There's a thing that happens when you learn a word late. You start hearing it everywhere, and you assume it was always there. Gravity. Democracy. Inflation. Words that feel like they were carved into the world before anyone showed up to name them.
And then you find out somebody sat down at a desk and made it up.
Somebody sat down at a desk and made this one up in nineteen forty-four. Which is the problem at the heart of what Daniel sent us this week.
Go on.
Here's the shape of it. Daniel points out that right now, the global superpower is the United States, and has been for a while. But that hasn't always been true. At various points, some country, some empire, some entity that wasn't even a state yet, has held that spot. So he wants a chronological list. From the oldest point in recorded history through to today. Recognized superpowers, in order.
And he's generous with the definition.
He is. He calls it a broad juristic definition. A superpower, for his purposes, is a country or a territory or a pre-state entity with disproportionate influence over global affairs and the course of history. Broadly analogous to the role the US plays today. That's his phrase.
"Broadly analogous.
It's doing all the work. And then he asks the follow-ups. What actually defines a superpower, and how far back does that definition stretch before it breaks? Which empires held disproportionate influence at each major period? How has the nature of the thing changed from ancient empires to the modern United States? And the one I think is the real question: is America the first truly global superpower, or did earlier powers play a comparable role?
Four questions and a definition that swallows the whole thing.
So before we can list them, we have to admit the word itself is a problem.
The word is a problem. It's not a timeless category. It was coined in nineteen forty-four by a man named William T.R. Fox, in a book called The Superpowers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. He was building on lectures Nicholas Spykman gave the year before. And Fox named exactly three.
Which three?
The United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. That's the original roster. Three. And the word was invented to describe those three, in that moment, at the end of the Second World War.
So the word is younger than the atomic bomb.
Slightly older than the end of the war, younger than the bomb. And here's the trap. Britannica's definition is a state that possesses military or economic might, or both, and general influence vastly superior to that of other states. Fine. But Britannica also admits the thing that sinks the whole exercise, which is that scholars generally agree on which state is the foremost power of an era, and then often disagree on the criteria that distinguish a superpower from other major powers.
So they agree on the answer and disagree on the test.
Every time. And the anachronism runs both directions. Wikipedia's own article on superpowers notes that the term gets applied retrospectively to preeminent ancient empires. There's a Channel 5 documentary literally titled Rome: The World's First Superpower. The New Cambridge Medieval History refers to Sasanian Persia as "the other superpower." Those are modern authors reaching backward with a nineteen-forties word.
What do the medievalists say about that?
They push back. The medieval great powers list carries an explicit warning. The term "great power" has only been used in historiography and political science since the Congress of Vienna in eighteen fifteen. And then the line that matters: in historiography of the pre-modern period, it is more typical to talk of empires.
Empires. Not powers.
There's a useful distinction from a legal scholar named Gerry Simpson. He separates "Great Powers" with capital letters, which is an elite legal club with formal rights and a seat at the table, from "great powers" lowercase, which is just empires whose might defines an era. The first one is a membership category. The second one is a description of gravity.
And Daniel's definition is the second kind.
Entirely the second kind. He's not asking who had a seat at the treaty table. He's asking who bent the world around them.
Which is the harder question, because gravity doesn't leave a paper trail.
Right. And the first thing you find when you go looking for the list is that there isn't one.
There isn't one?
There is no single canonical chronological list of superpowers. I looked. Wikipedia has three separate lists. Ancient great powers, medieval great powers, modern great powers. Three lists, three different sets of criteria, and they don't join up cleanly at the seams. And then there's the National Interest's list of seven, which is deliberately unranked and puts Canada at number one.
Canada.
Canada. It's a Heritage Foundation branding exercise, not a historical claim. So the honest position is that we're going to build this list ourselves, out of three lists that don't agree with each other, using a word that didn't exist for most of the period we're covering.
Great. Let's do it badly and honestly.
Let's start at the beginning, because the beginning is spectacular.
