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World history
Course: World history > Unit 2
Lesson 3: The rise and fall of empiresComparison: Fall of empires
Sal and World History Fellow Steven Schroeder discuss the fall of empires, from Achaemenid Persia, the Maurya Empire in India, the Han Empire in China, and the Roman Kingdom, Republic, and Empire in the Mediterranean.
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At2:21, what was the Yellow Turban Rebellion? Were there any long-term affects of it on China?(7 votes)
Basically these guys only wore yellow turbans and they hated the Hans, who only wore purple turbans.
Just kidding, what happened was that many agrarian people from the north had to move south to escape drought, and landowners made use of this to get cheap labor, and then the peasants were burdened even more by the government building fortifications on the silk road, causing taxes to skyrocket. Then at that point peasants, unemployed soldiers and even some landowners made bands of about 170 and started the rebellion. Soon private armies got into it, and the rebellion was a serious threat for the Hans. The Han government was already weakening with eunuchs using their position to enrich themselves. Further making this rebellion more deadly, the Taoists (a philosophy/religious group) secretly organized the rebellion, and even got some workers in the imperial palace to help rebel. Before the rebels were completely ready, the plan got betrayed and the rebels had to act early. Despite being early, the rebellion did pretty well, however eventually the rebels fell. The rebellion did cause the start of many other rebel groups to rise up and destroy the Hans.
The main impact on china was that the Han fell more quickly than they would have without it.(12 votes)
Why didn't bad leadership play a role in the fall of Rome?(6 votes)
It did play a part. Bad decisions from many emperors eventually snowballed into the collapse of the Roman Empire.(7 votes)
I have a question regarding the fall of the Roman Empire.
From my understanding, I think that over-expansion and bad leadership should also be included in the causes. Because, the Romans expanded from Europe to ancient Asia Minor, which eventually led to the division of leadership between the Eastern Emperor and the Western Emperor of Rome. So, there were two Emperors of Rome, who eventually turned on one-another. As in, one accepted Christianity, while the other didn't, for instance.
So, shouldn't these two factors also be considered?(6 votes)- Rome needed slaves from the land they were capturing to help their economy do well, as Sal said. Rome stopped expanding, causing them to lose that economic source. so in fact, Rome had to expand to survive, so you may say under expansion is a cause.
The division in Rome started as an administrative policy by Constantine. it was not until after he died that Rome's administrative divisions became separate countries. The emperors of the divided Roman empire actually had few to no wars, as the west was concerned by the Germanic peoples and the east was concerned by Parthia.(6 votes)
How does over expansion cause a fall? I thought the more you expanded the more power you will have? And can someone explain to me the division also? How can that cause a fall? Thanks(4 votes)- The more one expands an empire, the thinner one's power is spread, and the more enemies one acquires. If an empire is multi-lingual and multi-cultural, individuals seeking personal power can use feelings of resentment against the center to divide portions off from the margins. When the margins fall, the center is threatened. Consider the Soviet Empire that lasted from 1917 to 1991.(7 votes)
What is the most recent empire?(3 votes)- The Central African Empire was shortlived in the late 1970s. Ethiopia was an Empire until the mid-1970s. Japan continues today as an Empire. In many ways, both the United States and China function as empires, though neither calls itself by such a name.(4 votes)
"Succession" is listed as one of the factors which leads to fall of an empire, but it is not selected for the 4 empires in the video.
How succession leads to fall of an empire? And what are the examples?(2 votes)- Thank you for sending me on the quest to respond.I looked at the video (which I hadn't before) and found the list of factors as you said, and again, as you wrote "succession" was on the list. I had to deal with a personal confusion between "succession" and "secession", so I went to dictionary.com to get those cleared up. Succession is when one imperial ruler or dynasty follows another. This will happen in the UK within a decade or two. The Queen will pass on, and someone from among her descendants will succeed her. This will likely do no harm to the British Empire, such as it is now. "Secession", in contrast, is what happens when one part of an empire decides to leave that empire. In very contemporary terms, that happened in the early 1990s when several of its constituent units left the Soviet Union and that empire collapsed. Now, back to succession. If one considers the territory conquered by Alexander the Great and his armies to have constituted an empire, then the breakup of the same into 5 different "nations" could be considered to have resulted from succession gone bad, couldn't it?(5 votes)
i'd put over expansion as a reason Rome fell.(4 votes)- How does over expansion cause a fall?(3 votes)
This is because there is so much new land that the current ruler(s) can't control all of the population. This sudden weak leadership could lead to revolts or migration, causing the fall of the empire.(2 votes)
- At3:24, didn't Julius Caesar's BAD leadership play a huge role in leading to the Roman Civil War and ,subsequently, Rome's downfall?(3 votes)
- Not at all. The civil war that resulted after his death was fairly mild (for a war), and Augustus's pretty good leadership helped Rome become the dominant empire.
There is pretty much no way that the war after Caesars death could have been a cause to Rome's downfall, as Rome had 200 years of prosperity after it. Julius was also a very good leader who was extremely powerful and popular, and it was his murder by angry politicians that started the war, so blame them, not Caesar.(2 votes)
I need to know WHO led ancient Indian empire to its fall. Do you know who did?(2 votes)- There were many ancient Indian empires. To which one do you refer?(2 votes)
2:21Video transcript
- [Sal] Steve, what are doing here? - [Steve] Hey, Sal. We're gonna look at this
question of, why do empires fall? - [Sal] And for those of you
who don't know Steve Schraeder, he is a World History
Fellow here at Khan Academy and also a former World History teacher. - [Steve] So what we want to
do here is use this big ideas, these big factors that are
somewhat common across empires, to sort of understand how
specific empires fell. - [Sal] Let's start in Achaemenid Persia. So, Achaemenid Persia,
it's an empire that lasts for roughly 200 years. And I guess the obvious thing
about Achaemenid Persia, it gets taken over by Alexander the Great. So I'll just go ahead and
throw invasion on that list for Achaemenid Persia. So, outside of invasion,
if we go through the rest of this list, it clearly
was a large empire, so maybe there was an
element of over expansion. It was governed in a fairly federated way through these satraps. You might have had bad
leadership be a role. Darius III, famous for
deserting his troops on the battlefield. - [Steve] Yeah, and on top of that, we might throw in economics as well, because as Alexander conquers
bits and pieces of the empire, he's also depriving them of the resources that those areas would provide. - [Sal] So, now let's
move on to Maurya India. Once again, a significant empire, lasts definitely over 100 years and it's actually the
largest unified empire over the Indian subcontinent. And it starts with three
fairly strong rulers and it's known, especially
with Ashoka the Great, for spreading of the Buddhist religion. So why, in your mind, Steve, did it fall? Which of these factors
played most strongly? - [Steve] Well, the
first one that jumps out is over expansion. Once Ashoka dies, you see
the empire really lose a lot of that northwestern territory. What we did see is some religious strife. You mentioned that
Ashoka worked really hard to spread Buddhism and he did follow that in some of his policies
which led to some tension between some of the Hindu
population in the empire. - [Sal] And so you could also
call that division as well. So, moving on. Go to Han China. It began to fall the end
of the second century CE and then falls in the third century CE. Which of these factors led
to its eventual demise? - [Steve] Right. So I think we want to start
looking at the fall of Han China from the lens of the
Yellow Turban Rebellion. And that is partly a religious movement and it also is partly sparked
by environmental factors leading to food shortages. - [Sal] And food shortages
might affect the economy. - [Steve] Absolutely. And there's a lot of internal migration to look for better jobs within
Han China because of this. - [Sal] Do you think
leadership played a role? - [Steve] Yeah. There was a lot of dissatisfaction
with the Han emperor and how he was sort of dealing
with some of these problems. And over time, efforts
to defeat the rebellion led to regional warlords
gaining more power and then they eventually
carve out their own kingdoms from the Han domain. - [Sal] Okay. And then, overlapping
in time with Han China, we of course have the famous Roman Empire. And on my timeline
here, this first section is the Roman kingdom, then Roman republic, and then you have the formal Roman empire that collapses at the
end of the fifth century. So which of these factors
do you think played... In the Western Roman empire is collapsed, the Byzantine empire, the
Eastern Roman empire continues on for roughly a thousand years more. - [Steve] Well, let's start
with the obvious point there that there is a division. There's a formal political division that's gonna weaken both
halves of the empire in terms of the resources available. We also have, at the same
time as that division, religious issues going on. We have Christianity being
declared the official religion of the Roman empire at this time and that leads to internal conflicts between those who are Christians
and those who are not. - [Sal] You have migrations and invasions. You have famously the Huns
migrating into Eastern Europe and then putting pressure
on the Germanic tribes to oftentimes come into the
Roman empire, but that led to... So that was both migrations and invasion. - [Steve] Yeah, and in this
case, it's sometimes hard to separate invasion from migration. - [Sal] And I would throw in economy since the Roman empire, in
its expansionary period, was constantly getting new territory which would add tax
revenues to Rome's coffers. It allowed for more and more
slaves who could work for Rome. Once you get into the
third, fourth century CE, that expansion starts to stop and so it stops that
ever-growing pile of money and ever-growing pile of labor. So, I'd argue economy played a role. You can never point to just one factor. Empires are these very complicated things but there are these general themes and as a student, it's
valuable to think about them in a framework something like this. - [Steve] So all these factors won't apply to every single empire you look at. They're a good starting point
when you start thinking about those questions of why did
this particular empire fall? - [Sal] Awesome. Thanks, Steve. - [Steve] Thanks, Sal.