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89 Foreign Aff. 18 (2010)
Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos

handle is hein.journals/fora89 and id is 194 raw text is: Complexity and Collapse Empires on the Edge of Chaos Niall Ferguson THERE IS no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than The Course ofEmpire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in The Course ofEmpire, he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day. Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation ofEmpire. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrep6t, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng ofopulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and citizen- consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The NIALL FERGUSON is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. For an annotated guide to this topic, see What to Read on American Primacy at www.foreignaffairs.com/readinglists/american-primacy. [18 ]