Akkad.
The Akkadian Empire, roughly twenty-three fifty to twenty-one fifty BC. And it's often described as the first empire in world history. Sargon of Akkad comes down out of the north, takes Sumer, and holds it. That's the first time anyone stitches multiple cities under one crown and keeps them there.
What made it hold?
Administration, mostly. A standing army, appointed governors, a taxation system, and Akkadian as an administrative language across a patchwork of peoples. The innovation isn't the conquest. Conquest is old. The innovation is the keeping.
The keeping is always the hard part.
Always. Then Egypt's New Kingdom, fifteen seventy to ten seventy BC. The Hittites at their fourteenth-century peak. And then the Neo-Assyrian Empire, nine thirty-four to six oh nine BC, which at its height dominates from the Caucasus to Nubia, Egypt and Arabia.
That's not a country. That's a time zone.
It's most of the known world from where they were standing. And the Assyrians are the ones who perfect the machinery of empire as a permanent institution. Deportation of populations, provincial administration, a standing army that doesn't disband between campaigns. When Assyria falls in six twelve BC, Babylonia takes the top spot almost immediately.
And then Persia.
The Achaemenids, five fifty to three thirty BC. Territorially the largest empire of antiquity. At its height around five hundred BC, roughly five and a half million square kilometers.
Five and a half million.
From the Aegean to the Indus. And here's the thing that makes the Achaemenids interesting for Daniel's question. They're the first power that has to solve the problem of governing people who will never see the king, never speak his language, and never share his gods. And they solve it with tolerance, essentially. You keep your religion, you keep your local customs, you pay your tribute, and you don't revolt.
That sounds familiar.
It should. Every empire after them either copies that or spends a century reinventing it badly.
So the ancient sequence runs Akkad, Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, Babylon, Persia. Where does Rome come in?
Rome comes in after the Hellenistic period and runs a very long time. But I want to flag something before we get to Rome, which is how much the criteria shift between the lists.
Shift how?
The ancient list is about territorial extent and the ability to project force across a region. The medieval list is about something different. It's about duration and cultural reach. China appears throughout. The Byzantine Empire from five hundred to ten fifty. The Caliphates from six fifty to eight fifty. The Carolingian Empire, seven fifty-one to eight forty-three. The Vikings, eight hundred to ten fifty. The Mongol Empire, twelve fifty to fourteen fifty. Mali at thirteen hundred and again at fourteen fifty. The Mamluks, twelve fifty to fifteen seventeen. The Holy Roman Empire, nine fifty to twelve hundred. Venice and Genoa from eleven hundred. The Inca at fifteen hundred. The Grand Duchy of Moscow at fifteen hundred.
The Vikings are on the list.
Which tells you the criterion has quietly changed from "holds territory" to "changes the world whether or not it holds anything."
The Vikings held very little and changed everything.
They reached four continents before Columbus was born. They founded Dublin and Kiev. They traded down the Volga into Baghdad. If the test is disproportionate influence on the course of history, the Vikings pass it easily. They just don't pass it the way Assyria passed it.
So the list is measuring different things at different points and pretending it isn't.
That's the whole problem in one sentence. And then the modern list changes the criteria again.
How?
The modern list is about global reach and economic integration. Portugal, fourteen fifteen to eighteen twenty-two, described as the first empire to have territory on all continents. Spain, fourteen sixty-nine to eighteen nineteen, the foremost global power of the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire, fourteen fifty-three to eighteen seventy-five, the universal empire. Mughal India, fifteen twenty-six to eighteen eighteen, at roughly twenty-five percent of world industrial output. Qing China, sixteen eighty-three to nineteen twelve, at roughly thirty percent of world GDP in eighteen twenty.
Thirty percent of world GDP.
In eighteen twenty. And then the Netherlands, sixteen forty-eight to seventeen ninety-five. France. Britain. Russia.
Britain is the one everybody thinks of.
