Why Empires Collapse?

An empire, country or even a city or village is not roads, factories, farms and houses. It is the trust people have in each other to become a coherent mass to achieve common goals. The key is gain sharing. Once the powerful become too powerful and too selfish to think themselves above the law, to stop contributing in common good through paying taxes, community services and military services the trust is gone. The weak justifiably start thinking themselves as mere beasts of burden, draft animals to drag the huge loads of wasteful and unjustified life styles of the elites. The coherence is lost. Whenever a chance comes the weak becomes allies with the enemies of empire and give easy back doors and corridors for the military, economic and idealistic invasion. When an outsider is not present or is not willing to mess up with empire, the weaks on the least loose efficiency and start ignoring the maintenance, the result is lost of output and unreplaced accumulated depreciation of infrastructure that exponentially increase the speed of collapse. Once things are visibly getting out of hand of the elite they first press the weaks further by taxing-to-death but even that not safe the empire. The next stage is a war between elites who already have developed hatred for each other in their greed of acquiring resources now blame each other for the cause of collapse each posing itself the most loyal to the empire. Even in this condition the empire continue to drag on because the constituents of empire, the people, both weak and strong have vested interests in empire, the strong ones obviously find the only way of continuing their life styles in the existence of empire and the weaks propagandized by the elite the "barbarism" of outsiders and due to fear-of-unseen keeps their heads down. This not continue forever, at some point in time an outsider becomes both strong and brave enough to invade the empire, first at outskirts/borders/battlefields of empire, then at established colonies and finally at the core country and the capital. The weaks generally either welcome the invaders or remains nuetral, the strongs do fight and do their best in saving the empire but its too late. The empire finally falls. After that one of the two things can happen, the invaders might not feel it desirable to rule the empire go back to their strongholds and the empire or the individual provinces of empire might have a chance to rebuild on the ashes with a significant lower level of complexity and injustice but even if the empire do get a chance it would eventually collapse by a new invasion a few decades or centuries later. The second thing that might happen is that the invaders make their own empire on the ashes of the fallen empire. That empire too would at some point face the same collapse.

Lets take a few examples. British empire was made when due to improvements in judicial system in early 18th century lead to an increased level of justice and gain sharing. The british gets a very loyal public that work and fight for the empire. Once the elites gets too strong and too rich, especially the govt servants sent to colonies like india, the injustice increase. The wwi was a major blow to the british empire which though unlike wwii win it on its own and collapse former enemies/threats such as turkish empire, russian empire and austria-hungary empire become very weak. The british empire did got a chance to correct its errors after wwi, to redistribute wealth and increase gain sharing but it lost its chance. When the second blow came in wwii in Battle of England the empire could hold no more. The russians in the eastern front and to some extent americans in norway invasion saved the british isles from falling into outsiders' hands but the real chance for the empire was long gone. The british were wise to let go the colonies and settle on a much smaller population, territory, wealth, power and resources.

The turkish empire was built on the basis of tribal justice and equality and the life styles of the first emperors was not that high of those in the middle (Sulaiman the magnificient) and later (Abdul Hameed) ages. The first attempts of introducing high levels of injustice was blowed by the outsiders' invasion in mid 16th century when tamerlane invaded from east and imprisoned Sulaiman the magnificient in a cage even when the Sulaiman had already conquered the heart of europe in france and italy and had "tied his horse where the pope lives". The turkish empire collapsed but the persians after tamerlane had no interest in ruling the provinces of former empire so the empire got a second chance. The empire got its former glory and power very very soon and continue to exist for almost 4 more centuries. The final blow came in the wwi.

The point is, we should not just see the history of rise and decline of empires on basis of resource depletion. Classic (pre christ) empires like Akkad, Egyptian, Babylon, Chinese and Indian were built on very sustainable resource base, especially the agricultural practise was very sustainable, the mineral resources also continue on to exist to be taken out later in middle ages and modern ages by almost similar technology. The only true reason for collapse of empires, countries and city-states that is sufficient enough to explain the rise and collapse of ALL empires is injustice.