User:Fizzyflapjack/The United Empire

Throughout recorded, Western human history, different parts of our greater Western society, divided amongst themselves into a vast array of ethnocentric nation states, diverse imperial federations, and other political dominions, have toiled and flourished, suffered and prospered, and passed on a mantle of greatness from one experiment to the next. It is undeniable to say that there exists within each period of Western history a dominant nation and culture, a society which reaches out and expresses its undue will into the greater world of all humanity. Each of these polities are unique from each other in some aspect, but upon each attempt at global domination, the following empire comes to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor.

Our story begins with the Ancient Greek city states whose rise to prominence we commonly mark by the lifetime of Homer, beginning sometime around the 8th Century BC. Numerous and powerful, the hegemons of Greece were classed largely into two systems, the imperial, pseudo-democratic monarchy of Athens, and the tyrannical, autocratic city-kingdoms akin to Sparta. The was an essential moment in Western history, in which conquest and imperialism henceforth became a scope of the European elite at large, an idea spread by the flow of Greek settlers throughout the Mediterranean Sea. The Greeks grew to their mightiest under, who spread Greek civilisation to the far reaches of Northern India. Over time, as the heyday of Greek power came to an end, the mantle was left empty, waiting for a new attempt to lead the common thoughts and minds of the peoples which hereupon valued the ideas of personal liberties and human dignity, albeit for their own small regional and amongst only those they ordained to be worthy.

It is there we see the rise of the, centered around the largest city in the world at its peak that lasted half a century, from around 100 BC to 400 AD. The Romans placed tremendous importance upon the city of Rome, and all citizens, patrician and plebian alike, enjoyed a much greater dealer of freedom than people from most other parts of the Empire, with those small exceptions of cultural 'barbarism' being few and far between. The Romans, hence, put a large amount of effort into colonisation, on turning those savage provinces into idyllic farmlands and bustling market towns worthy of even the proudest, purest patrician. It was expected of these peoples, in return for their enlightenment, subservience and duty, in serving their benevolent mother city in its armies and feeding its peoples. While this system did function relatively well for a time, the Romans always found regional enemies which despised its enslaving, subjugating nature. The problem with the Roman Empire did not lie in its conquests, as those were the times of greatest prosperity for already conquered Roman lands, but rather, the Romans ultimately failed to stand up to the enormous social, political, military, and economic pressure which such a vast territory under such centralised control created.