Britain is the one that earns the word. After eighteen fifteen, the British Empire holds sway over twenty-five percent of the world's population and twenty-four percent of the Earth's land area. And the pound sterling is the main reserve currency from eighteen fifteen to nineteen twenty.
A century of the pound.
A century. That's the Pax Britannica. And that's the point where the modern definition of superpower actually starts to fit, because Britain has the navy, the finance, the industry, and the currency all at once.
And then it ends.
It ends, and the ending has a date. Nineteen fifty-six. Suez.
The Suez Crisis.
The moment Britain and France intervene in Egypt and the United States forces them to stop. That's the end of Britain as a superpower in any meaningful sense. Not a treaty, not a defeat. Just the discovery that you can be told to stop and you have to.
That's a brutal way to find out.
It's the cleanest example in history of a status ending in a single week. Then the Cold War gives you the two superpowers the word was invented for. The United States and the Soviet Union. And then nineteen ninety-one happens, and there's one.
And that's when the new word shows up.
That's when the new word shows up. Hyperpower. Popularized by the French foreign minister Hubert Védrine in the late nineteen nineties. The point of the word is that "superpower" no longer covered it. When you have to invent a bigger word, you're admitting the thing you're describing is qualitatively different from the last one.
So the chronology is done. And I want to go back to something you said earlier, because I think it's the hinge of the whole episode.
The regional versus global thing.
Because it decides half the list.
It decides almost all of it. James Jay Carafano, who wrote the National Interest list, argues that Rome pretty much invented global reach. And his list is explicitly limited to powers that competed on the world stage. That criterion rules out Egypt. It rules out Song China. It rules out the Maya, the Inca, the Iroquois.
On what grounds?
On the grounds that they were regional. They dominated their neighborhood and never projected beyond it. And Carafano is honest about the cost of that choice, because he also says trying to compare power across time and world makes no sense, so presenting a ranked roster of all-time all-stars is ultimately arbitrary.
He wrote the list and then told you the list is arbitrary.
He did. Which I respect enormously.
But here's my problem with the regional criterion. If the test is relative dominance within your known world, Egypt's New Kingdom wins.
Say more.
Rome at its greatest extent holds roughly sixty million people. About a quarter of world population. That's the National Interest's own number. Egypt's New Kingdom, Song China, the Inca, they dominate their known universe more completely than Rome dominates the Mediterranean. Rome shares its world with Parthia, with Han China, with Aksum. Egypt's New Kingdom doesn't share its world with anybody of comparable weight.
That's the strongest version of the counter-argument, and I think it's right. If you measure by share of the world you can see, several regional powers outrank Rome. If you measure by share of the actual globe, Rome is a Mediterranean power with a very long shadow.
So the answer depends entirely on whether "global" means the planet or the map in your head.
And that's not a technicality. That's the whole question.
Which brings us to the one Daniel actually asked. Is the United States the first truly global superpower, or did earlier powers play a comparable role?
There's a real case that Spain and Portugal get there first. The Age of Discovery in the late fifteenth century is described as an early form of globalization, connecting previously isolated parts of the world for the first time. Portugal is the first empire with territory on all continents. Spain is the foremost global power of the sixteenth century.
So the Iberians are the first with intercontinental reach.
Intercontinental reach, yes. But Britain is the first to combine global reach with industrial primacy. That's the combination nobody had before. You can have a global empire, or you can be the workshop of the world, but Britain is the first to be both at once.
And the US?
The US is the first with simultaneous military, economic, and cultural reach across every region at the same time. Not most regions. Every region. There's no ocean the US Navy doesn't operate in, no currency that clears trade the way the dollar does, no cultural output that travels the way American cultural output travels. Spain had two continents. Britain had a quarter of the map. The US has the whole board.
Which is why the word broke.
Which is why the word broke and Védrine had to build a new one.
And there's a nice piece of evidence that Rome wasn't in the same category, which is that Rome's hegemony has actually been dated.
