It goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a species who, due to a particular confluence of environmental forces, learned to travel over short distances on their hind legs. This allowed them to hunt different prey in a different way and necessitated they develop more complex hunting skills. They developed the first ever repertoire of skill sets; using a range of different methods to accomplish desired outcomes, unlike most species who have only a single skill set which they nuance to suit their environment.
This (technically infinite) self adaptability allowed the species to migrate in a non cyclical manor (unlike all other species). In other words they explored (albeit for strictly prosaic reasons). An open ended wandering, dictated by a desire to find an environment which would allow long term static occupation. Their great Diaspora was, ironically, motivated by a desire to stay still.
The species managed to find spots all over the landmass which allowed them to satisfy all of their daily needs and they settled. During this period the landmass separated into four major continental masses and a plethora of islands. The branches of the species, thus isolated, began to evolve along diverse but parallel lines.
Long term settlement necessitated the development of other skills. The settled peoples became aware of seasons for the first time and developed more and more sophisticated ways of making the environment continuously habitable. They began to husband crops and animals; controlling their environment rather than searching for them in nature. They had to produce complex solutions to complex problems in order to sustain a successful, sedentary, year round existence; they stored and preserved food, they built dwellings (after a long troglodyte (or cave dwelling) period) they developed civic systems in order to allow for labour specialization.
These static communities were threatened by nomadic groups still incapable of sustained agricultural production who would steal their stored resources, often in mounted raids. So they fortified their settlements, selected a group to train themselves as defenders and the strongest (or most tactically minded) became leaders. As the communities became more organized and militant and began to incorporate with other villages into larger city states these warrior-leaders mutated into warlord-kings. For quite some time these city states rose and fell, still subject to the limits of their environment-control technology, political autonomy and geographical resources.
Individuals rose up within this world who sought to forcefully incorporate as many city-states as possible into super-states (or empires). Of particular note was emperor Chin who created the Chinese empire, Ivan (the terrible) who consolidated Eastern Europe, The Roman Caesars, The Islamic Moguls and the European kings and queens. Amongst the most significant of these was Henry the eighth of England. His enclosures of common land led to the corporate division of arable land and the growth of urban living. Cities (often based around centres of trade such as ports and market towns) became the major population centres rather than villages, and a property based legal system emerged, as did an incipient sense of social class division. All of these factors would lead to the signing of the Magna Carta (which tied political power to property rather than heritage) and, ultimately, the industrial revolution; when a contractually disenfranchised rural working class and a socially aware cadre of urban philosopher/scientists together revolutionized the nature of material production with the intention of freeing the world from scarcity and social injustice. This technology spread to England’s trade partners and ultimately allowed those who possessed it to explore, map, colonize and control most of the world.
And thus it stood in 1914. These large trade-based power blocks stood together, shoulder to shoulder across the world. And they were all jealous of each other. Two major power blocks had developed which intersected on the political border lands of Bulgaria and Serbia. And in 1914 (when a nominal representative of one power block was assassinated) the system split into two warring halves. The following Great war continued, with a cold war period, until 1945 when America dropped a nuclear bomb on it’s Japanese opponents and German militarism withered under the weight of it’s own monomaniacal belligerence. The empire system had shred itself and a state based system emerged, with smaller often culturally, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous nations, each defined by its military capacity, geographical disposition (or at the behest of their former empire lords) and organized around whatever point of apparent consensus its leading caste could conjure up.
This left the two largest power centres (America and Russia) intact. Power became bi-polar with one major empire (China) seceding from world power disputes altogether and the rest cowed by the nuclear capacity of the two major states. These covertly antagonistic powers attempted to formulate a morally-based political community but were undermined by the fatalistic war mentality of the two major powers and by a general reluctance amongst the leaders of nation states to erode internal sovereignty. Throughout this ‘Cold War’ period the two power centres defined each other (and, by proxy, everyone else) ideologically and geographically but the Russian power block was quietly deteriorating due to internal political contradictions and a comparative poverty of recourses.
In 1989 the Russian Soviet system finally collapsed. The bipolar cold war system became a unipolar system. All nations understood that the American system of democratic capitalism was the only state model available and proceeded to negotiate accordingly. They used whatever particular material advantages they could muster to bargain for their place in the settling new order. Their citizens, their religions, their materials and their military became bargaining chips in a global game of poker, with each nation attempting to secure as large a share as they can of the global market while striking ideological poses in order to convince their citizens (and the media driven world community) that they are motivated by beneficent (or at least ideological) motives rather than raw greed and blind panic.
