'With the observable universe sheltering over 2 trillion galaxies. Our planet Earth is an insignificant speck of space debris' - Facts similar to these drove Nietzsche to deduce nihilism, the belief that there is no intrinsic meaning to life. However, we derive our overall philosophy from optimistic nihilism which presumes that there is no underlying meaning to life from a perspective of hope. It’s not that we’re doomed to live in a meaningless universe - it’s that we get the chance to experience ourselves and the universe we share. We look at a world lacking meaning and purpose and see the opportunity to create our own.

A Timeline of Planet Earth Geoscientists, or scientists who study the Earth, use the geologic time scale (GTS) to measure the history of the planet. The GTS (since the formation of Earth, roughly 4.54 billion years ago) is divided, in descending order of duration, into aeons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. The GTS is based on chronostratigraphic classification. Stratigraphy is a branch of geology that deals with the study of rock layers (or strata). Chronostratigraphy (“Chrono”: relating to time) is an aspect of stratigraphy that deals with the relation between rock strata and the measurement of geological time. Chronostratigraphic units are not uniform — any two aeons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages do not encompass the same length of time (like days or minutes). Rather, the transition from one to another is marked by events (often violent, such as mass extinctions) that shape the planet and its living conditions. Importantly, each interval of Earth time must have a clear, objective, universally applicable starting point. Currently, we are living in the Phanerozoic aeon, during the Cenozoic era, in the Quaternary period, the Holocene epoch, and the Meghalayan age. The proposed ‘Human Epoch’. The Holocene epoch (from the Greek “holos”, meaning ‘whole’, and “kainos”, meaning “new”) began some 11,700 years ago, at the end of the Last Glacial Period (LGP). The Holocene saw the warming of the Earth, which closely corresponded with the rise and proliferation of human beings. While Homo sapiens as a species had evolved well before the Holocene began, all of humanity’s recorded history falls in this epoch.

To simplify the enormity of the timescales involved, imagine Earth, a four thousand six hundred million years old planet, as a forty-six-year-old woman. This means one hundred million years (100 crore years) is equal to one year in our Earth woman's life. The Earth woman was barely two when the atmosphere formed and she was just seven when the first oceans formed. In her eleventh year, the first single-celled organisms appeared, and in her twentieth year, cyanobacteria induced the Great Oxidation Event. She was thirty-six when the flora like ferns and bushes took hold in Pangea. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty marking an event called the Cambrian Explosion (Biological Big Bang). In her forty-second year, flowering plants (angiosperms) evolved. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when reptiles like dinosaurs roamed the Gondwanaland. The 'Age of Dinosaurs' (the Mesozoic Era) included three consecutive geologic time periods (the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods) with a total period of 165 Ma (16.5 crore years). The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life.

Planet of the Apes: The aftermath of an immense asteroid collision at Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico) 66 Ma, is believed to have caused the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and many other species on Earth leading to the emergence of Apes on the planet. There have been many species similar to us that have lived over the last two million years. They co-existed with modern humans (aka Sapiens) in Asia and Europe as recently as 40,000 years ago. Homo sapiens, originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago, before dispersing around the world and becoming the only surviving species of humans left today. cognitive behaviour and social interactions played a key role in their survival by slowly perfecting the art of hunting and controlling fire. First, they perfected the use of stones which is called the Paleolithic Age (Old Stone Age). These early hunter-gatherers weren't at the top of the food chain and constantly feared being eaten by Felidaes and Canines. These tiny communities observed the sky, stars, and natural phenomena and they started assigning meaning to them to bring them comfort and ready answers. Next came the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), with its chipped stone tools, and then the Neolithic (New Stone Age), with its polished stone tools.

Taxation has been a fundamental aspect of human civilization for millennia, serving as a means for governments to generate revenue to fund public services and infrastructure. Since the dawn of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, and as primitive pastoral societies better organized themselves, a class of people served as protectors of the general population against repeated raids and wars. The head amongst them became the ruler who gathered a protection fee, initially in kind as a part of the produce, and later in some precious metal as ages passed. The ruler was over law and the fountainhead of all laws of the land. And, human history is marked by continuous contact and exchange, rather than isolated developments, as opposed to the idea of distinct civilizations as proposed by 19th century European scholars. Technological innovations and cultural exchanges, driven by agriculture, trade, and transport, shaped ancient civilizations and their interactions. Disputes were mediated by the leopard-skin chief. It is only with tribal societies, however, that we see the emergence of a separate caste of warriors, along with what became the most basic and enduring unit of political organization, a leader and his band of armed retainers. The Sumerians chose not to burden subjects with taxes. The first known taxation took place in Ancient Egypt and Babylon around 3000–2800 BC. The Romans and Greeks had comparable practices of collecting taxes from land and polls.

In the Vedic times (Chalcolithic period i.e. Indian Copper age), the tribal revenue collector was called the "Bhagadugha"; he gathered the ruler's share which varied from one-third to one-sixth of the produce for fertile lands. These fees were mostly in the nature of excise duty or customs duty i.e. indirect tax. Elsewhere, similar practices of collecting taxes existed in all ages. Only slight variations can be traced in their character and ways of implementation, with China being a notable exception following a merit-based structure of appointing revenue collectors rather than kinship or religion. Similar practices existed in the Bronze Age and during the period of the Mahabharata (Iron Age).

Social contract formulations are preserved in many of the world's oldest records. The Indian Buddhist text of the second century BC, Mahāvastu, recounts the legend of Mahasammata. The story goes as follows: 

"In the early days of the cosmic cycle mankind lived on an immaterial plane, dancing on air in a sort of fairyland, where there was no need of food or clothing, and no private property, family, government or laws. Then gradually the process of cosmic decay began its work, and mankind became earthbound, and felt the need of food and shelter. As men lost their primeval glory, distinctions of class arose, and they entered into agreements with one another, accepting the institution of private property and the family. With this theft, murder, adultery, and other crime began, and so the people met together and decided to appoint one man from among them to maintain order in return for a share of the produce of their fields and herds. He was called "the Great Chosen One" (Mahasammata), and he received the title of raja because he pleased the people."

In his rock edicts, the Indian Buddhist king Asoka was said to have argued for a broad and far-reaching social contract. The Buddhist vinaya also reflects social contracts expected of the monks; one such instance is when the people of a certain town complained about monks felling saka trees, the Buddha tells his monks that they must stop and give way to social norms.

Trade between the east and the west can be traced back to antiquity with the Indian Ocean serving as a trade route of equivalent importance as the silk roads. Traders from the horn of Africa and middle-east acted as middlemen of this trade route, guarding their handsome commissions by not sharing the direct trade routes to the riches of the East. During this period in time, Vishnugupta's Arthasastra mentions both proto-direct and (excise & customs) indirect taxes emphasizing that the King is only a trustee of the land, who relied on Gopas and Sthānika for revenue collection. Philosophical concepts were aligned worldwide like the Greek trio Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, the Chinese concept of Qi-Ying-Yang, Hinduism inspired Ling-Yoni and Buddhism inspired Dhyana, the Japanese Zen. Zeng He

The only counterparts the world had seen were the Egyptians (Two Lands), Greeks and the Romans (Ancient Rome, Roman Republic (SPQR), and Roman Empire).

Crete’s rise was influenced by external interactions, its development was deeply rooted in local practices and needs. Cretans adapted and evolved through selective incorporation of foreign influences, maintaining a distinct cultural identity amid broader regional changes. Cretan ships reached the Greek mainland, establishing connections with evolving societies and extending their trade and cultural influence further into the Aegean. The era saw a complex interplay between local traditions and external influences, with societies adapting new technologies and ideas while maintaining distinct cultural practices. Assur’s political system (of selecting a chief magistrate (limum) by lottery from leading families, serving a one-year term responsible for financial matters, including taxes and trade, and managed the city's administration with no mention of a royal palace is similar to Indus Valley) and Babylonian achievements illustrate the sophisticated nature of ancient civilizations, while Egyptian literature and Cretan expansion highlight the dynamic interactions between different regions and cultures.

Amber Route, the Carpathian region, encompassing parts of modern Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine, was rich in resources like copper, tin, and gold. The Eurasian Steppe contributed new technologies, such as chariots and advanced horse equipment, to the Carpathian region. The spread of these innovations influenced local cultures and trade practices. Over time, the Carpathian region declined as new trade routes emerged, leading to shifts in the flow of goods. The Mycenaean connection with Scandinavia and Britain became more prominent, with British amber reaching Mycenae. The eruption of the volcanic island of Santorini, ancient Thera, was a monumental event, deeply impacting the Aegean world around 1600 BCE before which the ancient Aegean world was interconnected and culturally complex, challenging simplistic distinctions between different Bronze Age cultures. Despite the upheavals, Crete and the broader Aegean region remained vital centres of trade and cultural exchange.

The Amarna letters, over 300 clay tablets with cuneiform signs were discovered on a mound near Amarna, Egypt, about 60 kilometres south of Cairo (Amarna was the capital of Egypt under Akhenaten (reigned c. 1353-1336 BCE), who shifted the capital from Thebes and focused religious worship on the sun god Aten). These are diplomatic correspondences primarily written in Akkadian, spanning the reigns from Amenhotep III to Tutankhamunportray diplomatic and economic interdependence in the ancient world. They illustrate how major rulers of the time, including those from Cyprus (Alashiya), Hatti, Mittani, and Babylon ) managed their international relations through a combination of diplomacy, economic exchanges, and marriage alliances. The letters provide a window into the complexities of maintaining political power and prestige through a network of interconnected states and reveal the significant role of personal relationships in ancient diplomacy. Smaller states, particularly Ugarit, played a crucial role in shaping the political, economic, and cultural landscape during the Late Bronze Age. Significant innovations and cultural exchanges often originated in these peripheral regions rather than in the dominant centres of power. Ugaritic script was a significant development, being the first state-sponsored alphabet. It was standardized and included some vowel markings, unlike earlier informal alphabets. Despite Ugarit's innovative cultural output, it faced destruction around 1200 BCE, part of a broader collapse of cities across the eastern Mediterranean. This period saw widespread devastation and the end of Ugarit's distinctive contributions to literature and identity. The collapse of the Bronze Age System around the 12th century BC due to reasons including invasions by the Sea Peoples, internal rebellions, natural disasters, and systemic failures affected the broader Amarna system, with the fall of major powers like the Hittite empire and the disintegration of Egypt's New Kingdom. The Aegean region was particularly affected, marked by abandoned palaces and a significant decline in trade and communication. This period saw a reduction in both population and artefacts, indicating a decline in living standards and social complexity. 

Transition to the Early Iron Age: Following the collapse, Greece entered a period of simplification rather than total disintegration. Kings and palaces vanished, leading to smaller communities with simpler lifestyles. Despite a decline in population and artefacts, some elements of the earlier culture persisted, such as agricultural practices and local pottery. Literacy, however, was abandoned for around 400 years, as Linear B writing was used primarily for administrative purposes. The collapse of Bronze Age palaces led to a shift in trade patterns. Although overall overseas commerce declined, new areas, especially those on trade routes, began to prosper. For instance, Xeropolis and Perati became significant trade hubs. The transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age involved a mix of decline and adaptation, with new trade patterns, military conflicts, and technological innovations shaping the period. The Levant during the tenth century BCE was marked by the decline of Egyptian hegemony and the rise of independent city-states that became major players in Mediterranean trade and commerce, shaping the region’s economic and cultural landscape. Levantine peoples expanded westward, establishing new centres of influence and adapting to their new environments.

Invention of the Greeks: Ancient Greeks integrated and adapted various elements from their interactions with the Phoenicians and other Eastern Mediterranean civilizations into their own culture. Adaptation of universal polytheism facilitated the identification of similarities between deities from different cultures. The blending and adaptation of religious ideas and deities from one culture to another, such as the Greek adaptation of Levantine gods, Universal Polytheism and rituals adaptation between the Aegean, Levantine, and Anatolian civilizations during the early first millennium BCE.

8th-7th Century Developments: Etruria saw significant growth with new settlements, fortifications, and complex social structures. The Etruscans (or ‘Tyrsenoi’) adopted Levantine goods and technologies but adapted them to their local context. New religious practices and burial customs emerged, including the construction of elaborate tombs and the adoption of Levantine temple architecture. Etrurian merchants established connections across the Mediterranean, including with Carthage and Greece. The Etruscan alphabet was adapted from Greek, reflecting increasing cross-cultural interactions. 

Plot of the Iliad: Achilles, a Greek hero, quarrels with Agamemnon over Briseis, leading to his withdrawal from battle. Patroclus fights in his place and is killed by Hector, prompting Achilles to seek vengeance and kill Hector. The Iliad ends before the war’s conclusion. Historical Context: The Iliad’s version was finalized around the 8th century BCE. It reflects early Greek traditions and lacks later cultural or artistic developments, likely due to the adoption of the alphabet for writing. The Epic of Gilgamesh, originating from Sumerian and Akkadian literature, recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu. Their heroic journey, conflicts with gods, and search for immortality echo some themes found in the Iliad. This suggests the interplay and influence of ancient mythologies across different cultures. It explores how epic narratives and heroic tales, such as those in Homer's Iliad and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, reflect common motifs and themes like heroism, divine intervention, and the quest for immortality. The passage also highlights the transmission of stories and ideas across cultures through trade, migration, and oral traditions, showing how Greek epic poetry both absorbed and contributed to a shared mythological landscape of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

Babylon's Prominence: The first surviving world map, from ancient Babylon, was discovered in Sippar, Iraq. It depicts a disc-shaped world centered on Babylon, surrounded by a circular sea labeled as "bitter river." Lydian kingdom, particularly under King Gyges, introduced innovations like coinage. Greek scientists like Anaximander were influenced by Babylonian models, creating their own maps with similar worldviews. Greek-speaking cities in Anatolia and beyond had closer connections with Babylon and adopted aspects of its culture and technology. Cities like Carthage and Massalia (Marseille) rose to prominence in the western Mediterranean. Early Rome, initially a collection of villages, developed into a city with influences from Etruria. Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet and numeral system, contributing to their own technological and cultural advancements.

Rise of the Persian Empire: Cyrus, the king of Anshan, arriving in Babylon after a swift conquest. Cyrus transformed the fortunes of the Persian Empire, originating from minor kings in Iran. By the mid-6th century BCE, he defeated the Medes, took control of Ecbatana, and conquered significant territories, including Lydia and Babylon. His conquest extended the empire to a vast expanse, surpassing earlier empires in size. Darius the Great and Imperial Administration succeeded Cyrus and faced challenges asserting his legitimacy. He constructed the Behistun Inscription to validate his rule, portraying himself as a savior against a usurper. Darius introduced the title "King of Kings" and emphasized a distinct Iranian identity, diverging from Cyrus’s borrowed Mesopotamian titles. Persian Relations with Greece -  Despite their vast empire, the Persians had limited interactions with Greek city-states. Initial contacts with Sparta and Athens involved diplomatic and military exchanges, with Athens eventually seeking an alliance with Persia for protection against Sparta. The relationship highlighted Persia’s complex engagement with Greek powers, marked by both conflict and diplomacy. The Persian Wars have been highly significant in Western history, with notable events like the Battle of Marathon and the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae. The latter's slogan, "Molon labe" (Come and take them), has been appropriated by various political movements, including neo-fascist groups. Greek victories, such as those at Salamis and Plataea, are celebrated, while Persian victories and their sack of Athens are often overlooked. From the Persian perspective, the wars were punishment expeditions rather than attempts at conquest. The Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) was a minor blow to Persian pride. Despite initial setbacks, Persian ambitions persisted. Darius’ successor, Xerxes, launched a full-scale invasion of Greece. The Persian Wars left a legacy of both historical memory and practical outcomes. They demonstrated the impact of military victories on political power and influence in the ancient world, shaping Greek and Persian histories differently.

Origins of the Continents Concept: The concept of continents was introduced by Ionian Greek Scholars, notably by Anaximander and later Hekataios, who wrote about ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Terms like ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ were repurposed by Greek geographers to describe large regions rather than their original, smaller geographical connotations. Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II sent Phoenician sailors around Africa, and Persian King Darius sent Scylax to explore parts of Asia, establishing maritime routes and expanding knowledge of the continents. By the late 5th century BCE, Herodotus noted gaps in geographical knowledge and uncertainties about the exact boundaries of Europe and its surroundings. After the Persian Wars, Greek culture began adopting Persian elements, such as dress and customs, despite ongoing hostilities. Greek authors, influenced by Persian ideas, developed theories about how climate affects people’s characteristics, though these ideas were often more about environmental factors than inherent qualities. Philosophers like Aristotle saw Greece as an intermediate region with balanced characteristics between Europe and Asia. Philip II of Macedon united Greek states, while Alexander’s conquests blurred the lines between Europe and Asia, effectively collapsing the previous continental distinctions. Thus, the concept of continents was a Greek invention, initially applied to the Mediterranean world. Significant explorations by Egyptians and Persians expanded knowledge of these continents. Greek and Persian interactions shaped the symbolic and geographical understandings of Europe and Asia. Over time, Greek views evolved from a binary to a more integrated understanding of the world, culminating in Alexander the Great’s conquests. The division between Europe and Asia is not based on any significant natural barrier, but rather on historical, cultural fiction, legacy of historical self-definition and political narratives developed primarily by Europeans themselves over centuries, particularly through processes like the Renaissance, Christianization, and the deliberate formation of a "Western" identity. Europeans established and reinforced the idea of their region as distinct and, often, superior. This has sometimes resulted in attitudes of exclusivity or unwelcoming superiority, shaping both historical and modern perceptions of what constitutes "Europe" versus "Asia."

King of Kings: The ancient city of Troy, visited by Xerxes before his European campaign, was also a significant stop for Alexander as he began his conquest of Asia. Alexander, about twenty at the time, was influenced by Xerxes' actions and aimed to avenge Persian aggression. His military journey took him through Greece, Ionia, Anatolia, and led to his confrontation with Persian king Darius III at Issus. Alexander rejected Darius' peace offer, asserting his ambition for more. Alexander rapidly defeated Darius, captured key regions including the Levant, founded Alexandria in Egypt, and won at Gaugamela. He encountered elephants for the first time in battle against the Persians, which were previously unknown to many Greeks. After Alexander’s death, Ptolemy I, one of his generals, established a dynasty in Egypt, making Alexandria a cultural and commercial hub. The Ptolemies adopted Egyptian customs, the city became a center for learning and culture, housing the famous Library of Alexandria and the Mousaion. Scholars like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus made significant contributions in astronomy and geography. The Hellenistic kingdoms, arising from Alexander’s empire, showcased a blend of Greek, Egyptian, and Persian cultures, influencing art, science, and administration for centuries.

The Punic Wars were viewed as emblematic of territorial and maritime empire dynamics. Historical and political rhetoric used ancient rivalries to symbolize contemporary conflicts. Greek historian Polybius, who was a Roman prisoner, provided insights into the governance and cultural exchanges between Rome and Carthage and said that Rome’s legal and administrative systems were influenced by Carthage. Ultimately, Rome’s expansion led to cultural assimilation and technological advancements.

Ancient Rome and Roman Republic (SPQR): Story of the opera Mitridate, re di Ponto, focusing on the historical figure Mithridates VI of Pontus, a prominent enemy of Rome, and his struggle for freedom and autonomy against the expansive power of Rome. It highlights personal and political betrayals within Mithridates' family and their collective resistance against Roman domination. Mithridates VI ruled Pontus for nearly sixty years, expanding his kingdom significantly. Despite initial alliances with Rome, he became a major adversary due to his resistance to Roman expansion including Mithridates’ wars with Rome and the significant events like the massacre of Romans in Anatolia. The Parthian Empire, a major power in the region, is depicted in its complex relationship with Rome and its interaction with China through the Han dynasty. This reflects the broader geopolitical landscape affecting Mithridates. By Caesar's time, the Romans controlled a vast east-west strip but had limited knowledge of northern Europe. The Greek city-state Massalia (modern Marseille) was a key power in the region before Roman annexation. Caesar's military success and political maneuvers, including his relationship with Cleopatra, led to the annexation of Egypt and significant reforms, including the Julian calendar. His assassination in 44 BCE triggered further civil wars, eventually leading to Octavian (Augustus) establishing the Roman Empire and extending its borders. After Actium, Octavian (later Augustus) ruled Rome informally for a decade, holding only the symbolic title of ‘tribune of the plebs’. He was known as the princeps, or ‘first man’, and later took the name Augustus, meaning ‘the consecrated one’. This name, rather than ‘Romulus’, was chosen to avoid the negative connotations of kingship. The Romans saw their city’s origins in legends. One story, from Livy, tells of twins Romulus and Remus, raised by a she-wolf and later founding Rome. Romulus established the city and expanded it by forcibly acquiring women from the Sabines. This legend combined with another about Aeneas, a Trojan prince who fled Troy, to form Rome’s mythic foundation. These stories emphasize Rome’s openness to outsiders and the role of conquest in its expansion. Augustus used this narrative to justify his rule and integrate the legacy of both Aeneas and Romulus into his reign. About a third of Rome’s million inhabitants were enslaved, but migration was common, with many people moving voluntarily or enforced. Studies show a shift in ancestry towards the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Jews, including early Christians, settled in Rome, and graffiti in Arabic has been found in Pompeii. DNA analysis reveals people from East Asia in Italy, but they were likely born locally. Migration also brought people from across the empire, including Britain. Under Claudius, the empire expanded into Britain. Roman London, founded around 50 CE, became a vibrant commercial center with a mix of local and immigrant populations. Trade Winds: The term "Silk Road" was coined by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in the late 19th century. He combined Greek reports and Chinese historical sources to provide information on ancient trade routes. The Silk Road was first described by the Tyrian geographer Marinos in the 2nd century AD, who reported a journey from the Euphrates to China. However, the term "Silk Road" is based on a misunderstanding; Marinos's account was of an unusual journey rather than a regular trade route. Ancient overland routes across Asia existed but were primarily for military and administrative purposes rather than trade. Rightly so, more significant trade occurred via maritime routes across the Indian Ocean, which were faster and cheaper than overland routes. The Ptolemies utilized trade winds to facilitate this trade, with ships traveling between the Red Sea and India, and later directly to India from Egypt. During the Ptolemaic period, the main focus was on trade with Africa and Arabia. Evidence of trade with India began to increase in the 1st century AD. Roman trade through the Red Sea grew, undermining caravan routes through Arabia. Archaeological finds include Roman coins and pottery in India, and Indian goods like spices and textiles in Egypt. During the 1st century CE, Palmyra opened a new trade route from the Mediterranean to India, using camels and local connections for safe passage. This route significantly reduced journey times. Palmyra’s strategic position and hybrid trade routes facilitated extensive trade, including with Rome. By the 2nd century CE, the Palmyra route was popular alongside the Red Sea route. Ships would arrive at different times of the year depending on their destination. This system ensured a steady flow of goods between India and the Roman Empire. Trade routes from India to the Mediterranean peaked between Augustus and Nero’s reigns. Indian spices and pepper were used in various applications, including food, perfume, and medicine. After Augustus’ death, Chinese silk began arriving in Rome, leading to its popularity and subsequent ban on men wearing it. Roman and Chinese knowledge of each other was limited, the Chinese referred to Rome as Dà Qín and described its people vaguely. Chinese sources mention a Roman embassy arriving in China during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, though relations were challenging due to trade barriers and dangers.

Roman Empire: The concept of "all roads lead to Rome" is modern, though earlier thoughts suggested many paths led to Rome, such as Alan of Lille's idea and Chaucer's use in the 14th century. In ancient times, Rome was geographically distant from many parts of its empire. The empire's peak in the early 2nd century under Emperor Trajan saw vast conquests, including Arabia, Dacia, Armenia, and Mesopotamia. Despite this, Rome was not prominently mentioned in key trade routes like the Periplus of the Red Sea. The Sahara was involved in a complex trade network, including the trade of slaves. Although direct evidence of Saharan slave routes is limited, historical and archaeological findings suggest a significant role of slave labour in both the Sahara and Roman provinces. Under emperors like Hadrian and Severus, the empire saw both consolidation and significant African contributions to its economy and administration. However, by the late 2nd century and into the 3rd century, the empire faced severe challenges, including economic decline, environmental changes, and disease outbreaks, leading to a period of crisis characterized by frequent changes in leadership and increased military control. The Roman Empire's centre of gravity shifted away from Italy, highlighting the empire's struggles to maintain its vast domain amidst internal and external pressures. The increasing pressure on the Roman Empire from external and internal forces, leading to its eventual fragmentation. Initially, the Roman Empire struggled with maintaining control over its extensive borders, particularly in Europe, where it faced persistent resistance from various barbarian groups. Over time, these groups, including the Franks, Alamanni, Vandals, and Goths, began to pose a significant threat, leading to raids and territorial losses. Internal divisions and economic troubles further weakened the empire. Reforms by emperors like Diocletian and Constantine, including military and administrative changes, temporarily stabilized the empire and shifted focus to the eastern provinces. Constantine's establishment of Constantinople as a new capital marked the beginning of the empire's shift towards the eastern territories, highlighting the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of a more eastern-centered power structure.

The books sought to impart systemic knowledge without a time sequence. They authoritatively present the ultimate reality with fantasized storytelling to make it appetizing for the masses. Societal changes took time Gradually but surely, the instructions presented in the books intermingled with strict interpretations to better serve the political agendas of societies. The term “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) is an Islamic designation for those religions that have received divine revelations in the form of scriptures, such as Judaism, Christianity, and, according to some interpretations, Zoroastrianism. The Quran identifies the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians as people of the book, and calls them to believe in the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad.

From the ancient deities "El" and "Ra," the story begins as Abraham transforms his faith, giving rise to Yahweh and his poignant tale of sacrificing his son. Through the chapters of Genesis, we uncover the profound narrative of creation, original sin, and the tale of Noah's Ark, a testament to divine providence. The story of Abraham is central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to these religions, Abraham was chosen by God to be the father of many nations. The story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son is an important part of this narrative. The story of Genesis is also central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It tells the story of creation and Adam and Eve. The concept of original sin is derived from this story. The story of Noah’s Ark is also found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It tells the story of a great flood that destroyed all life on Earth except for Noah and his family. Moses is an important figure in Judaism. He led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and received the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai. David and Solomon are important figures in Judaism and Christianity. David was a king who united the tribes of Israel after killing Goliath while Solomon was known for his wisdom.  

Yeshua Nazareth (Jesus Christ) is central to Christianity. He is believed by Christians to be the son of God who died for their sins. The church developed after his death with important apostles like Peter and Paul. The Dead Sea Scrolls are important Jewish texts discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947. They contain some of the earliest known copies of Jewish scripture including parts of the Old Testament. Constantine played an important role in early Christianity. He was responsible for legalizing Christianity in Rome and calling for the Council of Nicaea which produced the Nicene Creed. There were several major schisms in Christianity including those between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as well as between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism by Luther. The pentarchy refers to five patriarchates that were considered important centers of Christianity including Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Chi-Rho is a Christian symbol that represents Jesus Christ. It consists of two Greek letters superimposed over each other. The Knights Templar was a Christian military order that played an important role during the Crusades. There were several Crusades which were military campaigns sanctioned by the Catholic Church against Muslim forces in order to reclaim holy sites in Jerusalem. Islam developed in Arabia during the 7th century CE. Its founder was Muhammad who received revelations from God through the angel Gabriel. The Quran is considered by Muslims to be the word of God as revealed to Muhammad.

Christianity and the fall of Rome: Constantine, who was baptized close to death, had Christianity become fashionable among the Roman elite. Churches were built across the empire, and missionaries like Ulfilas, who invented a Gothic alphabet, translated the Bible for the Goths. Ulfilas excluded the Book of Kings, believing it could incite aggression among the Goths. The Eastern Roman Empire, often called Byzantium, saw itself as Roman despite modern naming conventions. The Goths, deemed heretics by Nicene Christians, remained so until the sixth century. Julian the Apostate was the only fourth-century emperor to reject Christianity. The Roman state transitioned from persecuting to enforcing Christianity under Theodosius, who outlawed pagan rituals and mandated Christian profession for all subjects. The eastern provinces thrived, while the western empire weakened. Northern groups moved into Roman territories, and conflicts with Central Asian Huns exacerbated the instability. Western provinces became independent kingdoms.In Britain, Anglo-Saxons established chiefdoms, and Roman culture waned. The trans-Mediterranean economy deteriorated due to climate change and other factors. Bells have been used in religious and ceremonial contexts for centuries, often linked to Christianity's spread across Europe around 400 AD, thanks to figures like Bishop Paulinus of Nola, and later formalized in worship under Pope Sabinian around 604 AD. 

Islamic Caliphates: By the early 8th century, the Islamic state had expanded from China to the Atlantic, with rulers living in Damascus and retreating to desert castles for leisure and reflection. These retreats, like Qusayr ʿAmra, were symbols of luxury and power. The concept of 'Kings of the World' borrowed from Sasanian tradition highlights Iran's central role in global trade and politics. Sasanian rulers viewed themselves as central to the world’s political landscape, engaging in extensive trade networks that connected China, India, and the Mediterranean. By the early 7th century, Khosrow II seized major Roman cities, including Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem. The Sasanian empire faced a counter-offensive, and the political instability led to the loss of territories.  The Ummayads reached the western ocean but failed to conquer Constantinople in 717 CE. This led to a balance of power, with the Caliphate becoming the center of the world, surrounding New Rome. 

Fathers of Europe - Charles Martel and Charlemagne: Charles Martel, known as "the Hammer," defeated Muslim forces at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, halting their advance into what is now France. This victory helped consolidate his power over the Franks and marked a crucial moment in the region's history. Charlemagne, Martel's grandson, expanded the Frankish realm, ultimately establishing the Carolingian Empire, which laid the groundwork for modern Europe. Charlemagne's reign was characterized by both military conquests and strategic alliances, including his support of Pope Leo III. He was later crowned as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a title symbolizing the revival of the Western Roman Empire. The text underscores the emerging concept of a distinct "Christian Europe" amid diverse religious and cultural influences.  This period also saw advancements in art, architecture, and literature. Geographical understanding evolved with three main types of maps: Greek-inspired coordinate maps, Christian "T–O" maps reflecting theological views, and itinerary maps for travelers. Charlemagne maintained diplomatic relations with both Islamic powers and Christian rulers, exchanging gifts and fostering international ties. After his death, despite conflicts and territorial losses to Islamic forces, European rulers continued to navigate a complex world involving diverse cultures. Charlemagne's dynasty fell in 888, and the Saxon Ottonian dynasty emerged as the dominant European power. Diplomatic exchanges continued with Constantinople and Muslim courts, but religion was often a secondary consideration to political and economic interests. Western Europe became increasingly interconnected with the larger world, centered around Baghdad. 

Islamic Golden Age: In the 8th century, the Abbasids began the "Translation Movement" in Baghdad, commissioning Arabic translations of key scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac. Initiated by caliph al-Mansur and expanded under al-Ma’mun, this effort was lavishly funded and part of a broader commitment to scientific inquiry. Rather than merely preserving knowledge, the translations aimed to build upon it, influencing both Islamic and later European thought. The movement drew from earlier Iranian and Sasanian traditions and incorporated new materials like paper, which facilitated extensive writing and scholarship. The legacy of this intellectual exchange includes advancements in various fields, from astronomy to mathematics, reflecting a fusion of Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge that spurred significant scientific progress. Al-Farabi's Enumeration of the Sciences divided knowledge into linguistics, logic, mathematics, physics and metaphysics, and politics, integrating Arabic and Greek sciences and expanding the mathematical sciences. Increased trade through the Indian Ocean, influenced by Chinese innovations like printing and gunpowder, facilitated cultural exchanges between Islamic and Christian worlds, leading to the transfer of scientific knowledge to Europe. This period saw a revival in European trade and knowledge, as exemplified by the use of Indian numerals and chess. The Viking expansion, documented in sagas, included settlement in Greenland and exploration of North America, with the site at L’Anse aux Meadows providing evidence of early European presence in the Americas.

The Great Schism of 1054, marked by the mutual ex-communication between the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople, highlighted a deep rift between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, centred on issues like the use of unleavened bread and papal authority. In parallel, the Christian Reconquista in Iberia, led by kings like Alfonso VI, involved strategic alliances and conquest rather than solely religious zeal. The Crusades, initiated by Pope Urban II, extended Christian territory but deepened the schism, while also leading to significant cultural exchanges. The Crusaders' conquests, including the establishment of Latin kingdoms in the Levant, accelerated trade between Christian and Muslim regions, enriching European ports like Venice and Pisa. This period also saw a "Twelfth-Century Renaissance" in Europe, driven by the translation of Arabic scientific and philosophical works into Latin, primarily through Toledo, where scholars like Gerald of Cremona played a key role in integrating Arabic knowledge into Western Europe. Gerald of Cremona, captivated by the extensive scholarship he encountered in Toledo, remained there for life, translating over seventy Arabic scholarly works into Latin with meticulous accuracy. His translations included major works by Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and prominent Arab scholars like al-Khwarizmi and Avicenna. Meanwhile, itinerant scholars like Adelard of Bath spread knowledge of Arabic numerals and scientific concepts across Europe. In Sicily, King Roger II, influenced by both Christian and Arabic traditions, fostered a multi-confessional court and commissioned the renowned geographer al-Idrisi to create a comprehensive world map. Al-Idrisi’s "Book of Roger" integrated Islamic and Greek cartographic methods, significantly advancing European understanding of geography. Despite these achievements, the Crusades, marked by failed campaigns and shifting focus to local conquests, reflected the complex and often contentious nature of medieval Christian expansion. 

In medieval Europe, a more homogeneous Latin Christian culture emerged as local saint cults gave way to the veneration of prominent figures like Mary, Peter, and John, and independent monasteries became part of centralized networks. This period saw the rise of universities modeled on earlier educational institutions in China, India, and the Sasanian Empire, with a curriculum focused on theology, philosophy, and science, heavily influenced by Arabic and Greek scholarship. The Crusades targeted both external enemies and internal heresies, leading to significant persecution of Jews and the imposition of Latin rites on Orthodox territories. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II exemplified Europe's complex relationship with the Muslim world, engaging in diplomacy and fostering scholarly exchange while also responding to Mongol threats. Overall, the era highlights Europe's shift towards cultural uniformity, the growth of intellectual institutions, and its evolving role in a broader global context. This period witnessed the Mongol Empire’s massive territorial expansion under leaders like Genghis Khan and Möngke, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, bolstering trade networks across three continents. Concurrently, West African empires like Mali thrived on gold trade and Islamic scholarship, exemplified by Mansa Musa’s legendary pilgrimage to Mecca. The era highlights a vibrant global economy, linking diverse cultures and fostering exchanges of goods, technologies, and ideas, from Chinese porcelain to African gold and spices. As goods, capital, technology, and ideas flowed from Africa and Asia to Europe, so did stories, with Arabic fables becoming immensely popular in medieval Europe. The Arabic storytelling device of the ‘frame tale,’ which originated in India and traveled through Persia, allowed for a flexible narrative structure where stories could be added, removed, or altered. The most famous example, One Thousand and One Nights, features Scheherazade telling tales to delay her execution, illustrating the frame tale's adaptability. Similarly, Kalila wa-Dimna, originally from India's Panchatantra, was translated and expanded through various cultures, reflecting a dynamic exchange of narratives. By the 18th century, these stories, enriched through numerous translations, had become some of the most widely distributed works in literature, highlighting a global literary network. This tradition of storytelling bridges diverse cultures and eras, revealing a shared fascination with narrative and wisdom.

In "Land of Darkness," we trace the journey of Ibn Battuta, who set out from Morocco in the 14th century on a pilgrimage and ended up traveling over 75,000 miles across the Islamic world and beyond, including parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe. His observations reveal a world dominated by Muslim rulers, yet increasingly fragmented by political and environmental changes. Battuta's travels intersect with the broader narrative of the Black Death, which began in Central Asia and wreaked havoc across continents, exacerbated by climate shifts and global trade. This plague not only devastated populations but also triggered profound economic and cultural shifts in Europe and beyond. The narrative underscores how the plague's impact, coupled with societal and environmental upheavals, led to significant transformations in global commerce, culture, and humanistic studies, marking a pivotal moment in world history. The Decameron stands out for its progressive portrayal of Muslims and interreligious relations, featuring tales of mutual respect and cross-cultural interactions. It includes depictions of figures like Saladin and narratives such as that of William II of Sicily and the king of Tunis, who collaborate honorably while their descendants navigate a complex love story amidst piracy. Similarly, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, a popular spoof travelogue from the 14th century, offers a fantastical account of global travels with anachronisms that reflect a nostalgic view of a fading, interconnected world. This sentiment is echoed in architectural and cultural shifts, such as the Christian appropriation of Islamic architectural styles in Iberia and the creation of the Catalan Atlas. This map, blending ancient and contemporary knowledge, illustrates a world rich in diversity yet increasingly focused on a European-centric view. As Europe solidified its identity and power through conquest and colonization, including the transatlantic slave trade and the eradication of indigenous populations in the Americas, these historical narratives reveal a shift from a multicultural world to one increasingly defined by European dominance and exclusion.

Age of Exploration is often celebrated for connecting the world through new Atlantic routes linking the Americas and India, marking the start of a global era. However, it can be argued that cultural and economic exchanges between different civilizations began much earlier and were crucial in shaping what we now call the West. European Isolation and Expansion ~ In the 15th century, European nations began distinguishing themselves by excluding Jews, Muslims, and other groups. As European navigation expanded, so did their distance from and often their displacement of the people they encountered. This created a new world that excluded these displaced peoples. Despite the isolationist tendencies, European nations continued to interact with various cultures, including Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, and Native American societies. European fascination with these cultures was not always based on superiority. Key works, such as the English translation of Kalila wa-Dimna, highlight the extensive European interest in foreign and ancient knowledge. European interest in ancient history persisted into the 18th century, as demonstrated by works like Charles Rollin’s Ancient History. This reflects the broader European fascination with diverse historical cultures. Emergence of Western Civilisation: The concept of 'Western Civilisation' as distinct from other cultures became more defined in the 19th century. Scholars began mapping shared cultures onto specific geographies, reinforcing ideas of civilizational and racial hierarchies. Critique of Civilisational Thinking: The text critiques the notion of 'Western Civilisation' and the isolationist view of history. It argues that understanding societies in isolation is outdated and historically inaccurate, suggesting the need for new ways to conceptualize our interconnected world.

To those who look only at Mughal (Gurkani) palaces and Ashokan edicts, the past appears glorious. But peel away the gilding, and a more sobering reality emerges—of a thousand-year struggle between ideas and interests, reform and reaction.

In the grand arc of civilization, the Indian subcontinent once loomed as a radiant centre of philosophical inquiry, scientific endeavour, and mercantile sophistication. From the Upanishadic dialogues to the trade routes that ferried pepper and pearls to Rome, the region was open, dynamic, and porous to ideas. But sometime around the first millennium, the doors began to shut. A once-thriving, cosmopolitan civilizational landscape slowly calcified into orthodoxy, caste rigidity, and regional feudalism. The transformation was neither swift nor accidental—it was, in fact, a thousand-year decline powered by theological defensiveness, institutional stasis, and the complex overlay of tribal structures. 

Across China, India, the Middle East, and pre-Columbian America, state institutions did not supplant tribal ones. They coexisted uneasily. The “tribe,” both as social identity and political unit, retained immense hold over people’s loyalty, even when empires expanded over them. In India, this duality played out in a particularly distinctive fashion. Unlike the West, where the state gradually eroded clan-based structures and built centralized bureaucracies, Indian rulers often co-opted local chieftains, kin networks, and caste councils into their governance machinery. The state was more often a federation of fiefdoms than a sovereign monopoly of power. This uneasy synthesis was compounded by the religious counter-revolution that followed the golden age of Indian philosophy. Between 500 BCE and 300 CE, Buddhism and Jainism had posed fundamental challenges to Vedic orthodoxy, championing merit over birth and non-violence over ritual sacrifice. Alarmed by their appeal, especially in East and North India, Brahminical elites tightened the cords of orthodoxy. The social order, once fluid, ossified. A rule-based society emerged, heavily policed by religious sanction. Advancement became suspect; innovation was viewed as a threat to the divine order. A society that had once embraced heterodoxy now punished deviation. 

This shift was not just ideological—it had lasting institutional consequences. In the north, monks and merchants once debated under Bodhi trees and in royal courts. By the 10th century, many of these same spaces had fallen into decay or were repurposed by new invaders. The south, too, despite its Sangam-era flourish of literature and trade, succumbed to similar patterns. In the latter half of the Sangam Age, temple-centered economies grew dominant. Rulers became patrons of priestly castes, exchanging land and protection for spiritual legitimacy. As doctrinal conservatism deepened, societal advancement slowed. 

Enter the raiders. From the northwest frontier came waves of armed marauders—Afghans, Turks, and Mongols—bringing with them not just swords but systems. Chief among these was a militarized feudal-tax regime derived from Rome’s beneficium, Mongol revenue systems, and the Turkish iqta. The Delhi Sultanate adopted it with alacrity. The subcontinent’s land was parceled into jagirs, and jagirdars—like their European counterparts—were granted revenue rights in return for military service. This was not an administrative innovation; it was a trade of decentralization for control. Over time, zamindars and taluqdars came to dominate rural economies, wielding disproportionate influence over the peasantry. 

The Mughal (Gurkani) Empire, for all its grandeur, reinforced rather than reversed this feudal structure. Despite its famed centralization under Akbar, revenue collection remained heavily dependent on intermediaries—loyal not to the empire but to their own clans. Even as gunpowder and Persianate culture flowed through the empire, the administrative sinews remained feudal. The system prized loyalty and revenue over competence and innovation. Meanwhile, in the Deccan, the Vijayanagara Empire mirrored this feudal logic with southern inflections. Emperor Krishnadevaraya (1509–1529), celebrated for military prowess and temple-building, introduced a variable tax regime that prefigured lagaan. Taxes increased only if the farmer’s income rose, a sophisticated fiscal idea ahead of its time. But even this progressive step was enmeshed in a deeply unequal rural order, where hereditary officials and landed elites held sway. Bureaucracy never quite outgrew patrimony. This tapestry of tribal legacy, religious retrenchment, and imported feudalism shaped India’s political institutions for centuries. The British did not dismantle this system—they merely rebranded it. The zamindari system was formalized, and hereditary rulers were roped into indirect rule under the Crown. In some ways, the thousand-year decline was perfected under colonial modernity.

The 2nd-century Antonine Plague and the later Cyprian Plague devastated the Roman Empire, sapping manpower from its armies and weakening its economy. These outbreaks, coupled with unstable imperial succession, civil wars, and economic mismanagement, culminated in the 'Crisis of the Third Century' (235–284 CE). The empire survived, but at the cost of becoming a more centralised and bureaucratic state, with an economy increasingly directed toward sustaining military expenditure. Excessive taxation, a strained agrarian economy, and periodic internal unrest gradually hollowed out Rome’s economic base. The rise of Christianity transformed the empire’s social fabric and civic structures, while ongoing invasions by Germanic tribes and internal decay led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Europe entered a prolonged period of political fragmentation, economic regression, and intellectual decline, often referred to as the "Dark Ages." Europe was fragmented into small kingdoms and polities. Feudalism (serfdom) took hold, with most people living as peasants or serfs, bound to land and under the thumb of local lords. Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire endured for nearly another millennium, even as new powers emerged elsewhere. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, the Rashidun Caliphate (Four Companions) rapidly expanded across the Middle East and North Africa, succeeded by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, ushering in a flourishing Islamic Golden Age. 

By 1000 CE, while Western Europe remained relatively insular and agrarian, Islamic caliphates, Indian kingdoms, and Tang and Song China were part of vibrant trade networks, exchanging goods, technology, and knowledge via the Silk Road and Indian Ocean routes. In Western Europe, the first major revival came under Charlemagne, crowned in 800 CE as "Emperor of the Romans." His reign marked a short-lived but significant unification of Western and Central Europe, and triggered the Carolingian Renaissance—a cultural and intellectual revival rooted in classical learning. 

The spread of Islam prompted the Roman Catholic Church, between 1100 CE to 1300 CE, to launch nine major Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control and assert religious authority and to repel Mongol invasions and Islam's expansion into Western Europe. At this time, the Mongol Empire rose in the east, conquering large parts of Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Their advance into Western Europe halted after the death of Ögedei Khan in 1241, due to internal succession disputes and logistical limitations. The Crusaders (Knights), unintentionally, brought advances and ideas of the East, and lost knowledge of the Greeks and Romans back to Europe (particularly, Italy, as the Roman Church had ordered the crusades).

Despite some agricultural innovations like the heavy plough and the three-field crop rotation, life for most Europeans remained difficult. By the early 1340's, population growth outpaced food supply. Then came the Black Death (1347–1351), which wiped out roughly one-third of Europe’s population, worsening the already harsh living conditions but also weakening feudal structures over time. 

By the ocean they came: The European Renaissance in the 1300s-1500s marked a rapid transition from the dark & middle ages to modernity. The major reasons were reduced fear of death due to repeated epidemics like Plagues and Pox, and accounts of the traveler Marco-polo serving as the riches of the East. This urged Europeans to travel far and wide ushering in the Age of Sail. By the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Ottoman Empire began rising in Anatolia. Following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans became a dominant power, controlling key land routes between Europe and Asia. While they did not completely block East-West trade, the taxes and tolls imposed by Ottoman intermediaries pushed European powers—especially Portugal and Spain—to search for alternative maritime trade routes, igniting the Age of Exploration, to overcome Europe's geopolitical isolation.

So, before the Age of Discovery aka Age of Exploration, began in 1488, there were basically two kinds of colonial expansion that existed. 

• The first kind of colonialism is not that well known. Since the early 1400, Spain had a colonial project going in the Canary Islands. This has been called Europe's first genocide. Over the course of a century due to Spanish wars and enslavement the population of the Canary Islands dropped from estimates of 50 to 80,000 to just a thousand Canary Islanders. The Spaniards faced a lot of resistance, but eventually they made the islands into a plantation economy, often using enslaved labour (in coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants). This process historians have called a template for Spanish conquests in the New World. This model was repeatedly replicated by subsequent European powers, particularly in the Americas and Africa, giving rise to the Atlantic Slave Trade. At that time, Europeans didn't think they could reach Asia by sailing west. And they were totally right, as it was really far. However, Christopher Columbus, an Italian navigator, put his findings before Spanish experts of the court twice, and he was rejected twice. Only the intervention of the Spanish king, Ferdinand II, made it possible for Columbus to get three boats - perhaps because he felt it was a low-risk, potentially high-reward situation. So what did Columbus realize when he was on his first trip? Well, his initial idea when he was selling out was to plug into existing trade networks, just like the Portuguese did. But remember, his pitch before the Spanish King had been that he would find the rich Asian cities - the spices, the cloth, the house with gold roofs. And what did he find of all these things? Nothing. So Columbus actually got nervous. He had to tell his bosses something about this trip. How was he going to make this successful enterprise from the initial idea of Portuguese trading posts? He switches to the Spanish style of colonialism that they had developed on the Canary Islands, where they use locals or import other people to start the plantation economy. Because he died believing he'd found islands east of Asia. So in his mind, he was in the east. The Spaniards were able to conquer the empire they found so quickly by befriending local factions that were angry at the most powerful factions around. The Spanish were really trying to exploit domestic divisions. People in the New World had allegiances, politics and agency. Some chose to support the Spanish, something that didn't really work out for them later. But in the end, they chose so themselves. Four Spanish-based voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs opened the way for the widespread European exploration and colonisation of the Americas. During the Age of Exploration, Tahiti gained a reputation as a sensual paradise, partly due to European explorers' accounts of the islanders' open attitudes towards sexuality and their willingness to exchange sexual favours for iron goods.

• The second was the Portuguese way. You could plug into existing trade routes by showing up, occupying some land, building forts and trading posts. This is what the Portuguese were doing in Africa. Take the Fort of Elmina that they built. They did this because there was a lot of resistance from locals and because nearly half of the explorers died in the interior of Africa. Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese mariner, in 1488, became the first European navigator to round the southern tip of Africa and to demonstrate that the most effective southward route for ships lies in the open ocean, well to the west of the African coast. His discoveries were later used by Vasco da Gama to establish a sea route between Europe and Asia. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in India, with Vasco da Gama landing in Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) in 1498. They established a colonial presence, primarily focused on the spice trade and maritime dominance, with their rule in India lasting for over four and a half centuries.

'Barques', a three-masted sailing ship with square sails enabled sailors to cut strong ocean currents and tame wild winds. This ushered the Age of Discovery, a period largely overlapping with the Age of Sail, approximately from the 15th century to the 17th century in European history, during which seafaring Europeans explored and colonized regions across the globe. This resulted in a sharp rise in power of Spain and Portugal, urging the Christian Pope to split the world in two through the Treaty of Tordesillas, causing fear among fellow European nations forming their own naval capabilities and acquiring new territories. European Renaissance enabled the European Powers to question things, appreciate art and take risks and which improved ability to transverse oceans. This period was swiftly followed by the Age of Discovery with Europe at an advantage to establish hegemony on overseas territories because of better guns, immunity from germs, and intellectual prowess like the double-entry bookkeeping, accounting, and the printing press.

Rule of law: With the days of Spain and Portugal gone, France and England came into the picture. Since at least the fourteenth century, English monarchs had used letters patent to grant rights of denizenship — protection to life and property similar to those for native-born subjects — to foreigners who promised to introduce new industries and protected their own industry through customs and preferential Industrial policy. Monarchs also used to issue Charters (monopoly rights) to collect steady taxes in order to fund their wars. The protestant reformation had escorted old ideas with new values to England like the separation of powers by providing for checks and balances.

Societies and Guilds: Over time, the concept of a company evolved with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world's first formally listed public company, which started off as a spice trader in 1602. Whereas, in England, taxes were levied on common lands and other movable properties. Various developments over centuries including the origination of the three clauses Magna Carta Libertatum, third-party enforcement of private property rights by the keepers-of-the-peace later called the justice-of-the-peace, and events that lead to the establishment of the English parliament on the doctrine "No taxation without representation" enabled the establishment of institutions that provided an edge to England over other states, the world over. Simultaneously, as trade expanded notable variations were adopted in the taxing principles based on demography like taxes were levied on the basis of occupation and place of control.

In the early 18th century, a Scottish adventurer named John Law briefly became the most powerful man in France’s economy. After fleeing Britain for killing a man in a duel, he turned gambler and economist, promoting the idea that paper money—not gold—was the key to national wealth. In 1716, France, bankrupt after Louis XIV’s wars, gave Law permission to set up the Banque Générale, later nationalized as Banque Royale. It began issuing banknotes, initially backed by gold. Law then merged this bank with the Mississippi Company, a trading firm with exclusive rights to exploit French territories in North America. He used freshly printed paper money to inflate its share price from 500 to over 10,000 livres. For a time, Paris was gripped by a frenzy: servants quit to day-trade and the word “millionaire” entered the language. But Law printed far more notes than there was gold to redeem—eventually three times more—and confidence collapsed. In 1720, panicked investors demanded gold, the share price crashed by 90%, and food prices soared. Law, stripped of power, fled France disguised as a woman and died poor in Venice. Though speculative mania and mismanagement played a role, Law’s fall became a cautionary tale about easy credit and paper money. The episode—known as the Mississippi Bubble—left France wary of central banking for generations. Today, as central banks expand balance sheets under “quantitative easing,” critics draw uncomfortable parallels with Law’s grand experiment which he called "credit expansion". 

In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success.

The Industrial Revolution: The transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power and water power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the mechanized factory system. Output greatly increased, and a result was an unprecedented rise in population and in the rate of population growth. The development of trade and the rise of business were among the major causes of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in history. Comparable only to humanity's adoption of agriculture with respect to material advancement, the Industrial Revolution influenced in some way almost every aspect of daily life. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists have said the most important effect of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population in the western world began to increase consistently for the first time in history. The only ill effects were the working conditions of the people who came to cities from rural areas to work in factories. This gave rise to divergent political views the world still uses, Capitalism (Right-wing) and Communism (Left-wing).

New Ideas: As machines did most of the hard labor, people became both wealthy and free to follow varied pursuits. Europe witnessed a period of intellectual and philosophical revelations in the 17th and 18th centuries which had global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was preceded by the Scientific revolution. It was a period of series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy), and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. Nations like England dominated Medicine, whereas Germans mastered manufacturing machine parts and chemicals, while the French made were busy with their looks. The fierce competition led to continuous wars amongst themselves resulting in the French Revolution where ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity took center stage. With support from the weak French, thirteen British American Colonies in the Americas resolved to form an Independent nation called the United States of America became independent against the backdrop of British's own principles of "No taxation without representation". Whereas, in 1799, Britain introduced Income Tax as a temporary measure to cover the cost of the Napoleonic Wars. Today, the majority of nations today have followed suit. 

Liquid Gold Literally: As economies prospered during the Age of Industrialization backed by fossil fuels. An emergent need was felt to procure and control Oil. 

