Learning from History: Evolution, Success, Stasis, Colonisation of Societies — and What Present-Day Trends Indicate About the Future

Human civilisation has never advanced evenly. Progress has always been lopsided, contingent, and cumulative, shaped less by virtue or intelligence than by geography, institutions, and the incentives societies create for adaptation. To understand why some regions prospered early, why others stagnated, how colonisation emerged as a global phenomenon, and what the present moment implies for the future of humanity, we must look at history not as a moral story but as a systems story — one of feedback loops, compounding advantages, and institutional lock-ins.

The earliest large-scale prosperity emerged in Eurasia, not because of inherent superiority, but because geography quietly stacked the deck. The Eurasian landmass runs primarily east–west, allowing crops, animals, and technologies to diffuse across similar climates with relatively low friction. Wheat, barley, cattle, horses, ironworking, and writing spread over thousands of kilometres without encountering drastic seasonal or ecological barriers. By contrast, Africa and the Americas are oriented north–south, forcing innovations to cross deserts, jungles, and radically different climate zones. This alone delayed agricultural diffusion by millennia. Early agriculture mattered because it produced surplus calories, and surplus calories are the prerequisite for everything else — cities, writing, metallurgy, administration, standing armies, and science. By 1 CE, Eurasia already accounted for roughly 70 percent of global population and over 80 percent of global economic output (reconstructed Maddison estimates), not because it was more advanced culturally, but because it industrialised food production earlier and more widely.

Once surplus existed, Eurasia compounded its advantage through domesticable animals, dense trade networks, and repeated exposure to epidemic diseases. Oxen and horses multiplied human labour; rivers and coastlines lowered transport costs; diseases culled populations but also produced immunity over centuries. When Eurasian societies later expanded outward, germs often did more damage than guns. These were not deliberate strategies, but emergent properties of long cohabitation with animals and high population density. By the medieval period, Eurasia hosted multiple advanced civilisational cores simultaneously — China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe — all sophisticated, urbanised, and productive.

Yet from roughly the 11th century onward, much of Asia entered a condition of stasis, not decline in the sense of collapse, but equilibrium at scale. Large Asian empires achieved what earlier societies could only dream of: administrative reach over vast territories, predictable taxation, food security, and internal peace. This success produced a paradox. Stability reduced the pressure to experiment. Centralised bureaucracies filtered innovation through court politics. Merchants remained subordinate to the state. Social mobility narrowed. When shocks occurred — Mongol invasions, climate fluctuations, or later European contact — Asian societies rebuilt by restoring older institutional models rather than reimagining them. Productivity per capita in China and India remained high by global standards until the 18th century, but growth flattened. Europe, by contrast, was poor, fragmented, and violent. Dozens of competing states, none strong enough to suppress innovation everywhere, created an environment where failure was frequent but adaptation relentless. By 1700, Europe still lagged Asia in absolute output, but its rate of change had decisively overtaken it.

Colonisation emerged not because Europe was morally or intellectually superior, but because it escaped equilibrium. Permanent interstate competition drove military innovation, financial experimentation, and oceanic expansion. Capital markets arose not by grand design but by accident, as rulers borrowed from merchants who gradually acquired leverage and legal protections. By the time European powers reached Asia with industrial-age weapons and navies, the institutional gap — not the cultural gap — had become decisive. Colonisation then locked this divergence in place. Colonised societies were prevented from accumulating capital, industrialising independently, or reforming institutions organically. Global productivity growth slowed overall, as extraction replaced innovation across much of the world. Between 1820 and 1950, global GDP grew, but inequality between regions exploded — a clear sign that colonialism redistributed output upward rather than expanding it efficiently.

One society escaped this fate narrowly and instructively: . Japan’s isolation during the early modern period did not eliminate commerce, literacy, or internal competition; it simply contained external influence. When Western powers arrived abruptly in the mid-19th century, the shock was undeniable but not annihilating. Japan retained sovereignty, administrative competence, and elite cohesion. Most importantly, its ruling class chose collective self-destruction over national subjugation. Feudal privileges were abolished, military and educational systems rebuilt, and foreign technologies adopted selectively rather than ideologically. Within two generations, Japan crossed the industrial threshold. History rarely offers such narrow windows. Japan succeeded because it had enough centralisation to act, enough decentralisation to adapt, and elites willing to sacrifice themselves to preserve sovereignty.

The broader lesson from colonialism and the long stagnation it imposed is that world productivity declines when systems optimise for control over experimentation. Empires, whether imperial China or European colonial regimes, extract efficiently but innovate poorly. Global prosperity expands fastest when knowledge, capital, and failure are allowed to circulate. The Industrial Revolution accelerated growth not because of machines alone, but because institutions tolerated uncertainty. When those institutions were later imposed unevenly through colonial rule, the global system became hierarchically productive but locally brittle. The 20th century’s wars, depressions, and decolonisation were in part corrections to that imbalance.

In the present day, and embody two different responses to this historical inheritance. China escaped poverty through decentralised experimentation and market incentives after 1978, achieving the fastest large-scale growth in human history. Yet as it approaches the technological frontier, it is recentralising authority, prioritising stability and control. Historically, such systems excel at catch-up but struggle with breakthrough innovation. China’s future is therefore one of sustained power but rising rigidity — high output with declining marginal creativity unless incentives shift again. India, in contrast, has grown more slowly but built dense democratic and legal institutions. Its path is noisy, inefficient, and frustrating, yet adaptable. India’s challenge is not authoritarian lock-in but democratic drag — underinvestment in human capital and uneven manufacturing growth. Its opportunity lies in combining digital public infrastructure with labour-absorbing industry. One system risks brittleness; the other risks delay.

Looking beyond nations, the 21st century presents a possibility unprecedented in history: a partially integrated mankind. Climate change, pandemics, AI, and supply chains do not respect borders. Civilisational prosperity now depends less on conquest and more on coordination. History suggests that global systems prosper when three conditions are met: decentralised innovation, shared standards, and credible restraint on extraction — whether by empires, corporations, or states. The future global order will require institutions that allow competition without collapse, diversity without fragmentation, and growth without ecological overshoot. This is not idealism; it is systems logic. Civilisations fall not when they fail to dominate, but when they lose the ability to adapt.

The ultimate lesson of history is sobering but hopeful. Progress is not linear, dominance is temporary, and equilibrium is dangerous. Yet decline is not inevitable. Societies that preserve openness, tolerate dissent, and align elite incentives with collective survival can bend history — slowly, imperfectly, but decisively. The question for the present century is not who will rule the world, but whether humanity can finally design systems that reward adaptation faster than they reward control.