The Rise and Fall Race
Pick up to four states and empires and watch them rise and fall, year by year: who led the world’s stage, when they overtook each other, and how long each held on.
How the race is scored
Every state and empire profile has a power curve: the Institute’s judgement of the state’s strength through its history, from the works cited in its profile, on a scale of 0 to 10 that is scaled to its own peak. Alone, that cannot tell a great empire from a small kingdom: both reach 10. So the race weighs each curve by the state’s weight in the Institute’s analysis, the mean of its military power, territorial reach, economic strength and historical influence, also out of 10. A state’s standing in a year is its curve there times its weight, divided by ten. The same weight ranks the great powers on the century pages.
These are interpretive judgements, not measurements: read a lead of a point or two as close. The curves and the scores are free to download as open data, and the Empire Explorer draws every curve side by side.