this essay (found in the comments here: https://np.reddit.com/r/history/comments/47tif6/fate_of_empires/). As such, I will make a point-by-point breakdown of Glubb's supporting evidence (and some of his claims as well), the majority of which is incorrect or faulty.
Here is an archived link to a pdf of the essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20210428104759/http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
To summarize, Glubb - who is a soldier by trade and has no educational background in history that I am aware of - proposes a unified model of an empire's life cycle and its subsequent collapse, à la Jared Diamond or Joseph Tainter.
Unlike Tainter or Diamond, Glubb describes and justifies his model in less than 25 pages without any citations whatsoever, and his model has a blatant political agenda.
I will quote the first part of Glubb's own summary of his model in the conclusion:
>(b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.
>
>(c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten generations?
>
>(d) The stages of the rise and fall of great nations seem to be:
>
>The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
>
>The Age of Conquests
>
>The Age of Commerce
>
>The Age of Affluence
>
>...
I will cover the parts listed above and Glubb's badhistory when supporting his claims.
The "Table"
Glubb's first two points (the time period of an empire's dominance is almost always 250 years and has not varied for 3000 years) primarily derive the below table that he wrote up, without any citations.
| The nation | Dates of rise and fall | Duration in years |
|---|---|---|
| Assyria | 859-612 BC | 247 |
| Persia (Cyrus and his descendants) | 538-330 BC | 208 |
| Greece (Alexander and his successors) | 331-110 BC | 231 |
| Roman Republic | 260-27 BC | 233 |
| Roman Empire | 27 BC - 180 AD | 207 |
| Arab Empire | 634-880 AD | 246 |
| Mameluke Empire | 1250-1517 | 267 |
| Ottoman Empire | 1320-1570 | 250 |
| Spain | 1500-1750 | 250 |
| Romanov Russia | 1682-1916 | 234 |
| Britain | 1700-1950 | 250 |
The author is full of double standards in this table, an
... keep reading on reddit ➡
That’s it. That’s the post. luv u gibby
EDIT: I think this came off as a “Fuck Montoyo” post but that’s not what I meant at all. I just loved Gibbons some times
I can’t find it on YouTube and it’s very important
So I was playing the game the other day and after I completed a major battle (I forget which one, but it was before Fredericksburg) I got the Iron Brigade as a Victory reward. The weird thing though was that they came commanded by John Gibbon (who was historically their commander). This is only weird because I had already hired John Gibbon earlier with political influence. So now I have two Gibbons, the one I bought, and the one I got for free. I assume this is just an oversight on the part of the devs, but it would be nice if it got patched. To “fix” this I made one Gibbon commander of my fourth Corp, and made the second Gibbon the commander of the first division of the fourth Corp, so it’s like he’s the Corp commander but also personally overseeing a division which I guess is hypothetically possible and lets me reconcile the fact I now have clone major generals.
I haven't read much Green Lantern, or from these creators individually, and I wasn't reading comics at all when it was released. I was hoping for a broad overview of both praise and criticism that has evolved from these works, to get a broader perspective of the GL landscape as I begin.
