Why You Shouldn't Learn History Through Memes.

I felt compelled to screenshot this meme, post it here, and explain why it’s nonsense after seeing it (or something a lot like it) one too many times. In the meme, some patriotic U.S. citizen is getting excited to celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence while some knowing “historian” looks on condescendingly because 250 years is somehow exactly how long empires can last. This is it. The U.S. is done.

The idea that “an empire” has a fixed definition across time and space, and that due to the characteristics that make it meet that definition, it will inevitably collapse after roughly two and a half centuries. “Empire” is an abstract concept we apply to various political entities throughout history. There are sets of characteristics that each of these entities may possess to varying degrees, but the world’s historians and political scientists do not agree on what the definition of an empire actually is, which political entities might meet that definition, let alone how long they might last.

Material conditions, military technology, and political practices vary wildly across time. Why would an empire that marches armies over borders to bring back slaves, livestock, and gold be subject to the same material and temporal limitations as one that controls the IMF, and has airplanes and aircraft carriers?

And just when do these “historians” (and there are precisely zero trained historians who believe what the meme says) count the beginning and end of these various empires? Let’s start with everyone’s favorite empire to compare to the United States: Rome.

The Romans really started acting like an empire and conquering the Italian Peninsula around 340 BC with the Samnite Wars. Just over 500 years later, in the early 300s AD, Constantine permanently moved the capitol to Constantinople (after Diocletian and other Emperors had already moved it away from Rome), but despite the fact that the city of Rome was no longer the center of the Roman Empire, there was still an unbroken line of political succession that lasted until 1453 AD, when the Ottomans broke down the walls of Constantinople and the Roman Empire finally ended.

The Romans in Constantinople had slowed down on their empire-like behaviors in the preceding century or so, but there were at least 1500 years of the Roman Empire. Even if you decide to deny that the Eastern Empire was “Roman” (and there aren’t very good reasons to do that), the Western Empire collapsed in the 470s AD, so that still gets us more than 800 years of Rome.

For the readers who are bad at math: Both 1500 and 800 are larger than 250.

Charlemagne was one of the people who decided that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 470s left a vacuum in “Roman” authority that was there to be filled, and then got himself named “Holy Roman Emperor” by the Pope in 800 AD. He waged some wars, did some fighting, and made the Carolingian Empire. It lasted around 80 years. This is considerably less than 250.

The title Holy Roman Emperor persisted and was later applied to the Holy Roman Empire. It really got going around 1500. Most of the Holy Roman Emperors were members of the Habsburg family. Their empire lasted until 1806, when Napoleon defeated them. The Habsburgs maintained a semblance of this empire until the end of the First World War in 1918. If we count the defeat to Napoleon as the end, then they lasted about 300 years. That’s actually sort of close to 250! If we consider that the Habsburgs maintained control of the same political machinery and a lot of the same territory until 1918, it’s closer to 400 years. That’s less close to 250.

The starts and ends of these things are often ambiguous, which makes calculating exact lifespans difficult. It also makes that meme seem even dumber.

Coincidentally, the Ottomans who conquered the Romans in 1453 also came to an end at the end of the First World War. They really started to rise around 1300 AD, so they managed to last about 600 years. Which is more than double 250.

But when did U.S. Empire begin? The British Empire rolled into North America around 1600 AD, started settling the land, and then displacing and killing the native population. When the colonists declared and won their independence from Britain, the same property-owning class that had been in charge in the colonies remained in charge in the new United States. From that perspective, we are already at over 400 years of unbroken empire-like behavior. Or maybe we should start counting the years of U.S. Empire after the Spanish-American War when the U.S. started crossing oceans to control other people? Then it would be just over a century and few decades.

But at this point you should know that none of this matters, because “empires” don’t have some magic expiration date built into them. They can go through a lot and just keep going for centuries and centuries. If you are rooting for the U.S. Empire to end, don’t just count to 250 and then gleefully await its collapse.