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First Transition:

The Collapse of the Ancien Regime (1767-1830)

"We owe it to Napoleon (and not by any means to the French Revolution, which aimed at the 'brotherhood' of nations and a blooming universal exchange of hearts) that we now confront a succession of a few warlike centuries that have no parallel in history; in short, that we have entered the classical age of war..."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche
   The Gay Science
   1882

Readout
1767 A.D.
Egypt, 1780 B.C.: The powerless Thirteenth Dynasty begins, ending the classical "Middle Kingdom" phase of Egyptian history.

1796 A.D.
Rome, 331 B.C.: Alexander the Great defeats the King of Persia, Darius III.

1804 A.D.

Rome, 323 B.C.: Alexander the Great dies in Babylon. His empire is divided among his generals. The Hellenistic Age begins.

1811 A.D.
Rome, 316 B.C.: The cities of Greece regain their liberty from Macedonia.

1816 A.D.
Rome, 311 B.C.: The civil wars among Alexander's generals end. Macedonia goes to Cassender, Thrace to Lysimachus, Egypt to Ptolemy Soter and Asia to Antigonus.

1817 A.D.
China, 483 B.C.: Wu Tsu-hsue, a minister of the State of Wu who opposed its aggressive foreign policy, is ordered to kill himself.

1818 A.D.
China, 482 B.C.: Actual hegemony over the Chinese world passes to the upstart State of Wu, ruled by King Fu-Ch'ai.

1827 A.D.
China, 473 B.C.: The war-weakened State of Wu is destroyed. The Era of Hegemonies comes to an end. The Era of Contending States begins.

1830 A.D.
Islam, 1204: The Crusaders take Constantinople and establish the ephemeral Latin Empire.

Commentary
In each of the civilizations under consideration, the period previous to the one with which the program begins came in later years to be thought of as a Golden Age. Consider the list: the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, the Enlightenment in Europe, the Greece of Pericles and Socrates, and the "Spring and Autumn" era in China. (The Baghdad Caliphate in Islam still existed at the end of the transition period, and would do so for some decades more. Nobody said these lines would match perfectly.) It was the time of Kant and Confucius and Plato. This was the epoch when each civilization worked out all the main themes that would characterize it for the rest of its history. By the time the events indicated by the readout lines had occurred, each of the civilizations in question had matured. Each is already in principle what it later becomes in fact. In the First Transition, the civilization breaks out of its shell. It begins to address less and less the demands of its own internal development and more and more the requirements of the "real world," or at any rate of the larger world in which it lives. The result, to all appearances, is a collapse or an explosion.

The collapse is most in evidence in Egypt, which was invaded during this period by the group of Asiatic peoples called the Hyskos. Something similar happened in Islam, where the old center of the culture in Constantinople was occupied by Crusaders and the new center in Baghdad was in the hands of incompetent adventurers. Meanwhile, waves of Turkish invaders increasingly dominated international life.

Explosions occurred where some great individual saw the possibility of taking political ambition to its logical extreme. In China and the West, this ambition was frustrated. The successful attempt by the king of the State of Wu to temporarily wrest hegemony over the international system from his erstwhile patron, the venerable State of Chin, resulted in the destruction of the upstart state within less than a generation. In the West, France was not destroyed by the excesses of Napoleon's ambitions, since it eventually recovered its position as the leading power of Europe, but it never regained the overwhelming predominance it had sometimes enjoyed in prior ages. Napoleon's achievement lay in demonstrating that, whether or not the ideas of the Enlightenment were true, there were certainly powerful.

The most successful of the transition tyrants was the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great. While Greek businessmen and Greek mercenaries preceded him by some generations into Asia Minor and Egypt, it was he who persuaded the unthinking of the superiority of Hellenic culture by the simple expedient of conquering all the surrounding civilizations. All three tyrants briefly controlled the homelands of their cultures: Alexander alone among them laid the basis for the later colonial empires.

In this transition, practical life fell into chaos just as theory was approaching what it believed (falsely) to be the final truth about the organization of the universe and the nature of the good society. For almost three centuries to come, history is about trying to manhandle the facts of practice into the molds of theoretical truths.

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