Slave Trade and Scramble of Africa

How did the Industrial Revolution affect the progression of management theory? Early companies were not corporations in the way we understand that word today, but social bodies, an ’agglomeration of traders’ from different branches of enterprise and were controlled by ‘craft guilds’. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods and services lacked standardization and were produced at home in small batches. These companies were largely in the hands of a family or a single owner/manager. The Industrial Revolution saw work shift from family-led home production to factory production. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, small factories transformed into larger and more complex ones and the exchange of goods was taking place across more and more regions, most business owners no longer had the expertise to run such vast geographic and financial enterprises. This managerial inefficiency and lack of control over production urged for the establishment of management as a distinct field of study so that some order and logic could be brought to bear on ‘how work was performed’. Modern management is less than 150 years old and evolved during the Second Industrial Revolution. A dedicated framework was developed to enable a person to make preparations for handling general management responsibilities.

Europeans: The Europeans, particularly the British, were pioneers of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century123. They introduced many new inventions that changed the world forever, such as the Spinning Jenny for spinning wool or cotton, the Newcomen steam engine, and the Watt steam engine1. These inventions led to the wide-scale introduction of machinery, the transformation of cities, and significant technological developments in a wide range of areas1. South Koreans: South Korea’s industrial development is unique in the modern history of industrialization4567. The South Korean government aggressively pursued an economic development strategy that centered on manufacturing-sector growth, driven largely by industrial complexes4567. More than 900 industrial clusters account for 62 percent of the country’s manufacturing production and 80 percent of total exports4. They also focused on maximizing export products, starting with simple items such as garments, fiber, and footwear, and then moving towards more sophisticated hardware-based products for heavy manufacturing industries such as automotive, TVs, steel, mobile devices, and semiconductors7. Chinese: China introduced the concept of new-type industrialization21. This concept represents the transformation from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing89. It involves forming a new industrial structure featuring the joint development of emerging industries and traditional manufacturing industries310. Moreover, China developed the concept of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)1112139. SEZs in mainland China are granted more free market-oriented economic policies and flexible governmental measures by the government of China, compared to the planned economy elsewhere11. This allows SEZs to utilize economic management which is more attractive to foreign and domestic businesses11. In SEZs, foreign and domestic trade and investment are conducted without the authorization of the Chinese central government in Beijing11. These zones were created as a ‘catalyst’ for the Chinese economy to transition from a centrally planned economy to one that incorporated aspects from both a centrally planned and a free-market economy12.

The legitimacy of the state, rule of law, and an accountable government helped England stay a powerhouse well up to the second World War. The majority of Nations post-independence followed tax practices adopted in England like merit-based tax collectors and tax systems to gather maximum resources. Sped by the waves of industrial revolutions, usage of fossil fuels, new technologies like electricity, new science, and taking advantage of resources and labor elsewhere; the international presence of corporations increased ushering in a phase of rapid globalization. Taxes followed, and with more and more cross-border transactions, making international taxation immensely important post-second world war.

Germany was unified under Prussian leadership through a combination of strategic military campaigns, political manoeuvring, and the skillful leadership of Otto von Bismarck, the Chief Minister of Prussia, was the architect of German unification. He adopted a "blood and iron" policy, using military force and political cunning to achieve his goals. After 1871, Germany unified under Prussia and became a huge industrial, military, and scientific powerhouse — within 30 years, it rivaled Britain and France combined. Britain and France, for centuries, were bitter enemies (Hundred Years’ War, Napoleonic Wars, colonial rivalries). But by the late 19th/early 20th century, they buried the hatchet because Germany was rising fast and threatening both. A series of friendship agreements called the Entente Cordiale (1904) was executed. Britain saw Germany’s naval buildup as a direct threat. France never forgave the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871. So, Britain and France, once rivals, teamed up against Germany out of self-preservation. Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871): Bismarck provoked a war with France, using a fabricated telegram to rally other German states to Prussia's side. The Prussian victory led to the southern German states joining the North German Confederation, forming the German Empire. In January 1871, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Palace of Versailles, marking the culmination of German unification.

History’s bloodiest century was shaped not only by wars fought with tanks and bombs, but also by clashes of ideology and economics. The first great rupture, the First World War (1914-18), began less from principle than from accident. A tangle of alliances, rising nationalism in the Balkans, and the competition for colonial empire dragged Europe into a conflagration. Germany’s industrial rise threatened Britain’s global dominance; France sought revenge for 1871; Austria-Hungary feared disintegration. Germany (formerly Prussia-led) felt left out of the colonial race. Germany is trying to secure dominance in Europe and fearing encirclement by Russia and France. Trigger: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (June 1914) → Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia → alliances pulled everyone in. The result was a mechanised slaughter that left 20 million dead, empires broken, and debts piled high. In its wake, governments turned to heavier taxation, reparations and tariffs, trying to balance budgets and rebuild shattered economies. Instead of integration, trade collapsed into protectionism—an ominous prelude to the next conflict. USA didnt wat to get into European quarrels, but the Zimmermann Telegram (1917): Germany secretly offered Mexico an alliance—if Mexico attacked the U.S., Germany would help it reclaim lost lands (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico). When Britain revealed this telegram to the U.S., outrage followed. After the war, President Wilson proposed his Fourteen Points (a peace plan emphasizing self-determination, free trade, and a League of Nations). But at home, Americans grew disillusioned with European wars → U.S. Senate refused to join the League of Nations, retreating into isolationism during the 1920s. After WWI, it was blamed (via the Versailles Treaty, 1919) as the main aggressor. This humiliation and economic collapse paved the way for Hitler and WWII.

The Second World War (1939-45) was born from the failures of the first. The punitive Treaty of Versailles left Germany embittered and unstable. Economic depression in the 1930s furnished fertile ground for Hitler’s rise; Japan, short of resources, turned militarist in Asia. Once again, industry became a weapon: America’s assembly lines churned out bombers and tanks, while Soviet factories—relocated east of the Urals—proved resilient under siege. When peace returned, much of Europe lay in ruins but the United States emerged as the world’s banker, creditor and workshop. Taxes swelled during the war to finance mobilisation and never fully receded, embedding the idea of large peacetime states.

Russia was not always a villain in Western eyes. During WWI, Russia was Britain and France’s ally against Germany. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia turned communist, withdrew from WWI, and became viewed as a threat by the Western European Powers.

From this rubble emerged a binary world. The Soviet Union, having absorbed terrible losses, preferred communist regimes across Eastern Europe. Its system promised equality and rapid industrialisation, but depended on closed economies and heavy state control. America offered the opposite: liberal democracy, the Marshall Plan, and a rules-based system of trade and finance embodied in Bretton Woods. Both powers sought converts. The USSR consolidated control over Eastern Europe by installing communist governments in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. (known as the Eastern Bloc). The USA responded with the Marshall Plan (1948)—massive aid to rebuild Western Europe’s economies and prevent them from “going communist.” This division hardened into the Iron Curtain, famously described by Churchill in 1946. After WWII, the Iron Curtain split Europe. West prospered under capitalism; East remained under communist regimes until 1989–91. America formed NATO (1949) and USSR formed Warsaw Pact. The Berlin Blockade (1948–49): USSR tried to starve out Western-controlled Berlin; U.S. responded with the Berlin Airlift, supplying the city for 11 months. Later, the Berlin Wall (1961) became the symbol of these ideological divisions. Washington viewed free trade and open markets as guarantors of peace and as new outlets for its overabundant industry. Moscow saw socialism’s advance as both moral mission and strategic shield. Each invested abroad, backed proxies, and built alliances—NATO for the West, the Warsaw Pact for the East. USSR backed independence movements and communist parties in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. USA promoted development aid, democracy movements, and multinational institutions (IMF, World Bank, GATT/WTO). The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties is considered a codification of customary international law and state practice concerning treaties. Tax treaties provide two alternative methods for eliminating double taxation i.e Exemption method and the Credit method. Each saw these regions as the key prize in shaping the world order.

The mistrust that grew between them was not rooted in direct battle—the two never fought an open war against one another—but in the fear that the other’s system, if unchecked, would dominate global politics and markets This illustrate the “domino theory”—the U.S. belief that if one nation fell to communism, others would follow. Proxy wars from Korea to Vietnam to Angola became stand-ins for a larger struggle. The result was mistrust escalating into a Cold War, fought through proxy wars, propaganda, espionage, and nuclear brinkmanship—even if never a direct, declared war between them. Taxes and trade policy were not immune: America kept defence budgets swollen, funding them with higher levies and deficit spending; the Soviet bloc sealed itself off in a planned economy with heavy industrial taxation and little private enterprise. The aftershocks of the world wars thus shaped a second conflict—the Cold War—that was as much about the flow of capital and goods as about soldiers and spies.

In the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 looked like vindication of markets and integration. But the old rivalries linger, with Russia still wary of encirclement and America still uneasy about challengers to its order. The legacy of the 20th century is a reminder that wars are fought not only on battlefields but also in tax codes, trade treaties and factories—and that mistrust, once sown, can endure long after the guns have fallen silent.

From Glory to Austerity: Britain’s empire peaked in the late 19th century, sustained by naval supremacy, industrial leadership, and colonial wealth. But its very success carried the seeds of decline: running a global empire stretched finances and military commitments thin. The rise of rivals—Germany’s industry, America’s scale, and Japan’s naval ambitions—meant Britain was no longer unrivaled. The real breaking point came with the two World Wars: Britain won militarily but lost economically. World War I left it heavily indebted to the U.S., and World War II bankrupted it, forcing London to borrow massively from Washington and accept the Marshall Plan. At the same time, its colonies—from India to Africa—demanded independence, draining both manpower and prestige. Meanwhile, the U.S., blessed with resources, continental scale, and immunity from wartime destruction, emerged as the global creditor and industrial powerhouse. By 1945, power had unmistakably shifted: Britain, once the imperial hegemon, had to accept its new role as a junior partner to the U.S. in the Western alliance. And yes, it was difficult to digest — Winston Churchill himself spoke of Britain being “bankrupted and exhausted” by war. The “special relationship” that Britain later cultivated with America was, in some sense, a dignified adjustment: rather than resist the loss of primacy, Britain recast itself as America’s closest ally, ensuring relevance even in decline.

The U.S. has, in effect, outpaced every great “industrial challenger” since the 19th century

From the fragile settlements of the 17th century, when pilgrims clung to the Atlantic coastlines in search of faith (groups like the Mayflower Pilgrims 1620s and Puritans 1630s who left England for religious freedom) and fortune (profit motives of others—Virginia Company settlers chasing tobacco wealth, adventurers seeking land, and merchants testing the New World as a commercial outpost), America’s story unfurled with the paradox of liberty and control: colonies that grew restless under Britain’s mercantilist leash erupted into revolution, the Boston Tea Party of 1773 symbolising defiance against taxation without representation, and the ensuing War of Independence (1775–1783) forging a republic out of rebellion. Yet the young nation’s unity was tested again in the Civil War (1861–1865), where the clash between slavery and freedom, agrarian South and industrialising North, threatened its very fabric, only for blood and iron to stitch together a Union reborn. From that crucible, the United States leapt into industrialisation with a ferocity unmatched—railroads stitching continents, factories humming with Ford’s assembly lines, and Carnegie’s steel and Morgan’s finance erecting both skyscrapers and the scaffolding of modern capitalism. Unlike Europe where resources were drained by frequent conflicts (Franco-Prussian War, Crimean War, colonial wars, etc.), America was spared major wars on its own soil after 1865, allowing uninterrupted growth. America excelled in adapting and commercialising new technologies: Edison’s electricity, Ford’s assembly line, Bell’s telephone. Unlike Europe, the U.S. had a relatively freer environment for patenting and scaling inventions. This fueled the “Gilded Age” excesses and the raw dynamism of U.S. capitalism. The U.S. shielded its industries from foreign competition and enjoyed a vast, unified home market. Britain industrialised first (late 18th–early 19th century), but by mid-19th century much of its infrastructure—railways, coal, textile mills—was already built. Growth slowed because new technologies didn’t deliver the same leap as before. By adopting technologies invented elsewhere (like spinning machinery or Bessemer steel) and scaling them with American resources, the U.S. avoided much trial-and-error. So Britain lit the spark of industrialisation, but the U.S. turned it into a roaring furnace by scaling, financing, and commercialising technologies at a pace Britain—constrained by empire, class, and size—couldn’t match. After 1865, America had the rare advantage of being a vast nation with no hostile great power on its soil. The dollar, once a provincial currency, became first the lubricant of domestic growth, then, through wars and crises, the linchpin of global finance, as Wall Street learned to orchestrate credit, debt, and speculation on an imperial scale. By the mid-20th century, backed by industrial might, military victories, and Bretton Woods institutions, America had transformed from a frontier experiment into the global hegemon, wielding not just armies and industries, but the weight of a financial system upon which the world itself came to balance.

France’s Empire: Cushion—and Trap: The cushion. France’s colonial empire (North & West Africa, Indochina, the Maghreb) gave it: Protected markets for textiles, wine, and manufactures, and secure sources of raw materials (phosphates, rubber, metals). Strategic depth and prestige after the 1870–71 humiliation; empire soothed politics and underwrote the franc via colonial monetary zones (later the CFA). A safety valve for capital: risk-averse savers could buy colonial loans and concessions with quasi-state guarantees rather than finance risky metallurgy or chemicals at home. The trap. The same empire also locked France into: Lower-productivity specialisation—administration, extraction, and protected manufactures—blunting incentives to scale heavy industry or systematise R&D (where Germany surged). Capital diversion: money chased colonial railways and bonds instead of domestic plant and equipment, keeping French finance conservative and dispersed. Political overhang: colonial wars (Madagascar, Morocco, Indochina, Algeria) drained attention and budgets, stoking instability and delaying structural reforms. The empire gave France markets and materials, but at the cost of domestic scale, financial risk-taking, and technological focus—the very ingredients the U.S. and Germany used to sprint ahead.

After 1871, Germany, not Britain, was actually the U.S.’s closest rival in speed of industrial catch-up. By 1900, both were industrial titans, but the U.S. overtook Germany because it combined abundant resources, mass consumer markets, and peace into relentless commercialisation. Germany’s brilliance in science-based sectors was formidable, but its geopolitical entanglements meant that industry was always tied to state power and eventual war. America became the workshop of the world, while Germany became the arsenal of Europe—a crucial difference in trajectory. This mix of peace at home, resource endowment, technological adoption, and ruthless business organisation meant that, by the early 20th century, the U.S. had vaulted from a recovering republic to the world’s workshop and banker, laying the foundations of its global hegemony.

In industrial terms, the U.S. has faced a series of “wars without bullets”—with Britain, Germany, Japan, and now China—and each time it has emerged on top, thanks to scale, openness to innovation, vast resources, and a financial system that converts capital into global power 

• U.S.: Domestic scale + finance + commercialization → world’s workshop and banker by 1914–45. (Detailed factors discussed in detail below)

• Germany: Science-based heavy industry + coordination → Europe’s industrial pacesetter, but entangled in militarised geopolitics. The fiercest competitor, especially 1871–1945. German chemistry, engineering, and precision industry were world-leading. But two world wars wrecked its momentum, and America’s financial and industrial depth proved decisive.

• France: Never really a serious contender after the mid-1800s—too fragmented, too rural, too scarred by wars. Empire cushioned shocks and flattered prestige, but absorbed capital, encouraged rent-seeking, and slowed industrial scaling. When the colonial project unraveled after 1945, the structural lag was exposed—prompting belated modernization (Plan Monnet, post-war dirigisme) to catch up in chemicals, autos, and electrics.

• Britain: America overtook Britain by the late 19th century, surpassing it in steel, railroads, oil, and eventually finance.

• USSR: Industrialised at breakneck speed through command economy methods, but at enormous human cost. It managed to rival America militarily (nuclear, space), but not commercially—its system lacked adaptability.

• Japan: Post-1945, Japan’s rise was extraordinary: electronics, cars, shipbuilding. By the 1980s it looked poised to surpass the U.S., but its bubble economy and structural rigidities ended the challenge.

• South Korea: A miracle story (Samsung, Hyundai), but more a regional “mini-Japan” than a global hegemon.

• China: The only one still in contention. Since the 1990s, it has built the world’s largest manufacturing base, leapfrogged in EVs, solar, and digital payments, and is trying to catch the U.S. in AI and semiconductors. Yet, as you yourself once noted, China’s empire is more contingent—dependent on exports, resources, and controlled openness—whereas America’s was self-sustaining.

The United States rose to superpower status not by accident, but through a combination of geography, timing, and strategy. Its vast natural resources, fertile land, and two-ocean buffer gave it economic and military security unmatched in Europe or Asia. Superpower transitions across history have usually followed a common arc: a state rises on the back of resources, trade, technology, and military organisation, dominates for a period, and then declines when overstretched or outpaced. Ancient China thrived early through agricultural surplus, centralised bureaucracy, and innovations like paper and gunpowder, but frequent internal strife and invasions curbed its global projection. India, during the Maurya and Gupta eras, commanded immense wealth through trade and culture, but remained fragmented politically, leaving it vulnerable to outside powers. The mantle shifted to Rome, whose disciplined armies, legal systems, and Mediterranean trade networks created an empire that endured centuries before collapsing under internal decay and external pressure. In the early modern era, Spain surged ahead by exploiting New World riches and maritime conquest, only to decline from overextension, costly wars, and financial mismanagement. Britain then leveraged naval supremacy, industrialisation, and colonial empire-building to create the first truly global superpower, but two world wars drained its wealth and forced retrenchment. Finally, the United States, geographically secure, resource-rich, and untouched by wartime destruction, emerged as the 20th century’s hegemon, marrying industrial scale with financial and military power. In each case, the transition was less about sudden collapse than a gradual shift in economic engines, innovation hubs, and strategic advantage. 

By the early 20th century, the industrial powers of the West had developed distinct specialisations that reflected their resources, geography, and culture. Europe, particularly Britain and France, was the birthplace of most foundational innovations—steam power, electricity, the telegraph, modern medicine, and much of early engineering—yet its older urban centers and rigid class structures slowed mass application. Germany, a late unifier, focused on high-value, knowledge-intensive industries: chemicals, dyes, pharmaceuticals, and precision engineering. German firms like Bayer, BASF, and Siemens dominated global chemical and electrical markets, and German universities became centers of advanced scientific research.

Industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned the U.S. into the world’s factory, while waves of immigration supplied both labor and innovation. Though many of the foundational scientific and technical breakthroughs of the 19th century—electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, modern chemistry, and medicine—originated in Europe, the United States distinguished itself by perfecting scale, speed, and systems of production. Unlike Europe, where factories were often smaller and constrained by older urban geographies, America had vast land, abundant raw materials (coal, iron, oil, timber), and a rapidly growing population fueled by immigration. U.S. industrialists pioneered mass production, standardization, and vertical integration, turning European inventions into affordable, widely available goods. Carnegie’s steel empire, Rockefeller’s oil monopoly, and Ford’s moving assembly line exemplified this: the U.S. did not always invent first, but it industrialised best. By World War I, this focus on efficiency and scale had made the U.S. the largest producer of steel, oil, and manufactured goods, allowing it to supply both its own fast-expanding domestic market and, during wartime, the exhausted economies of Europe. In short, where Europe was the laboratory, America became the factory. The United States, by contrast, excelled not in invention but in scale and systems, leveraging vast natural resources, cheap energy, and an immigrant-driven labor force. American giants such as Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, and Ford Motor Company turned European breakthroughs into mass-market products through vertical integration, assembly-line production, and aggressive corporate consolidation. Thus, on the eve of World War I, Europe remained the intellectual laboratory, Germany the scientific workshop, and the United States the world’s factory floor—a division of strengths that would tilt decisively in America’s favor once the wars hollowed out Europe’s economies. 

Crucially, the world wars crippled Europe’s old powers: the U.S. entered late, suffered relatively few losses, and emerged as the creditor and supplier of the Allies. For world peace, the League of Nations was an abject failure. However, for companies, it has proved a great success. In the 1920s it set a basis for corporate taxation that has endured ever since. Some action to improve and simplify corporate taxation was long overdue. After 1945, America possessed the world’s strongest economy, the largest navy and air force, and—at least initially—a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, and global institutions like the UN and World Bank, largely shaped in Washington’s image, cemented U.S. dominance. In essence, America’s rise came from a mix of material advantage, lucky geography, and the collapse of rivals, leaving it to define the 20th century’s world order.

The Second Industrial Revolution (1800-1950 of Steel, Oil, and Electricity), was based on the ideas of Adam Smith's Capitalism. That era influenced Corporate Management, Mergers and Acquisitions, and the emergence of Conglomerates. The United States on the shoulders of the revolution assumed a greater role in World Economy, Security as well as in International Politics and outshined its European contemporaries which were heavily exhausted because of WW-II. The US took steps to form the United Nations (UN) which has on several occasions appeared to be following a US-established "rules-based order" for others but ignored all of the US's misdoings. The US slowly displaced the UK and took over the multi-lateral roles of providing the World its Security, Finances, and Innovation. The US also played a key role in the formation of NATO and the 'European Union' and then single-handedly provide for American Security to proxy support from the Europeans. It fought the Vietnam war, a Cold War-era proxy war. All these events helped it assume the status of a #Superpower and of never being wrong just like the father of the family.

The formula of U.S. hegemony - The structural strengths of the U.S. economy made it uniquely capable of doing what no other power could. At its core, the U.S. had what other powers lacked: sheer scale and security. A vast continental landmass rich in coal, oil, farmland, and minerals meant America never had to depend on fragile overseas colonies. Two oceans shielded it from invasion, allowing resources to be channeled into production rather than constant defense. By the late 19th century, America had already become the world’s largest industrial economy, and crucially, it had a huge domestic consumer market—millions of middle-class buyers that kept factories humming even when global trade faltered. During WWI and WWII, this industrial base made the U.S. the arsenal of democracy—it could produce planes, tanks, and ships in quantities no rival could match, while also lending and financing allies through programs like Lend-Lease. Post-1945, instead of retreating as Britain had after its wars, the U.S. leveraged its strength: it rebuilt Germany and Japan through the Marshall Plan and similar aid, but on American financial terms, binding them into a U.S.-led economic order. Institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the dollar as global reserve currency (Bretton Woods system) embedded American dominance into the world’s financial plumbing. When the Cold War came, the Soviet Union could compete militarily but not economically—its planned economy simply couldn’t generate sustained growth or consumer prosperity, while the U.S. economy kept innovating. Even Japan in the 1980s and South Korea later, though economic miracles, could not escape American primacy: they were export-driven and dependent on U.S. markets, finance, and security guarantees. America, by contrast, had a self-sustaining loop of innovation, finance, military, and consumer demand, making it uniquely resilient. In short, the U.S. didn’t just win wars—it built a system in which others’ prosperity still reinforced American centrality. In summary, The United States became the world’s hegemon because it combined five structural advantages no rival could match: geography (a secure continent protected by two oceans), resources (abundant coal, oil, farmland, and minerals ensuring self-sufficiency), scale (a vast home market that sustained industrial mass production and consumer demand), finance (Wall Street’s global dominance and the dollar’s role as reserve currency under Bretton Woods), and institutions (U.S.-designed systems like the IMF, World Bank, NATO, and the Marshall Plan that locked allies into its economic order). These foundations allowed the U.S. not only to outproduce and outspend competitors in two world wars but also to rebuild Europe and Japan on its terms, wage a long Cold War that bankrupted the USSR, and absorb the challenge of export-driven rivals like Japan and South Korea. In effect, America created a world where others’ growth reinforced, rather than undermined, its own centrality.

After the Second World War, America fused its industrial might with a global financial order, underwriting reconstruction in Europe and Asia in ways that tied prosperity to its own primacy. The Cold War sharpened this system: technology flowed to allies, markets were opened, and Washington’s guarantees underpinned both security and trade. Japan and South Korea are case studies—once war-torn, they became industrial powerhouses under an American security umbrella, their growth reinforcing rather than threatening U.S. hegemony. China’s rise, by contrast, is more zero-sum. Its industrial policies—most visibly in electric vehicles and batteries—have delivered breathtaking scale, but not the same self-sustaining ecosystem. The Chinese EV industry dominates global volumes and outpaces rivals in cost and speed, yet its expansion leans heavily on subsidies, squeezed margins, and foreign markets that increasingly resist its exports. Where America built alliances that multiplied its strength, Beijing’s manufacturing surge often breeds dependency without loyalty, and resentment rather than alignment.

The Digital Age began in the mid-20th century after the USA was caught off-guard by the USSR's launch of Sputnik. An immediate need was felt to mitigate such surprises and keep America competitive and ahead of the rest of the World. This led to focused government and military support for R&D in STEM by funding universities which marked a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology. Since the early 1980s, the digital share of global GDP had breakneck growth, areas of remarkable sophisticated developments include: 

• Telecommunications: Novel ways in the transmission of information through electromagnetic radio waves, optical fibers, and satellites. 

• Technology: Improvement in computing power i.e. HardTech (CMOS) in all spheres like logic chips, GPUs, memory chips, analog chips, and ASICS followed by the development of the Internet Protocols (TCP-IP), WWW platform, Parallel Processing, alongside SoftTech which lead to the development of InfoTech and Cloud Computing. The way forward may be better adoption of Artificial Intelligence tools like Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep learning; edge computing, quantum computing, metaverses, and pattern associating chatbots which use large language model (LLM) a type of machine learning model that can perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, etc.

• Medicine: Randomized controlled trial (RCT), Cancer detection and treatment, Human Genome Project, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, mRNA technology, and cellular senescence.

• Finance: Capital and Derivatives Markets, Mergers and Acquisitions, Startups, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Wealth Management, Virtual digital assets (like crypto-currencies and NFTs), DeFi, P2P Lending, Margin Loans, Term Loan - B (TLBs).

• Geo-Politics: Rules-based order, International Cooperation, Globalisation. However, the West has been hypocritical while preaching democracy and human rights, Dollar Supremacy, SWIFT.

• Space: Space missions, ISS, James Webb, LHC.

• Management and Consultancy: Management techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution in the United States focused on increasing efficiency and productivity in the workplace through the use of scientific analysis, assembly lines, standardization, and attention to the human factors involved in the production process. This overflowed to the Japanese management practices of Kaizen and Six Sigma. Later to South Korea and recently to China.

• Engineering: Roadways, Electricity generation and transmission, Steel manufacturing, Building high skyscrapers, Automotive manufacturing, 3D Printing.

• Defense: Fifth-generation fighter jet aircraft, Nuclear Bombs, Nuclear Submarines, Cruise Missiles, and Drones.

• Energy: Controlled oil for over a century, Fission Technology, and R&D on Novel techniques to extract oil like Fracking, Solar PV cells, and Magneto-inertial Fusion Technology The real growth in the years to come might be the confluence of Healthcare and Tech. 

Thus, the contrast is stark: America’s order grew stronger as its partners grew richer; China’s growth, particularly in sectors like autos and EVs, risks peaking unless others’ prosperity can be made to reinforce Beijing’s centrality. What sustains China’s grip, for now, is batteries. By dominating cathode and anode supply chains—from Congolese cobalt to Indonesian nickel—Chinese firms have become indispensable. Yet even here, the logic is extractive rather than generative. Dependence on Beijing’s minerals does not translate into loyalty or alignment, only uneasy reliance. In short, China has built an industrial colossus that awes by scale but lacks stabilizers. Where America’s post-war industries bound allies closer, China’s EV juggernaut risks alienating customers and provoking retaliation. That fragility echoes into the AI race: speed and size can take you far, but without a system that multiplies power through partnership, the empire risks peaking before it consolidates. This is why, in the AI race, the odds still tilt toward the United States. Its advantages—venture capital depth, immigration-fueled talent, open scientific collaboration, and an alliance-driven standards regime—mirror the systemic resilience that underwrote its 20th-century dominance. China’s scale and speed are formidable, but without the stabilizers America once enjoyed—secure geography, resource surpluses, deep trust in finance, and a voluntary network of allies—its empire remains contingent, not self-sustaining.

Looking forward, issues with climate change, fusion energy, quantum computing, 6G network, digital markets, AI, etc., and how will states deal with and regulate them, race our minds. But with business fast going from sacred ox to whipping boy, governments have become less concerned with creating a better system and more with just getting firms to pay more tax. There are also unknown unknowns that may become clearer only once firms have adjusted. Two things can be predicted. A bonanza awaits tax lawyers and Chartered Accountants. And the new equilibrium will be less favourable to companies (as after falling for decades, taxes on companies are rising again).

US supporting China was a mix of strategic necessity, economic opportunism, and willful miscalculation.\

• Cold War Calculus: The Kissinger-Nixon Gamble (1970s) - Strategic need > long-term risk: When Nixon and Kissinger opened to China in 1971, the U.S. was stuck in Vietnam and locked in Cold War rivalry with Moscow. Splitting Beijing from Moscow looked like a masterstroke. The U.S. essentially traded away vigilance for immediate geopolitical leverage. The thinking was: China is weak, agrarian, and fearful of the USSR; let’s bring it into the U.S.-led order, and it’ll liberalize. The CIA and Pentagon knew China would play its own game, but they believed weakness + exposure to U.S. consumer capitalism would neuter Chinese communism.

• 1980s–1990s: Wall Street’s Dream & Pentagon’s Distraction: Wall Street logic: China = cheap labour + vast market. U.S. corporates pushed hard to outsource manufacturing. Washington buy-in: “Economic engagement will create a middle class → middle class will demand democracy → China will converge.” Pentagon distraction: During this period, U.S. attention was on the USSR’s collapse, Gulf War I, Balkans, then the War on Terror. China looked like a secondary issue. Deep State blind spot: The intelligence community did flag industrial espionage, tech theft, and PLA’s dual-use R&D. But the ruling elite (both parties) prioritized economic integration.

• 2000s: WTO Admission & the Delusion of Convergence Clinton & Bush eras: U.S. lobbied for China’s entry into the WTO (2001). The assumption: WTO rules + global supply chains = irreversible liberalization. Reality: China played by its own rules—mercantilism inside, open markets outside. Why ignored? Corporates: Huge profits from offshoring. Treasury/Wall Street: China recycled trade surpluses into U.S. Treasury debt, financing cheap credit and the U.S. housing boom. Pentagon: Preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Willful Blindness: The “End of History” Effect: After 1991, the U.S. establishment genuinely believed liberal democracy + markets were universal destiny. Deep State analysts did issue warnings—about China’s military buildup, Great Firewall, cyber theft—but those were seen as “manageable irritants.” Washington elites underestimated the CCP’s ability to absorb capitalism without political reform.

• Why Choose Not to See? Immediate gains vs. abstract risks: U.S. firms gained trillions, consumers enjoyed cheap goods, politicians won credit for low inflation and growth. Long-term risks (dependency, hollowed-out industries, empowered rival) were abstract. Fragmented U.S. state: “The U.S. government” is not monolithic. Treasury, Commerce, and corporates wanted engagement; Pentagon and intelligence wanted caution. The engagement side won—until China got too powerful to ignore. Hubris: A sense that America could always “manage” or “bend” China. That hubris delayed recognition.

• The Turning Point (Post-2010s) By 2010–2015: Xi Jinping centralized power. “Made in China 2025” openly targeted U.S. tech dominance. South China Sea militarization showed military intent. Cyber theft reached industrial scale. At this point, the deep state consensus flipped—China wasn’t just a competitor, it was a systemic rival. The Obama “Pivot to Asia,” Trump’s tariffs, and Biden’s tech export controls are all late course-corrections.

So, the U.S. didn’t fail to see China’s game. Rather, it chose immediate benefits and strategic convenience over long-term vigilance. Wall Street, consumer politics, and Cold War strategy blinded Washington into thinking China’s integration was a win-win. The reckoning came only once China was too entrenched to reverse cheaply.

However, China has replicated industrial scale and innovation capacity in ways reminiscent of Germany, Japan, and South Korea, but it lacks the structural advantages that underpinned America’s rise: secure geography buffered by two oceans, abundant natural resources that sustained both wartime mobilization and peacetime growth, a vast consumer market that absorbed output and rewarded innovation, and, most crucially, a financial system that became the backbone of global trust through Wall Street, the dollar, and institutions like the IMF and World Bank. These foundations allowed the United States to construct a world order in which others’ prosperity reinforced its own dominance—alliances through NATO or bilateral Asian treaties were not merely coercive but often voluntary, binding foreign growth to U.S. markets and security guarantees. China’s ascent, by contrast, rests on shakier ground: it faces a hostile neighbourhood and contested maritime routes, relies heavily on imported energy, contends with a slowing domestic market, and manages a financial system viewed with caution abroad. Its external partnerships—from Belt and Road investments to commodity-for-infrastructure deals—are often transactional and leave recipients indebted or wary, generating dependency rather than durable trust. Whereas the American system became self-sustaining because it made allies richer in ways that deepened their commitment to the U.S.-led order, China’s model remains contingent, vulnerable both to external resistance and its own internal fragilities; in simple terms, America built an empire others wanted to join, China is building one they tolerate until they no longer must. In simple words: America built a self-sustaining empire, China is building a contingent one. By contrast, China’s industrial ascent has been breathtaking, yet its foundations are brittle.

History offers a lesson: America’s “game” has historically been scale + self-sufficiency + narrative control. Every empire before it — Asians, Roman, British, Dutch, Spanish — depended more visibly on fragile trade routes and colonial tribute. America turned geography, industry, and finance into a closed loop. Empires that endure are those with resilient systems rather than sheer scale. America’s AI ecosystem is underwritten by a deep pool of private capital, a magnet for global talent, and an alliance network that shapes standards and supply chains well beyond its borders. China, by contrast, has size and state direction, but its model is brittle—overreliant on subsidies, vulnerable to external choke-points, and weighed down by slowing growth and demographic decline.

India-US relations: India’s non-alignment (1950s–60s): After independence, India under Nehru championed non-alignment. The U.S., viewing the world through the Cold War binary, found this frustrating. Washington wanted India as a bulwark against communism, but New Delhi hedged. U.S. tilt to Pakistan: When India didn’t line up, the U.S. chose Pakistan—cheaper to arm, strategically useful for encircling the USSR and China, and willing to host U.S. bases. This sowed distrust in Delhi. India–USSR embrace: India, under pressure from wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965, 1971), leaned on Moscow for arms and diplomatic cover. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971, signed just before Bangladesh’s liberation war, cemented the divide with Washington. From then on, India saw the U.S. as unreliable, and the U.S. saw India as sanctimonious but dependent. U.S. focus = global system stability (open trade, secure sea lanes, anti-Soviet, then anti-terror, now anti-China). India’s focus = survival and autonomy (managing Pakistan, food security, energy dependence, technology transfer, sovereignty). The mismatch meant every convergence (like post-1991 reforms or 2005 nuclear deal) was followed by divergence (sanctions after 1998 nuclear tests, disagreements on trade, climate, WTO). China’s strategy: Accept integration on U.S. terms → acquire tech + capital → create parallel structures (Great Firewall, Belt & Road, CIPS vs. SWIFT). India’s strategy: Stay independent → avoid alliances → but delay state-backed industrial-tech push. Result: India opened but didn’t shield, so it became reliant on Western tech ecosystems (Microsoft, Google, Meta) rather than creating Baidu–Alibaba–Tencent equivalents. This asymmetry makes the U.S. view China as a peer competitor, but India as a swing state—important, but not indispensable. So the relationship often looks like it’s “about to take off” but then is restrained by legacy mistrust + mismatched expectations. It isn’t just India’s “independent stance.” It’s role misalignment: The U.S. has historically looked for allies (NATO-style compliance, burden-sharing). India only ever wanted a partner (technology, capital, recognition of sovereignty). That gap—ally vs. partner—creates permanent friction. Add to it: India is the only major Asian democracy that doesn’t have a U.S. security umbrella (unlike Japan, South Korea, Australia). Washington must accept India as sui generis, while Delhi must accept interdependence as inevitable. Until both sides reconcile this, “inflection point” will remain the default state. The U.S.–India story is less about independence vs. dependence, and more about mutual frustration with each other’s strategic cultures. China, in contrast, gamed the system by pretending to integrate while preparing to decouple. India neither integrated fully nor decoupled—hence the perennial “in-between” feel.

