At the time Akbar the great was enthroned in the Mughal empire, Spain was taking over Latin America, Elizabeth 1 was gearing up for a Spanish hegemon, and Japan was undergoing a civil war and the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the middle east, and east Europe, three gigantic empires were ruling: the Ottomans, Safavids, and the Mughals, ranging from Hungary’s borders to the present day Myanmar. And yet, the next two centuries saw those empires collapse, and Europe controlling, de facto, two-thirds of the globe.
What led to the change of order so rapidly? I was in the brilliant exhibitions on the Mughals in Virginia, and it dawned on me that the European right’s major problem isn’t the fact that it cannot decide whether to be civilizational, realist, or sovereigntist. It is that Europe, as a whole, has internalized the wrong lessons from the last three centuries of European dominance.
Consider that for roughly three centuries, beginning with the Industrial Revolution and accelerating with European imperial expansion and later American predominance, a relatively small part of humanity exercised disproportionate economic, technological, and cultural power. This period became so normal to modern consciousness that it was often mistaken for a permanent condition of history itself.
Yet the 21st century increasingly suggests a different possibility: not the collapse of the West, but the return of older patterns of global distribution, occurring simultaneously with technological upheaval and profound psychological consequences.
The first development is the return of India and China toward their historical weight in the world economy.
Economic history frequently challenges assumptions formed by modern experience. Historical estimates suggest that for much of the first 16 centuries after Christ, the territories corresponding broadly to present-day India and China constituted a very large share of global economic activity. Their predominance rested not merely on population but on productive agriculture, manufacturing, trade networks, and administrative sophistication.
China functioned as a vast civilizational centre, united and aloof, while India occupied a central role in commerce stretching from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, often divided into various local feudatories and confederacies, only united four times, under the Mauryas, Guptas, Mughals and the British. Visualizations of world GDP over centuries repeatedly show the same broad pattern: a dominGDPant Asia, a dramatic decline after industrialization in Europe, and then a modern recovery.
The 18th and 19th centuries, however, altered this equilibrium.
Industrialization transformed production, military organization, and finance. Europe and later the United States moved from being peripheral actors in many respects to becoming the principal centres of world power. By the 20th century, the idea of Western predominance had become deeply embedded in global consciousness. Yet what appeared to many as the natural order of civilization may instead have been a particular historical phase. China’s share of global output rose from a very small fraction of world GDP in the late 20th century to levels approaching one-fifth in some measures, while India steadily moved upward as one of the world’s largest economies.
The second development, happening now, is the arrival of artificial intelligence and automation. Previous industrial revolutions primarily displaced physical labour. Machines replaced agricultural workers, factory workers, and repetitive manual tasks. The current wave differs because it increasingly reaches into the social and administrative functions that sustained the modern middle class.
White-collar work once appeared protected because it relied upon judgment, paperwork, analysis, coordination, and information processing. Yet many of these activities are precisely the areas where AI systems demonstrate competence. Legal research, routine programming, accounting functions, documentation, customer service, and aspects of middle management increasingly face technological substitution.
This matters, because modern Western societies were built around the expansion of a broad middle class. Administrators, professionals, managers, and office workers became the social foundation of political stability and economic prosperity. The 20th-century social contract depended not merely upon wealth, but upon predictable careers, upward mobility, and the assumption that education led to secure professional employment. If AI compresses large sections of this structure, the effects may extend beyond economics into questions of legitimacy and social cohesion.
‘Modern Western societies were built around the expansion of a broad middle class’
The third development concerns the reaction to relative decline. The issue is often described emotionally, as societies being offended by the loss of superiority, but the deeper issue concerns narratives and expectations.
Societies construct stories about themselves. During periods of predominance, success is often interpreted as evidence of universal principles or historical destiny. When material conditions change, these stories come under strain. Relative decline does not require actual impoverishment. A nation may become richer in absolute terms while simultaneously becoming less dominant compared with others. Yet psychologically, relative decline can feel like loss.
This becomes especially difficult when shifts appear to challenge long-established assumptions. Western political and intellectual life developed during an era in which economic leadership, technological leadership, and cultural influence largely flowed outward from Europe and North America.
A world in which India and China increasingly shape markets, institutions, and global norms can therefore appear not simply as geopolitical adjustment but as a challenge to inherited understandings of history itself. Demographic changes, fiscal pressures, ageing populations, and slower growth in parts of the developed world intensify these anxieties.
The significance of these three developments lies in their convergence. If Asia regains a larger share of global influence while automation disrupts established social structures and societies struggle to adapt psychologically to changing hierarchies, then the 21st century may represent more than a transfer of power. It may represent the end of a historically exceptional age.
‘The extraordinary age may not have been the rise of Asia. It may have been the brief interval in which Asia ceased to dominate’
The question is not whether one civilization replaces another, but whether humanity is moving from a world organized around a singular centre of gravity toward one that more closely resembles older patterns of distributed power. The extraordinary age may not have been the rise of Asia. It may have been the brief interval in which Asia ceased to dominate.
The issue is key. Europe succeeded, in short due to three simple reasons. One, India and China stagnated and got increasingly divided and sought European (especially British and French) help. Britain and France, due to a combination of superior tech, mobile surplus elite and middle class who were willing to assimilate and settle down across the globe, and due to great power combination and resources, decided to spread across the globe. Over time, these entities consolidated into empires, while other European powers expanded their own imperial reach while largely avoiding major conflicts within Europe.
None of those conditions exist anymore. Europe needs adjustment. It needs to figure out what to do with their surplus elites, their middle class, and their tech advantage, while utilizing the massive manpower and resources of China and India to their advantage.
The 21st century isn’t the collapse of the West, but the end of a historically unusual period in which a relatively small part of humanity possessed disproportionate economic, technological, and cultural influence. Simultaneously, the redistribution of economic weight toward Asia and the disruptive effects of AI on middle-class structures may force societies accustomed to post-1800 assumptions to rethink narratives of progress, prosperity, and global leadership.
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