Moreover, many of today's most important states are still recognizably the progeny of empires. Regional conflicts from Central Africa to the Middle East, and from Central America to the Far East, are easily - and often glibly - explained in terms of earlier imperial sins: an arbitrary border here, a strategy of divide-and-rule there. Yet the ghosts of empires past continue to stalk the Earth.
Officially, there are no empires now, only 190-plus nation-states. This phenomenon of reduced imperial life expectancy has profound implications for our own time. Compared with their ancient and early modern predecessors, the empires of the last century were remarkably short lived. Yet, as time has passed, the life span of empires has tended to decline. Much of what we call history consists of the deeds of the 50 to 70 empires that once ruled multiple peoples across large chunks of the globe. Empires, more than nation-states, are the principal actors in the history of world events.
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