So, how to outwin America? Possibly: 

• If another power (say, China or an AI-led bloc) manages to own the backbone of the next Industrial Revolution like A New Tech-Resource Nexus (AI + Energy + Quantum). The U.S. has oil and semiconductors, but if fusion energy + quantum communication + AI platforms coalesce elsewhere, the “self-sustaining” empire suddenly looks outdated. 

• America is excellent at building one-to-many alliances (NATO, Bretton Woods). But the future may be many-to-many coalitions (BRICS+, Belt and Road, AI/data-sharing networks) that operate without a central hegemon. If China can successfully bind Europe, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia into contingent but interoperable blocs, the distributed empire may outcompete the centralised one.

• The real American empire is the dollar. If digital currencies, yuan-denominated energy trades, or AI-enabled cross-border settlement systems reach scale, America’s “closed loop” weakens. It doesn’t mean instant collapse, but even a 20–30% erosion of dollar dominance would force the U.S. to play a multipolar game it has never truly mastered.

• America thrives because it controls the narrative of the story: democracy, innovation, freedom. What could outwin it? If China, or another player, convinces the world that “resilience = interdependence, not isolation” — flipping America’s strength (self-sustaining empire) into a liability (“insular, protectionist, inward-looking”) — the soft-power balance could shift. 

America is hardest to beat where it is self-sufficient. To outwin it, rivals must make self-sufficiency obsolete — by proving that networked interdependence is stronger than isolation. If the next world-system is not about who controls one empire, but who orchestrates many contingent networks, then America’s closed-loop model could become its Achilles heel.

Nations, like people, are products of memory. India’s story—spanning millennia of intellectual breakthroughs, colonial subjugation, and democratic experimentation—remains a study in continuity and reinvention. It is at once the land of Aryabhata and of Infosys, of Nalanda and the IITs, of Gandhi’s swadeshi and Modi’s semiconductor incentives. To understand its current rise is to trace a sequence of ruptures and recoveries, not a linear ascent.

Centuries before Europe discovered algebra through the Arabs, India had seeded the world’s mathematics. Virahanka, a Sanskrit prosodist in the 6th century, described a numerical sequence for syllabic patterns in poetry—the same that would later be reborn in Europe as the Fibonacci sequence. Aryabhata (499 CE) approximated π with precision, described the earth’s rotation, and introduced trigonometric functions. Brahmagupta (628 CE) codified the rules of zero and negative numbers. Bhaskara II (12th century) explored calculus concepts long before Newton. 

The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, including the concept of zero, emerged between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE, later transmitted through Arab scholars to Europe, reshaping global arithmetic. The very first chapter of Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (1202) was titled “On the Hindu Method of Calculating,” an explicit acknowledgement of this lineage. The words of commerce also travelled: English “cash” derives from the Tamil kaasu (small coin); “market” has roots in the trading hub of Vijayanagara. Medicine bore an equally Indian imprint. The Charaka Samhita (c. 200 CE) codified Ayurveda into a systematic discipline. Sushruta’s compendium, translated centuries later into Arabic, described cataract surgery, bone-setting, and skin grafts. Economics too had precursors: Kautilya’s Arthashastra (4th century BCE) outlined taxation, espionage, and trade regulation as tools of statecraft—centuries before Adam Smith.

Colonial rule weakened institutions, yet India’s intellectual ferment endured. The early 20th century produced polymaths who shaped global science. Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught genius from Tamil Nadu, sent Cambridge a letter of equations so original that G.H. Hardy compared his talent to that of Euler and Jacobi. Ramanujan’s infinite series, partitions, and mock theta functions continue to influence number theory and even modern string theory. Indian physicists engaged with the quantum revolution of Einstein and Bohr. Satyendra Nath Bose collaborated with Einstein to develop quantum statistics; their work on indistinguishable particles gave the world the concept of the “boson.” C.V. Raman, another Indian physicist, won the Nobel Prize in 1930 for discovering the scattering of light—the “Raman effect.” Meghnad Saha devised the ionisation equation, still used in astrophysics to understand stellar atmospheres. Decades later, Jagadish Chandra Bose pioneered radio and microwave optics, while Narinder Singh Kapany invented fibre optics, laying the foundation of the modern internet.

By the 18th century, India produced nearly a quarter of the world’s GDP. The British Raj reversed this prosperity. The “drain of wealth”—described by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1867—siphoned India’s surplus abroad through tariffs, taxation, and forced cash crops. Britain’s industrialisation was underwritten by India’s de-industrialisation. Avoidable famines killed millions. The political response was intellectual as much as moral. The Indian National Congress (1885) began as an elite debating club but, under Gandhi, became a mass movement. His call for swadeshi was both a spiritual rejection of colonialism and a proto-industrial policy. Nehru, in contrast, imagined India as a modern republic guided by a “scientific temper,” borrowing from Fabian socialism and Soviet planning. 

In 1947, independence came with partition, poverty, and illiteracy. Yet India chose universal suffrage and a pluralist constitution. The Planning Commission launched in 1950, directing scarce capital through Five-Year Plans. Steel plants in Bhilai, Rourkela, and Bokaro symbolised heavy-industry modernism. In the 1960s, the Green Revolution, aided by American agronomist Norman Borlaug, turned India from famine-prone to food secure. 

Crisis drove change. In 1991, with foreign reserves covering barely two weeks of imports, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh dismantled the Licence Raj, slashed tariffs, and opened the economy. A new entrepreneurial class emerged. Bill Gates turned India into the world’s back office on the back of cheap labour, later its digital hub. Remittances from a global diaspora—engineers in Silicon Valley, doctors in Britain, labourers in the Gulf—soon outstripped foreign aid. India also reshaped global thought. Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach redefined development beyond GDP; Raghuram Rajan warned presciently of global financial fragility before 2008. 

In the 21st century, India’s ambitions shifted from catching up to leading. The Semicon India Programme (2022) pledged $10bn to attract chipmakers, with Micron establishing plants in Gujarat. Yet fabrication requires vast water, stable power, and intricate supply chains—areas where India lags Taiwan and South Korea. For now, its strength lies in chip design, not manufacturing. Still, Delhi sees semiconductors as the “new steel”—vital for autonomy in defence, telecoms, and AI. 

Its politics towards the West evolved accordingly. Nehru’s Non-Aligned Movement leaned Soviet, while the 1990s saw Washington treat India as a nuclear irritant. By the 2020s, India had become a strategic partner in the Quad, balancing against China. Yet it maintains “strategic autonomy”—buying oil from Russia while courting American capital, signing defence pacts while rejecting Western lectures on human rights.

India today is the world’s fifth-largest economy, but its per capita income remains around $2,700—behind Bangladesh. It sends probes to the moon, yet struggles with malnutrition. Its universities once rivalled Alexandria; today, IIT graduates migrate abroad for opportunities. Its democracy is vibrant but faces accusations of majoritarianism and institutional erosion. And yet resilience endures. The land that invented zero has refused to be reduced to one. It once exported textiles; now it exports coders. It once suffered colonial exploitation; now it courts global investors. India is neither miracle nor mirage—it is a civilisational experiment, unfinished, where ancient intellectual ferment meets modern ambition.

International taxation is a complex field shaped by historical, economic, and political forces. Its evolution reflects the dynamic interplay between national interests and global economic integration. This article delves into the origins, rationale, and frameworks of key international taxation concepts, shedding light on their development and impact on multinational corporations (MNCs) and global trade.

Origins and Evolution

Residency and Source-Based Taxation - The concept of residency in international taxation stems from the need to determine a taxpayer's jurisdiction for taxation purposes. Residency rules, which define where an individual or entity is considered domiciled for tax purposes, originated from early 20th-century tax treaties. These treaties aimed to resolve conflicts arising from multiple jurisdictions taxing the same income. The rationale behind residency is to ensure that taxpayers are taxed in the jurisdiction where they have a substantial economic presence or personal connection. Source-based taxation, on the other hand, refers to the principle that income should be taxed where it is generated. This approach seeks to allocate taxing rights based on the origin of the income, such as royalties or service fees, thereby preventing double taxation and ensuring fair tax treatment.

Transfer Pricing and the Arm's Length Principle - Transfer pricing rules address the pricing of transactions between related entities within a multinational enterprise. The Arm's Length Principle (ALP), a cornerstone of international tax rules, mandates that transactions between related parties should be priced as if they were conducted between unrelated parties. This principle aims to prevent profit shifting and tax base erosion by ensuring that intra-group transactions reflect market conditions. The origins of the ALP can be traced to the 1930s when the League of Nations first addressed transfer pricing issues. It was formalized in the OECD Guidelines in the late 20th century, evolving through various revisions to address global economic changes.

Tax Equalization and Minimum Corporate Tax Rates

Tax equalization is a mechanism used by multinational corporations to ensure that employees working in different jurisdictions are subject to similar tax burdens. This practice aims to standardize the tax impact on expatriates and promote fairness in global assignments. The minimum corporate tax rate concept emerged as a response to the race to the bottom in corporate tax rates, where countries lower tax rates to attract multinational businesses. The OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative, introduced in 2015, sought to address this issue by proposing a global minimum tax rate to prevent profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions.

Frameworks and Agreements

OECD Model Tax Convention and MFN Clauses - The OECD Model Tax Convention, established in 1963, serves as a template for bilateral tax treaties between countries. It provides guidelines on residency, income allocation, and dispute resolution. The Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause, often incorporated into tax treaties, ensures that any favorable treatment granted to one country will be extended to others, promoting fairness and consistency in international tax relations. Emerging economies, however, often face differential treatment under the OECD Model. They may receive less favorable terms in treaties due to their lower bargaining power or economic leverage. This disparity has led to calls for a more inclusive approach to tax treaty negotiations.

World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and IMF - The World Trade Organization (WTO) plays a crucial role in regulating international trade, including the treatment of cross-border taxation issues. While the WTO does not directly handle taxation, its agreements impact how countries design their tax policies to avoid trade disputes. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provide financial support and policy advice to countries, including recommendations on tax policy. Both institutions advocate for tax reforms that enhance economic stability and growth, emphasizing the importance of efficient tax systems in fostering development.

Contemporary Issues and Challenges

International taxation faces several contemporary challenges:

• Globalization and Digital Economy: The rise of digital businesses complicates traditional tax systems, leading to debates on how to tax digital services and intangible assets effectively.

• Tax Avoidance and Evasion: Techniques such as profit shifting and base erosion continue to challenge tax authorities, prompting ongoing reforms and international cooperation.

• Climate Change and Tax Policy: The integration of environmental considerations into tax policy, including carbon taxes and incentives for green investments, is an emerging trend.

International taxation has evolved from a set of rudimentary principles to a sophisticated system of rules and frameworks designed to address the complexities of a globalized economy. Concepts like residency, transfer pricing, and tax equalization reflect the ongoing efforts to balance national interests with global fairness. As international trade and investment continue to grow, the evolution of international tax rules will remain a critical area of focus for policymakers, businesses, and tax professionals alike.

In the modern tax landscape, a profound shift has turned taxpayers into unwitting agents of government inefficiency. This transition, driven by the rise of self-assessment and tax withholding, encapsulates a striking paradox: individuals tasked with remitting taxes now shoulder the complexities of compliance and bear the penalties for minor errors without additional reward. This development highlights the broader challenge faced by contemporary tax systems, striving to balance efficiency with accuracy. 

Historical Origins and Evolution - Taxation has ancient roots, initially emerging in various rudimentary forms with inconsistent enforcement. The modern concept of self-assessment, where individuals report their own income and calculate their tax liabilities, is relatively recent. Income tax was first introduced in the UK in 1799 by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger to fund the Napoleonic Wars. Initially a temporary measure, it evolved into a permanent fixture over time. Before the self-assessment system, income tax was managed through methods requiring taxpayers to provide income details, but the tax authorities determined the final liability. The UK's introduction of corporation tax in 1909 further expanded the scope of tax administration, with businesses responsible for accurate reporting of profits. Indirect taxes, such as excise duties and VAT, were collected through various systems involving trade and retail reporting. The self-assessment system, introduced by the Finance Act of 1994 and implemented in 1996, marked a significant shift. Spearheaded by Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke, it aimed to simplify tax administration by transferring the responsibility of accurate income reporting and tax calculation from authorities to taxpayers. Despite the limited technological tools available at the time, the reform was designed to reduce the administrative burden on tax authorities and enhance efficiency. However, the system faced considerable criticism for imposing greater complexity and risk on individuals and small businesses. 

The Rise of Self-Assessment and Withholding - The concept of self-assessment gained traction alongside technological advancements and a growing digital economy, with the aim of reducing administrative burdens. Tax withholding, introduced in the US in 1943 as part of the "Pay-As-You-Earn" (PAYE) system, complemented this shift. Initially, a wartime measure, withholding required employers to deduct and remit taxes directly, stabilizing revenue but imposing additional administrative duties on businesses. Despite initial backlash, the withholding tax system became entrenched in the US tax code and was adopted globally. It intended to streamline tax collection and ensure timely revenue flow, though it inadvertently turned taxpayers into de facto tax collectors. 

The Burden of Compliance - The shift to self-assessment and withholding has often increased complexity for taxpayers. The onus of accurate income reporting, deductions, and tax calculations has placed significant burdens on individuals and businesses. Errors, whether due to clerical mistakes or ambiguous regulations, can lead to substantial penalties and interest charges. The irony is palpable: taxpayers, now serving as unpaid agents of government inefficiency, face penalties for minor errors and regulatory ambiguities. Despite their central role in tax collection, they receive no additional compensation for their efforts. Instead, they navigate a complex system fraught with potentially costly mistakes. Unlike historical tax revolts, the introduction of self-assessment in the UK did not provoke widespread public unrest. The gradual implementation, combined with a narrative of modernization and efficiency, mitigated resistance. The public, already accustomed to managing intricate financial tasks, saw self-assessment as a reform aimed at improving processing times rather than imposing new burdens. 

Global Perspective and Technological Impact - Globally, taxation systems have evolved from their rudimentary origins to incorporate advanced technologies. While self-assessment and withholding mechanisms have been widely adopted, the challenges are not confined to any single nation. The tension between administrative efficiency and taxpayer burden is a common theme across jurisdictions. Technological advancements have enabled sophisticated tax collection methods but have also underscored gaps in clarity and support for taxpayers. The rapid pace of digital transformation often outstrips tax authorities' ability to provide clear guidance, exacerbating the compliance burden.

The advent of self-assessment and tax withholding represents a significant shift in taxation. While intended to enhance efficiency and reduce administrative costs, these mechanisms have created a complex environment where taxpayers bear substantial responsibilities. The paradox of taxpayers acting as unpaid collectors for government inefficiencies, coupled with the penalties for minor errors, underscores the need for ongoing reform and clearer guidelines. As the global economy evolves, tax authorities must strive to balance efficiency with fairness and clarity, ensuring that taxpayers are not unduly burdened by their role in the tax system.

Digital Ocean of Big Data and its Algorithms of Oppression: In a world where the lines between physical and digital assets blur, it's crucial for fiscal policies to adapt and ensure that digital giants contribute fairly, supporting the infrastructure and services we all rely on. Currently, with the development of silicon-based computing chips that enable connecting the world to blazing-fast internet, income can be generated in a location without physical presence. The era of big-tech exceptionalism of the tech oligopolies may be over but they are still elusive to many governments. On the global platform, states are improving the tax rules and their implementation - both for combating capital and profit flight and improving dispute resolution mechanisms. With the advent of technology, and digital everything - Cybercrime and blockchain technologies are on the rise to avoid taxes with states relying on AI tools like machine learning and neural networks coupled with Big Data Analytics to amass more information.

The state needs new ways to assert its authority online: The state has a monopoly over the use of physical force in the real world, which it manifests through tangible expressions of control - institutions like police and military, and coercive constructs like laws and regulations. The state's ability to wield this power is seen as essential to the maintenance of public order and necessary for the protection of its people. Since the 2000s, our world has so dramatically de-materialized that almost all our interactions today take place within the digital realm. Our activities in the digital sphere are intermediated by technology platforms - social media apps, e-commerce sites, and digital media services - all of which are owned by BigTech companies that have grown in dominance and are worth more than US$10 trillion. To access these platforms, we must give our consent to their terms of service (modern social contracts). As much as the digital world has given rise to various benefits, it has also unleashed new forms of violence that can be perpetrated on people like cyberbullying, cyberstalking, doxing, fake news, deepfakes, etc. Unlike the state which is accountable to its citizens through democratic processes, private companies are only answerable to their shareholders, who end up imposing their own values. Accordingly, states are racing to establish protocols and ex-ante legislations to control and police digital services that are to be delivered in their sovereign territories. States are engaging more fully with technology with the intent that it will allow the state to retain enough control over digital activities for it to be able to enforce domestic legal obligations, while still letting society benefit from the innovation that only private enterprise can deliver. 

