Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773)

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0213

83•freediver•4h ago

Comments

sebast_bake•3h ago

Timeless rules… They can be applied generally to large organisations, and serve as an excellent summary of symptoms of elite blindness

hellojimbo•2h ago

Is this like the prince or art of war where we are supposed to draw some lesson from very specific critiques and extrapolate it to every scenario.

skybrian•1h ago

Yeah, historical analogies are good mostly for suggesting possibilities you hadn't thought of. They don't prove anything.

bigDinosaur•1h ago

Empires having a rise and fall or increase/decrease in power/land is probably the most evidence supported grand narrative of history there is, although the specifics are always going to be different the general problems are perhaps universal (see also: The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter)

skybrian•43m ago

Maybe I'm missing what you're saying, but I think that by itself, the bare statement that "sometimes empires get larger and sometimes they get smaller" is about as useless as saying that stock markets fluctuate? But the reasons why it happened in various cases are often worth reading about. That's why we read history.

majormajor•12m ago

"Things change" is unconvincing to me as a "grand narrative." More an evidence-supported obvious fact.

analog31•1h ago

This reads almost like a precursor to the Declaration of Independence, which lists many of the same offenses of King George.

shermantanktop•47m ago

I dunno about every scenario. But it’s a pretty obvious lesson for Pax Americana, which has been based on both hard and soft power, both of which are in the hands of someone who doesn’t seem to share the premise that they should be used at all the way they have been in the past.

tomlockwood•22m ago

Also I reckon it reads as a good lesson for managers too!

chrisco255•6m ago

Pax Americana isn't an empire, it's built on treaties with sovereign nations. The U.S. doesn't set arbitrary laws for Europe, like the British were doing to the American colonies.

It might be argued that the relative peace in Europe and Asia is already cracking up, given the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Either way the world is a completely different place than it was in 1949 or 1989, and as the global situation evolves it makes absolute sense to adapt with it.

croemer•2h ago

Interesting that all nouns are capitalized, like in modern German and unlike in most other modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.

linguae•2h ago

The Declaration of Independence and the original US Constitution (the main portion plus the Bill of Rights) are also written in this style, though not all nouns are consistently capitalized.

analog31•2h ago

I was curious, so in case anybody else was, the first printed versions of these documents also retain this style. It wasn't just a habit of handwriting.

Telemakhos•2h ago

Satire, Piece, and Virtues are the first Nouns that I find not capitalized. They occur within the first few Sentences, and I trust that my Observation and Diligence in this Matter might not go without Recognition.

alexchamberlain•1h ago

Those are part of the modern day commentary, rather than the historic document that starts later in the article. The historic document itself seems to use capitalised nouns fairly consistently, though I haven't tried to find exceptions.

burnt-resistor•2h ago

Now, we can't even get people to capitalize proper nouns to disambiguate soil from a planet.

prpl•2h ago

or engineers from Engineers

shikon7•1h ago

In a some sense that goes back to the roots, as you can't distinguish these in German either ("Erde" is always capitalized)

wging•2h ago

It’s not uncommon for the time. E.g. “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

Jap2-0•1h ago

Decreasingly so, but even in stuff written in the last hundred years or so you'll sometimes find words capitalized for emphasis or similar.

tempestn•1h ago

Most communication from the highest office in the land is indeed now In this Exalted STYLE.

tonyhart7•1h ago

except china, china for some reason always unite despite many civil war and unrest

like imagine at some point roman empire and china is co-exist together and 2000 years later only 1 survive

didibus•1h ago

It's true, China went through a ton of unification -> division -> reunification phases in history. There's even a famous quote for this: "what is long divided must unite, what is long united must divide"

I think one possible reason is that the Qin Dynasty really managed to assimilate everyone into the same shared values, religion, language, writing, and so on. Other empires didn't succeed to that level, and the people in them always had strong differences, language, values, religion, beliefs, writing, philosophy, and so on.

jjmarr•47m ago

In Western tradition, an "empire" is definitionally unassimilated in that there are multiple groups/territories ruled centrally from a metropole. A state would no longer be an empire once it assimilates disparate territories.

andsoitis•56m ago

in the grand scheme of humanity, do you consider a single civilization largely persisting in key aspects over 2000 years a feature? Or a bug?

msgodel•52m ago

If it's my civilization it's a feature, if it's your civilization it's a bug.

It sounds like a joke but that is exactly how it works and many people have forgotten it.

joeblubaugh•47m ago

Chinese continuity is overstated for the purposes of modern nation-building. The Qing and Ming are as different from each other and modern CCP China as the kingdom of Prussia is from modern Germany.

ajross•10m ago

China literally fought the bloodiest civil war of the 20th century! It's technically still going on, even. One of the sides makes a lot of good chips, maybe you've heard of them.

chrisco255•3m ago

For context, Franklin had already been in Britain for 13 years by this point trying to lobby Parliament and the King about various grievances with the Crown's governance over the colonies. He would spend another 2 years trying in vain to get them to listen, before finally sailing back to America in March 1775.

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Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773)

Comments

Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems

Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773)

A Candidate Giant Planet Imaged in the Habitable Zone of α Cen A

Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

Litestar is worth a look

Running GPT-OSS-120B at 500 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs

The Day MOOCs Died: Coursera's Preview Mode Kills Free Learning

More than two hard disks in DOS

We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

Jules, our asynchronous coding agent

Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

A fast, growable array with stable pointers in C

You know more Finnish than you think

Apple increases US commitment to $600B, announces American Manufacturing Program

The Bluesky Dictionary

301party.com: Intentionally open redirect

Multics

Out-Fibbing CPython with the Plush Interpreter

Comptime.ts: compile-time expressions for TypeScript

A Man Who Beat IBM

Show HN: HMPL – Small Template Language for Rendering UI from Server to Client

Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths

The Inkhaven Blogging Residency

Automerge 3.0

Zig Error Patterns

303Gen – 303 acid loops generator

Rethinking DOM from first principles

AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks