It can try to fight China on that front and, most likely, fail or accept the challenge of leading the world into the Information Age with advanced technologies, new energy sources and the next generation of resources, aligning the world alongside it. America has a decade before China’s industrial economy is set to surpass it. It also pointed to how the US could defy the trajectories of past empires to remain the world’s leading power in the 21st Century by transforming itself from an Industrial Age to an Information Age superpower. Last month’s Sign of the Times looked at the rise and fall of great powers through history and implications for America. While the US still stands out as the most powerful great power in history, many aspects of the dominance it enjoyed during much of the 20th Century appear to be fading, with China emerging as the key competitor for leadership. The transition to the Information Age currently underway represents a similar potential period of disruption. The transition to the Industrial Age from the 18th century onward gave rise to a series of empires, led by Britain, that leveraged technology to become larger and more powerful than virtually any of their predecessors. While technological innovation has always been critical to an empire’s success, this has never been more the case than during the periods of discovery and disruption that marked the transition from one civilisational age to another. This isn’t the say that superior military forces are not an important driver of great power change, but more that these often depended on superior technologies too. The greater and more widespread technological innovation has been within an empire, the larger it has grown and the longer it has lasted, outcompeting external threats and addressing internal challenges. Since this time innovation has shaped the rise (and fall) of nearly every empire in history, creating the weapons and technologies that enable territorial expansion in the face of competitors, the commercial tools and systems that drive productivity and growth and the social technologies that create stable and sustainable legal, financial and governance systems. Technological advancement has been one of the key driving forces of human progress since before the dawn of civilisation.

Age of empires 2 supremacy