The new interventionism: After a long liberalizing era till the 2010s, the state has bounced back. Evermore pervasive and novel subjects have enhanced the scope of governance. Today, we are observing a new wave of changes in tax laws with an emphasis on the fight against Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. On the surface, the state appears to be more hands-off. Governments have realized that direct ownership is not the only way to influence businesses. Rather than own the means of production, governments worldwide are increasingly using other levers of control. The four vintage tools — industrial policy (protectionism), trustbusting (competition control), regulation, and taxes are being abjectly implored. Accordingly, pervasive rules just keep on growing and red tape continues to spread inexorably. Governments worldwide have followed suit of the EU lawmakers in coming up with new laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA), symbolizing a new approach to antitrust regulation. The number of prescriptive words such as “shall” and “must” in tax laws is also going up. Governments are regulating new areas such as climate or data protection. Rules are multiplying about what information companies must disclose, how to allow investors to challenge management, and who should sit on boards. Also with growing climatic changes and the urgency to reach net-zero emissions from the current 51bn Co2e, the tenets of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) are becoming hard laws. But these three letters alone won’t save the planet, the way forward is to electrify everything. We understand that ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: 'emissions'. Governmental action, combined with clear and consistent disclosure, can save the planet from climate change, not an abbreviation that is exaggerated superficial guff. With the urgency to green the electric grid using emerging tech like HVDC, 2020's will be a key decade for determining how big multinational and technology companies are regulated and taxed. 

It began, as many modern sagas do, with a quiet breakthrough. In 2012, a team led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto unveiled AlexNet, a convolutional neural network trained on GPUs. The model smashed previous records in image recognition and proved, in silicon and code, what the AI faithful had long believed: that deep neural networks could generalise meaning from raw pixels.

Five years later, in 2017, another turning point was witnessed. A group of researchers at Google released a paper with the modestly revolutionary title “Attention is All You Need.” It introduced the Transformer architecture—an elegant framework that dispensed with convolutions and recurrence and instead relied entirely on attention, the ability of a model to selectively focus on different parts of input sequences. The paper's authors are now scattered across the AI vanguard—among them, one who would go on to become a central figure in the creation of ChatGPT. The descendants of this lineage—ChatGPT, Gemini, LLaMA—have since reshaped computing, commerce, and culture.

In late 2024, OpenAI unveiled its text-to-video model. Remarkably, its outputs showed no overt signs of hallucination, suggesting that the model, for once, understood the world it was rendering. And yet, no one truly knows the theoretical boundaries of such systems. As chip architectures grow more powerful—still silicon-bound, now as GPUs but orders of magnitude faster—neural networks with a scale and complexity exceeding the human brain will become feasible in real time. It is no longer far-fetched to imagine a world in which deeper and broader models run continuously, quietly shaping the substrate of digital life. This is the context in which Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis—two of the central protagonists in the global race for artificial general intelligence—operate.

Their stories unfold like a modern retelling of Edison and Westinghouse: different temperaments, different philosophies, converging on the same goal. This book charts their paths: from early tinkering in the worlds of gaming and startups to the boardrooms of OpenAI and DeepMind, the companies they founded and shaped. Along the way, it lays bare the tectonic shifts within the industry. The revolt of X.AI’s founders against OpenAI. The governance crisis of November 2023, which nearly cleaved OpenAI in two. And the eventual recognition of Mr Hassabis, whose work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—a remarkable nod to the hybrid nature of modern science, where artificial intelligence intersects with atomic precision.

But there are darker sides to the story. It addresses AI's destabilising potential with balance, avoiding both utopianism and Luddite alarmism. Its title, Does, and the Race, is a double entendre: a nod to the corporate race to build AGI, but also a meditation on the human race itself, and AI’s place within it—a subtlety likely to vanish in translation, particularly in Japanese. At the heart of this new world lies the Transformer itself. It learns by predicting high-frequency words based on their position and association, a method that, though statistical, begins to approximate semantics. But meaning is not merely probabilistic—it is cultural, historical, idiomatic. AI, like humans, struggles to preserve rhyme, rhythm, and metaphor when crossing linguistic boundaries. Still, models like ChatGPT can now learn structures from hundreds of languages, each with their own embedded civilisations. The race is far from over. The firms helmed or influenced by Altman and Hassabis—and their competitors—will pour in capital, talent, and teraflops. With every new generation of models, they redraw the boundaries of what machines can say, see, and simulate. In doing so, they will not just disrupt industries. They will alter social contracts, education, governance, and—perhaps most profoundly—what it means to think!

while everyone's obsessed with AI models and chatbots, the real battle is happening in silicon.

First shift: Vertical integration is no longer optional for AI leaders. The old model was simple: Design your product, outsource manufacturing, focus on software. That model just died because AI chips need constant iteration between design and manufacturing. Tesla was facing rapid comptition from Chinese EVs and Samsung's Texas plant was bleeding money with no orders. So Tesla and Samsung joined hands. Tesla's AI4, AI5, and now AI6 chips each require different optimizations. You can't achieve this with traditional vendor relationships. The companies that win will control their entire stack. Tesla designs AI6 chips specifically for their needs. Samsung provides manufacturing expertise. Both companies share knowledge to optimize production. This collaborative manufacturing model is the future.

Second shift: The death of chip monopolies. For years, a handful of companies controlled AI chip production. Limited capacity meant limited innovation. But the Chips Act just pumped $4.75 billion into Samsung's Texas facilities alone: Suddenly, there's excess manufacturing capacity desperate for customers. Samsung's empty Texas plant is just the beginning. Intel, TSMC, and others are building massive facilities. Smart AI startups can now negotiate deals that were impossible 2 years ago.

Third shift: Geographic concentration creates unprecedented collaboration. Samsung's Taylor plant is near Austin. Tesla's headquarters is in Austin. Musk can literally drive to the fab in minutes. This proximity enables real-time iteration between design and manufacturing: Custom silicon becomes achievable at reasonable volumes. You need the right partnership structure. And timing.

- The winners in AI won't be decided by who has the best models. - They'll be decided by who controls their infrastructure destiny. This is the new playbook.

GenAI is an accelerant, not an autopilot. It is squeezing hours out of research, drafting positions and workpaper prep; but explainability, hallucination control and authority tracing are non-negotiable in tax.

The new tax stack: how governments are using AI—and how professional services are racing to keep up: Tax used to be a back-office ledger and a once-a-year reckoning. It is rapidly becoming a real-time, data-driven control system. Around the world, tax administrations are wiring up digital identity, e-invoicing, platform-reporting and machine-learning risk engines into a new “tax stack”. The OECD calls this trajectory Tax Administration 3.0—tax that is embedded in transactions and systems rather than tacked on after the fact. What’s changed is not just digitisation but instrumentation. In Europe, the EU AI Act—the world’s first horizontal AI law—enters into force with phased application from 2025–2026, setting risk-based guardrails for public-sector AI, including transparency, human oversight and governance. That matters because tax administrations are now avid AI users. Governments are quietly becoming AI power users. In the United Kingdom, HMRC’s long-running Connect platform hoovers data from dozens of public and private sources to risk-score taxpayers; while HMRC is cagey on specifics, independent analyses describe the scale and approach: big-data matching, network analytics and anomaly detection to prioritise enquiries. In the United States, The IRS has begun deploying AI models to better target complex high-wealth and partnership audits and to detect abusive schemes—part of a wider modernisation that couples data science with new funding. Official releases flag AI-enabled selection and case-building, not automatic assessments. In India, the Project Insight programme combines PAN-linked data, statement trails and ML to surface mismatches and under-reporting; the government has also rolled out faceless assessments and expanded GST e-invoicing to tighten input-credit fraud. Authorities explicitly tout analytics and AI as core to enforcement. In China, a nationwide rollout of fully digital e-invoices (e-fapiao) and the “Golden Tax” evolution are pushing transaction data straight into tax engines. The State Taxation Administration’s guidance on digital invoices lays out real-time verification and cross-checks that are natural habitats for ML models. Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Italy (and many others). Continuous transaction controls (CTCs) are now the norm: ZATCA’s Fatoorah integration phase proceeds in waves; Mexico’s CFDI 4.0 validates invoices in real time via certification providers; Italy’s SdI has mandated real-time e-invoicing since 2019. Each regime generates structured, high-volume data that feeds analytics and AI. The OECD’s playbooks now assume data-by-design tax: digital identity, platform-operator reporting and real-time data flows. That vision is hardening into rules. DAC7 compels digital platforms to report seller income across the EU (mirroring OECD model rules), and DAC8 pulls crypto-asset reporting into scope alongside the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), which dozens of jurisdictions have committed to implement by 2027.

The disruption: five AI innovations reshaping tax - 

• E-invoicing & CTC rails. When every invoice is validated or exchanged through a state gateway, tax becomes natively digital. False input-tax claims and carousel fraud drop; analytics and AI can triangulate outliers across sectors in near real time. Italy’s SdI and Mexico’s CFDI show how quickly compliance behaviours change once the rails are mandatory.

• Platform & crypto transparency. DAC7 and CARF/DAC8 extend tax visibility to the gig economy and crypto exchanges. The technical standards are tedious; the strategic effect is profound: previously “off-system” income becomes machine-readable for matching against returns.

• AI-assisted enforcement. From the IRS to HMRC and India’s CBDT/GSTN, administrations are blending supervised models with rules engines to pick cases, pre-populate returns and nudge taxpayers. Governance expectations set by the EU AI Act (human-in-the-loop, explainability, risk controls) now shape how public bodies deploy these tools.

• Embedded compliance. The OECD’s Tax Administration 3.0 blueprint envisions tax “in the system”—calculated at the point of transaction, using digital ID and verified data. This is migrating from vision to strategy documents across jurisdictions.

• Pillar Two engines. The 15% global minimum tax (GloBE) is now live across much of the EU, Japan and others from 2024. Multinationals must compute jurisdictional effective tax rates, deferred-tax adjustments and top-ups—an analytics problem tailor-made for automation and, increasingly, for GenAI copilots that translate statutory changes into configuration.

How the Big Four and the Professionals are responding:

The Big Four are pivoting from advisory plus spreadsheets to platform + managed services, with GenAI stitched through the stack. EY has built the Global Tax Platform (GTP) on Microsoft Azure to ingest multi-jurisdictional data and orchestrate compliance; EY’s broader EY.ai programme threads GenAI across service lines, including tax. Deloitte is pushing “Tax GenAI Factory” patterns—prompt libraries, retrieval pipelines and copilots for compliance production (returns, workpapers) and Pillar Two analytics—deployed on secure client tenants. KPMG’s Digital Gateway acts as a single pane of glass for compliance, controversy and Pillar Two modelling; its multiyear Microsoft alliance funds GenAI copilots embedded in tax workflows. PwC has ploughed $1bn into GenAI capabilities with Microsoft/OpenAI, standing up internal chatbots and domain copilots (including for tax) and re-skilling staff at scale. Expect heavier use of synthetic data for testing tax logic safely. Across all four, the pattern is consistent: centralised data platforms, connectors to ERP/e-invoicing regimes, rules engines for local nuance, and GenAI layers for research, drafting and review—kept inside strong governance wrappers to satisfy the EU AI Act and client policies.

Japan has moved briskly on Pillar Two (Income Inclusion Rule from fiscal years beginning on or after April 1, 2024) and implemented the Qualified Invoice System to tighten consumption-tax credits. That regulatory cadence is forcing automation in accounts-payable, vendor master data and invoice validation. Domestic consultancies are leaning into AI governance and DX rather than pure tax outsourcing. Nomura Research Institute (NRI) and NTT DATA market enterprise-grade GenAI services, model governance and risk frameworks—useful foundations for compliant tax AI (classification, document extraction, reconciliation) in tightly regulated environments. Big-Four Japan member firms then implement Pillar Two engines and e-invoice workflows on top.

China’s model: compliance at the speed of e-fapiao China’s fully digital e-invoice architecture and successive Golden Tax phases push tax into the transaction flow. Big accounting networks and global firms’ China practices help clients with e-fapiao lifecycle management (issuance, validation, archiving), ERP integration and anomaly detection tuned to STA rulesets. As coverage expands nationwide, audit-readiness and fraud analytics are becoming continuous rather than episodic.

Data is the new nexus. The hardest tax problems are now data problems: mapping messy operational systems to jurisdiction-specific schemas (SdI, CFDI, Fatoorah), tracking beneficial ownership and platform sellers, and computing Pillar Two across hundreds of entities. Firms that can engineer data—quality, lineage, controls—win. GenAI is an accelerant, not an autopilot. It is squeezing hours out of research, drafting positions and workpaper prep; but explainability, hallucination control and authority tracing are non-negotiable in tax. Expect more domain-tuned copilots that cite source law and administrative guidance, with human sign-off mandated by regulation (the EU AI Act’s bias toward human oversight will echo globally). Managed tax operations rise. With authorities shifting to real-time controls and relentlessly updating rulebooks (Pillar Two guidance alone is a moving target), many multinationals will outsource operate-level work to platforms run by the Big Four and top regional firms—often in co-managed models that blend in-house teams, vendor software and firm-operated utilities. Policy and product converge. When the OECD publishes a new schema (CARF), it lands as code in weeks; when a country tweaks its VAT e-invoice validation, providers ship patches overnight. The competitive edge is a pipeline that translates policy → data model → rules → tests quickly and safely.

If tax used to be about forms, it is now about flows. Governments are building telemetry into the economy; the firms that serve taxpayers are becoming more like systems integrators with opinions. The winners will be those who can make accuracy, auditability, and speed coexist—and explain it all to a human, when the algorithm says “trust me”. 

In the old days, Italy’s tax compliance was slow and stately. A shopkeeper in Milan might sell shoes in January, note the sale in his ledger, and months later declare the totals on a quarterly VAT form. The Agenzia delle Entrate, Italy’s tax authority, was left peering at aggregated numbers, trying to sniff out fraud long after the trail had gone cold. The Big Four accountants, summoned each quarter, toiled over mismatched ledgers and weary spreadsheets. The system relied heavily on trust and retrospective checks. Then, in 2019, the curtain dropped on that world. Enter SdI—the Sistema di Interscambio, a central stage where every invoice must now pass before reaching the customer. No invoice, no transaction. Every B2B, B2C, and B2G invoice must be issued electronically through the government’s SdI platform. Invoices are transmitted in real time to SdI, validated against schema rules, and then delivered to the counterparty. Suddenly, the taxman could see commerce not in snapshots, but as a live stream. Mismatches between sales and purchases can be flagged instantly. Fraudulent chains (e.g., fake input VAT claims) are disrupted because invoices must exist in the central system. For businesses, the change was jarring. Issuing an invoice became tantamount to reporting to the government. Compliance is “in the flow”: issuing an invoice = reporting to the government. VAT pre-filled returns are possible because authorities already hold the transaction data. ess paper, but stricter data quality demands (invoice formats, master data accuracy). Data had to be pristine—one wrong code, and SdI would spit it back. For the state, the payoff was immediate: fraudulent VAT chains withered; mismatches leapt off the screen. The system had become telemetry for the economy. And the Professional Service Providers had to reinvent themselves. No longer mere form-fillers, they became part-engineers, part-interpreters. Deloitte and PwC built software bridges from corporate ERPs to SdI’s XML gates. EY and KPMG staffed “tax operations centres” to monitor rejected invoices and troubleshoot schema quirks. Each firm layered analytics and, increasingly, AI: systems that flagged suspect entries, predicted disputes, even whispered to CFOs when working-capital strains loomed. The role of the adviser itself had shifted. Accountants who once delivered returns by the deadline were now system integrators with opinions—plugging clients into a real-time regime, but also arguing over the grey bits of law that algorithms could not parse. Italy’s experiment has become a parable. Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and India have borrowed their script, weaving e-invoicing into the fabric of tax. The lesson is clear: what was once a retrospective chore of filling forms has turned into the continuous management of flows. And in this new theatre, the winners will be those who can make accuracy, auditability and speed coexist—while still being able to explain, in plain words, why the machine said what it did?

Legal scholars emphasise that tax authorities often have a statutory duty to provide reasons for decisions. Opaque AI systems threaten this obligation. Rule of Law & Reasoned Decisions: Tax administrations—including in common law jurisdictions—must explain why a taxpayer was selected for audit or penalized. These are coercive decisions and must be justified. Explainable AI (XAI): Scholars propose that algorithmic systems can enhance reasoning—via techniques like local and global explanations (e.g., counterfactual models, LIME, SHAP) that show which factors produced a decision, and quantify their influence. Even if the underlying model is complex, decision letters can state: “Your VAT return was flagged due to X% deviation from sector norms and unusually high input-output ratios.” This makes the decision auditable, not just an inscrutable output. A tax expert, Tom Elsbury, suspected that HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was leveraging AI in decisions to reject Research & Development (R&D) tax credit claims—based solely on the style of rejection letters. After a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, HMRC refused to confirm or deny AI use, citing risk of aiding fraud. A UK tribunal ruled in favour of transparency. It ordered HMRC to disclose whether—and when—they used AI in those decisions. The tribunal emphasized that withholding this information undermined taxpayer trust and eroded confidence in fairness. It sets a precedent—showing that algorithmic opacity is no longer acceptable in tax decision-making. Taxpayers have a legitimate claim to know why the machine produced a result, and authorities may be legally compelled to explain. 

Instead of just explaining why a mismatch happened, systems will build digital twins of taxpayers — dynamic simulations of their business model, supply chain, and historic filings. These twins will simulate the impact of future transactions in real time:  “If you book this invoice from Vendor X, your ITC utilization probability of rejection rises 22%.” This shifts tax from post-facto policing → pre-facto risk steering, almost like credit score alerts in fintech. This changes AI from a “tax cop” → “tax coach.” Behavioral Tax Nudges via GenAI. Example: “90% of businesses in your sector already filed Q1 returns. Filing early saves you 3.2% late fee probability.” Nudges will be multilingual, voice-based, WhatsApp-integrated, meeting SMEs where they are. Cross-border Tax Interoperability - OECD’s Pillar Two + Global Minimum Tax reporting will need standardized, explainable digital interfaces. Disruption = global XBRL-on-steroids standard where one set of disclosures plugs into every jurisdiction, with regulators running shared AI models (not separate). Think “GloBE-as-a-service”: India, EU, US tax authorities co-running model nodes for multinationals. AI-driven Litigation Forecasting For corporates: predictive litigation tools that ingest prior judgments, bench composition, and arguments to give probability of success before ITAT/HC/SC. For revenue: triage of appeals to decide whether to pursue or settle. This could cut India’s huge tax litigation backlog by 30–40%. The next disruption is tax as a real-time, embedded, predictive service rather than a reactive compliance afterthought.

The United States is waging a new kind of economic war to retain its dominant position. High tariffs, once seen as blunt tools of trade protectionism, are now part of a broader strategy to shape the future — and dominate it. Today’s battlefield is not just about steel or aluminum, as in the Trump era. It’s about semiconductors, electric vehicles, clean energy tech, and above all, artificial intelligence. Washington is betting that if it walls off its technological heartlands — through tariffs, subsidies, and investment controls — it can sprint ahead while rivals struggle with stagnation.

It’s a calculated move, not unlike America’s past playbook. In the 1930s, high tariffs triggered a collapse in global trade and deepened the Great Depression. Today, the context is different — but the ambition may be the same: tilt the board in America’s favour. Europe is tiptoeing around recession, China is battling deflation and housing distress, and the Global South is weighed down by debt. The U.S., turbocharged by the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and a wave of private AI investment, sees a fleeting window — not to protect, but to leapfrog.

Historically, Washington has shown a knack for economic timing. In the Cold War, the space race helped counter Soviet momentum, but it was the U.S.’s ability to isolate the USSR from global markets and technology that drained its coffers. After WWII, Japan was in ruins. The US feared communism, so they pumped in aid, broke up monopolies, and rebuilt Japan into an export machine. From 1953 to 1970, Japan’s exports grew 380%. It was the greatest comeback story ever. Later, Japan’s economic ascent was marked by industrial giants like Sony and Toyota, by 1989, Japan's GDP per capita beat America's, eight of the ten biggest companies were Japanese, and Tokyo real estate was worth more than all of California. Japan became the world’s factory Cars, TVs, radios, semiconductors—if Japan made it, the world bought it. Japansese introduced new management systems as well like TQM, ISO and JIS. This was tempered by U.S. pressure in the late 1980s, culminating in the Plaza Accord (1985) to fix America’s trade deficit, Japan agreed to let its currency (yen) get stronger. Yen appreciated 2x in 3 years. Exports collapsed. Growth stalled. Japan Panicked leading to monetary missteps (Japan slashed interest rates to 2.5% and changed consumption tax triggering a giant bubble - people stopped investing in companies and speculated on real estate). The bubble burst in 1990 and ushered in Japan’s “Lost Decade.” South Korea’s rise was largely absorbed into the American orbit, both economically and militarily, under the shadow of North Korea.

Now, it’s China. Producing nearly a third of the world’s goods, Beijing is the world’s factory — and Washington’s chief concern. Tariffs make Chinese goods costlier, reduce dependency, and rewire global supply chains. A probable interpretation is that America sees now as a rare window to recalibrate its global position while rivals are economically distracted. By insulating its industries with tariffs and subsidies, it’s trying to build a moat around critical technologies — AI chief among them. While the world copes with inflation and fragmentation, America is trying to future-proof itself — investing in data centres, chips, and generative AI while building walls around its tech.

Geopolitics, too, is evolving. China has never been India’s friend — nor is it likely to be, owing to deep-rooted strategic and security mistrust. For Beijing, Delhi’s rise is a challenge, not an opportunity. Russia and China, meanwhile, are locked in a marriage of convenience: less an alliance than an alignment of grievances. As long as both share a common adversary USA (colloquially referred to as the West), temporary cooperation will serve tactical ends. 

US policy toward nations is not set by presidents. It is shaped by a permanent national security establishment. The current escalation likely reflects a working accommodation between Trump and the intelligence establishment — symbolic “legacy” wins for him, full control of foreign policy for them. His public volatility provides cover for more aggressive moves while maintaining plausible deniability. The difference between Biden and Trump is style, not substance: Biden worked largely through covert tools; Trump’s term enables the same objectives to be pursued more openly. US policy has been to curb India's autonomy via a deep-state apparatus — with merit in continuity across administrations. Against India, multiple factors converge. The absence of an absolute majority in government may be read as political vulnerability. India may have crossed strategic thresholds (possibly intentionally) involving sensitive facilities or exposure of de-facto illicit US nuclear assets in Pakistan. The BRICS de‑dollarisation initiative may be nearing operational readiness, with India seen as the most viable point of pressure. There are also longer‑term plans to alter the balance of power in India’s northeast, creating a pliable geopolitical buffer on its flank. Meanwhile, India’s drive toward defence, technology, and payment system sovereignty threatens entrenched Western levers. Trump’s presidency is no obstacle to this policy — if anything, it allows it to advance with greater speed and confidence. India should expect sustained pressure designed to force concessions, create dependency, or provoke internal fracture. What appears sudden is in fact the culmination of decades of preparation, now moving toward its denouement. The present altercations should also be read as an implicit admission (or at least a trial by fire) for entry into the ranks of major powers. Great powers test each other’s resolve through pressure, not courtesy. Trump's Aug 2025 tariff threats over Russian oil mark overt pressure, unlike Biden's diplomatic engagement (e.g., tech pacts). BRICS de-dollarization advances slowly, no imminent readiness. Claims of US nuclear assets in Pakistan or northeast buffer plans lack substantiation, appearing conspiratorial. India should leverage autonomy to counter via diversified ties. India’s task is not merely to endure, but to turn the moment into an opportunity to build full‑spectrum levers of engagement and coercion of its own, ensuring it can shape outcomes, not just withstand them.

But all this circus is not without risk. If the world’s growth engines falter, America’s supply chains, markets, and capital flows could also suffer. As in chess, dominance depends not just on a strong move, but on whether the opponent is allowed to play at all.

Further read: Chokepoints by Edward Fishman - An insider’s guide to economic warfare. With a satisfying amount of dash and drama, the author takes readers on a global tour of American sanctions. Ingenious technocrats have forged new, more precise tools of economic coercion.

India’s remarkable run looks set to continue in 2024. As the West’s relationship with China grows more hostile, companies are looking to shift their manufacturing bases elsewhere. India is a big beneficiary. Yet India will not grow in splendid isolation. Like the rest of South Asia, it faces risks from events and trends beyond its control. Three factors threaten to destabilise the region in 2025. 

• India "could overtake Japan to become the second-biggest economy in Asia and the fourth largest in the world" in 2025. While public investment has driven growth, its sustainability is questioned as the government aims to trim its budget deficit and faces pressure for handouts from coalition partners.

• The US will navigate a pragmatic, multi-layered strategy in Asia: engaging India as a trade partner and asking it to open up its vast market for US goods in priority sectors like agriculture and mining, while leveraging Pakistan for geostrategic aims, managing risks, and preventing Pakistan from becoming a complete Chinese ally. In essence, US favors countries it considers more manageable or eager for assistance, rather than those that act independently. India’s independent approach, its focus on domestic priorities, and the shifting US domestic climate all affect how the partnership unfolds across the region. This independent stance means India is sometimes reluctant to fully align with US expectations in tech competition or security. US policy toward India is not set by presidents. It is shaped by a permanent national security establishment (deep-state apparatus) whose long‑standing goal is to limit India’s autonomy, prevent its emergence as an independent pole, and keep it within a controllable orbit. Administrations change, methods shift, but the strategy endures. India should expect sustained pressure designed to force concessions, create dependency, or provoke internal fracture. What appears sudden is, in fact, the culmination of decades of preparation, now moving toward its denouement. The ongoing altercations should also be read as an implicit admission (or at least a trial by fire) for entry into the ranks of major powers. Great powers test each other’s resolve through pressure, not courtesy. India’s task is not merely to endure, but to turn the moment into an opportunity to build full‑spectrum levers of engagement and coercion of its own, ensuring it can shape outcomes, not just withstand them.

• US firms will ramp up investment in Southeast Asia for supply chain resilience, all while balancing national economic and security interests in the AI tech race.

• 2025 marks a deepening of the "third nuclear age," characterized by "more nuclear weapons, more nuclear-armed states, no limits on their arsenals and few qualms about threatening to use them.

• World GDP will grow by "just 2.5%." European economies will strengthen, but emerging markets will be flat due to "trade barriers, climate change and technological hurdles.

• Geopolitical tensions will weigh on the global economy," with a "blazing global trade war" expected under a Trump administration.

• Another big worry is the increasingly unpredictable climate. Expect more record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, and floods. La Niña is weakening. Its end will bring relief to many. But the climate will not stand still.

• Nvidia's Blackwell chip, starting full-scale production in early 2025, will power "AI factories" but highlights "bottlenecks—from the making of chips to the construction of data centres—created by demand for AI-related computational power. New data centers, especially those with Blackwell GPUs, will rely on "closed-loop liquid cooling," demanding more than just retrofits. Global power consumption from data centers could more than double from 2022 levels by 2026, reaching 1,000 TWh. This stresses power grids and necessitates carbon-free energy sources, leading to plans for restarting nuclear plants and orders for new reactors. Regulators are "circling" AI, with parts of the EU’s AI Act taking effect in 2025, and the African Union attempting to forge a common AI strategy.

• Energy storage is the "fastest-growing energy technology," driven by the need for stable renewable power for AI data centres and innovative alternatives to lithium-based batteries.

• China's state-led capitalism will achieve half the world's EV sales in 2025. Chinese EV-makers like BYD, XPeng (pronounced 'Zhaw-pang') and Niyo are expanding globally. Western firms are developing cheaper plug-ins, but "higher tariff barriers for China’s EVs will complicate green-car plans." Supply chain splintering will lead to new chip and battery plants. Chinese EVs offer innovative features like rotating touchscreens, unique interior designs, "tank turn" and "floating" modes, minimalist cabins with advanced autonomous driving, and integration with smart home devices (Xiaomi's SU7 Max). Chinese buyers are younger and "tech-savvy."

Other major events to watch out for:

• Ctrl-Alt-Delhi: India plans to export its e-governance technologies (Digital Public Infra) to other countries.

• While the Indian Supreme Court has acted to protect minorities, Prime Minister Modi faces increasing criticism from the Hindu-nationalist RSS. State elections suggest Modi is "less of a vote-winner" on local issues.

• Slow transition of foreign manufacturers to an Alternative Asia supply chain called #Altasia, China+1. These include emerging markets like India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, and Czechia.

• Role of the T25 (Transactional 25) economies and the future of non-aligned subscription.

• The spread of AI, Deep-Tech, and 5G technology in businesses. The tech war between America and China is just getting started. The industry is a vital battleground in their geopolitical rivalry.

• Setting up a regulatory body for AI for containing three risk factors, DeepFakes, Generative AI bias, and more powerful "frontier models" used for making cyber weapons and pathogens.

• 2025 is expected to be "one of the coolest years for decades to come," highlighting the continued upward trend in global temperatures.

• The global minimum corporate tax comes into force. 

• An onslaught of protectionism will change trade, but not diminish it.

• The idea of war in space is increasingly, no longer science fiction. Warnings about Russia developing a new space weapon involving a "nuclear warhead that can be detonated in orbit to knock out satellites" are causing "widespread alarm. America, China, India, and Russia have tested various anti-satellite capabilities, including ground-based missiles and "nesting doll" satellites.

• China's "micro-dramas" or "ultra-short dramas" are flourishing globally, described as "soaps on steroids."

• After decades of disappointment, cancer vaccines are showing "renewed promise" due to "advances in mRNA technology and personalised medicine. Moderna and Merck's mRNA-4157 melanoma vaccine is performing well in trials and "could approve the vaccine" by the FDA in 2025.

“Winning” as controlling the commanding heights of power in the 2030s–2040s: (i) frontier tech (AI, advanced semiconductors, biotech), (ii) system‐level industrial capacity, (iii) reserve-currency/financial leverage, and (iv) power projection & alliance pull. With that frame, here’s my best-judgment, scenario-weighted estimate—and what would have to change to swing the odds.

Headline probabilities (subjective, scenario-based) : These are not coin-flips. They reflect structural advantages the U.S. currently enjoys—technology stack access, capital depth, alliances, and demographics—versus China’s scale and manufacturing velocity.

By ~2030 

• U.S. maintains overall lead - 70–80% : Immigration keeps the U.S. young(er) and innovative; CHIPS/IRA catalyze on-shore fabs & clean-tech; export controls slow China’s access to cutting-edge AI chips; dollar system intact.

• China narrows gap but not decisive 20–30% : World’s largest manufacturing base, EV/solar scale, fast diffusion domestically; works around some chip restrictions; but faces demand, property, and demographic drags.

By ~2040

• U.S. still primary system leader - 55–65%: Tech stack leadership (AI models, tools, chips design), alliance network, deep capital markets; demographic replenishment via net migration.

• China co-leads (regional/sectoral), not hegemon - 25–35%: Dominance in selected manufacturing/green tech; partial financial spheres via RMB trade settlement; still constrained at tech frontier and capital openness.

• China becomes primary system leader - 5–15%: Requires breakthrough in domestic leading-edge semiconductors/AI compute, structural reform that revives productivity, and stable external environment.

What’s driving the odds right now

1) Technology choke-points (AI chips & tools).
The U.S. keeps tightening or modulating access to advanced AI compute (export controls, licensing regimes), even as domestic chipmaking is subsidized (TSMC/Samsung/Micron/Intel awards; 25% investment tax credit). China can design and scale at lagging nodes, but consistent access to top-end GPUs/EDA/tools remains constrained.

2) Industrial policy & re-shoring.
U.S. manufacturing capex is elevated (record manufacturing construction), reflecting semiconductors, batteries, and clean-tech prompted by CHIPS/IRA. That doesn’t replace China’s manufacturing breadth, but it secures critical nodes.

3) Trade shields against China’s scale.
Tariffs (EVs, solar, steel/aluminum, medical) are explicitly designed to slow Chinese price transmission into U.S. markets and buy time for domestic ramp-up. Europe is also scrutinizing Chinese EV subsidies, tempering export momentum.

4) Demographics & labor supply.
China’s working-age population is shrinking; aging raises fiscal and innovation headwinds. The U.S., despite aging, continues to add people via net migration—supporting demand, entrepreneurship, and R&D labor pools.

5) Finance & currency.
The dollar’s network effects (depth, convertibility, sanctions power) remain intact; no near-peer substitute yet. China’s capital controls and legal opacity limit RMB internationalization beyond regional/commodity niches. (IMF’s 2025 outlook still shows U.S. resilience among advanced economies.)

What would have to change to flip the probabilities

• China up-case (toward 40–50% by 2040):

  • Breakthrough in domestic leading-edge fabs (high-yield <5nm with competitive GPUs/accelerators) and sovereign EDA/tool chains.

  • Property/workout + productivity reforms (SOE discipline, private sector confidence, hukou liberalization) restoring high-quality growth.

  • Capital-account opening that attracts foreign savings without destabilizing flows.

  • External détente that reduces tech-control frictions and tariff walls.

• U.S. down-case (toward 40% by 2040):

  • Policy whiplash that stalls CHIPS/IRA execution or undercuts immigration.

  • Capital-market dysfunction (debt-ceiling crises that trigger lasting premium on U.S. assets).

  • Allied fragmentation (Europe/Asia hedging away from U.S. standards in AI/semis/clean-tech).

Fast indicators to watch (will shift odds within 12–24 months)

• U.S. CHIPS execution: on-time high-volume output from TSMC AZ, Samsung TX, Intel OH/AZ; yield reports and tool delivery cadence. AIP

• China’s AI compute supply: emergence of competitive domestic accelerators and training runs at GPT-4.5+ scale without Western GPUs. (Licensing workarounds being contested; policy direction is fluid.)

• Tariff & EV policy in U.S./EU: whether trade barriers on Chinese EVs/solar harden or soften.

• Demographics: China’s births/deaths trajectory vs. U.S. net migration—affects labor, demand, and innovation.

• IMF/WEO revisions: any sharp growth downgrades for China or upside surprises for the U.S. signal momentum shifts.

Bottom line

• 2025–2030: Advantage U.S.—compute choke-points, alliance pull, capital markets, and immigration keep the frontier anchored in America.

• 2030s: Two-track world likely—U.S. leads the tech-finance core; China dominates scale manufacturing and selected green-tech verticals.

• 2040s: U.S. still favored, but China can reach co-leadership in parts of the stack if—and only if—it solves chips at the frontier and reignites productivity.

The West's moral calculus turns out to be fraught: For about 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western foreign policy seemed to rest on sure foundations. Liberal values—democracy, open markets, human rights, and the rule of law — had just prevailed over communism. America, the first and only global hyperpower, had the clout to impose this moral code against terrorists and tyrants. And tough love was justified by the belief that history had shown that Western values were the uncontested formula for peace, prosperity, and progress. However, another 15 years on, Western foreign policy is in a mess.  Albeit, not all faith in the institutions that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment is lost. Liberal values are universal. The assumption that the rest need the West more than the West needs the rest is less true these days. Today's reality is an undertone of a tussle for dominance between USA and the West which is being challenged by China and Russia.

India's Time to reap the Demographic Dividend - India has created a strong economic base and is poised to achieve the status of a developed country (Vikasit Bharat) over the next 25 years. Our projections indicate that India@2047 can exceed a per capita income of USD26,000 – almost 13 times the current level with GDP nearing $35 trillion. The plan for development will be made a reality making India a manufacturing hub using Industrial policy (PLI schemes, etc.). For market seekers, the scale and emerging consumption patterns that India could offer over the next quarter of the century are immense. We predict that the global demography will slowly pace to join the ranks of care-home-bound, snowy-headed, mentally fossilized reactionaries due to cellular senescence, aging, and the Kingdom of the invisible. Whereas, India is the most populous nation with the median age projected to be 31 in 2030 compared to 42 in China and 40 in the US, thereby making India a country with the largest working-age population in the world. India’s growth potential, therefore, makes it an attractive destination for all three types of investors – resource seekers, efficiency seekers, and especially market seekers. Both the Government of India (GoI) and India Inc. (corporate India) could aspire to achieve economic and social outcomes for India@2047 by destressing the economic and social fault lines and reimagining the future of a committed India.