It has. There's a paper from the last few years called "Rome as a Hegemon" that dates Roman hegemony to three hundred four BC through four hundred ten AD. Calls it one of the longest in history.
Seven hundred years.
Seven hundred years, and Mediterranean-scoped. That's the honest description. Enormous, durable, and regional.
So the US is the first truly global one.
It always is. And this is where the episode stops being history and starts being a live argument.
Lay it out.
On one side, Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal in January of this year, with a piece titled "America Is the Sole Superpower Again." And Andrzej Demczuk in Historia i Polityka last November, arguing that multipolarity is an illusion and the US remains the global superpower.
Two academics, same conclusion.
Same conclusion, different evidence. And then the counter-view, which is older than people think. Samuel Huntington in nineteen ninety-nine called the world a strange hybrid. His phrase was a uni-multipolar system with one superpower and several major powers. And he warned that Washington must relearn the game of international politics as a major power, not a superpower.
That was twenty-seven years ago.
Twenty-seven years ago. Huntington was already predicting the adjustment.
And China?
Contested,. Marco Rubio called China a superpower at his confirmation hearing. Trump has called China a superpower. And then the skeptics. Jo Inge Bekkevold in Foreign Policy, Frank Dikötter at Hoover, both arguing it isn't one. Not yet, or not in the way the word means.
What's the skeptics' argument?
That China has economic weight and regional military reach but not the alliance structure, not the currency, not the cultural pull. That a superpower has to be able to make other countries do things they wouldn't otherwise do, and China can buy influence but can't yet command it.
And the polling says something different from the analysis.
The polling says something very different. Gallup International ran a survey across thirty-seven countries. The US and China came out tied as superpowers. And forty-one percent expected Russia to be a superpower by twenty thirty.
Russia.
Russia. Which is a striking number when you look at the Russian self-image data. A Levada poll in twenty nineteen found seventy-five percent of Russians believed Russia was a superpower. In two thousand five, that number was thirty percent.
So Russian belief in Russian superpower status went from thirty to seventy-five percent in fourteen years.
While the objective indicators moved the other way. Which tells you that superpower status has a psychological component that doesn't track the balance sheet.
That's the most interesting thing you've said all episode.
It's the most interesting thing in the data. Because it means the list we've been building isn't just a list of capabilities. It's partly a list of who believed what about whom.
And then there's BRICS.
The eighteenth summit was in New Delhi, September twelfth and thirteenth of this year. Xi Jinping's first visit to India in seven years. The bloc is now eleven members, representing roughly forty-nine percent of world population and forty percent of global GDP.
Forty-nine percent of the people on Earth.
Forty-nine percent of the people on Earth, in a club that exists partly to argue that the current arrangement is wrong. Zhou Bo, a retired PLA officer, said at the summit that a lot of other countries may say China is now a global superpower. And Alejandro Reyes from the University of Hong Kong said the BRICS bring together countries that disagree with one another but share an interest in having greater room for maneuver internationally. His phrase was that it bespeaks the idea of multipolarity as agency.
Multipolarity as agency. That's a good phrase.
It's a good phrase for a thing that may or may not be happening. And that's where I'd leave the analysis. The 2026 answer to Daniel's last question is that the US is still the sole superpower by capability, and increasingly contested by perception.
Capability says one thing, belief says another.
And the gap between them is where the next decade lives.
Which is a good place to stop, except we have one more voice in the building.
Hilbert: Twenty-two pounds.
Sorry?
Hilbert: The atlas. Twenty-two pounds, that's what it weighed. It was a Philips Imperial Atlas, nineteen oh two, and it lived on a trolley at the back of the map library because you couldn't lift it off the shelf.
You catalogued it.
Hilbert: I catalogued the whole collection. Night shift, small university, donated by a family that didn't want it. Nineteenth-century British imperial atlases, the kind where whole continents are shaded pink and the legend just says "British Possessions." I spent four months with those books.
Four months of pink continents.
Hilbert: And the thing that got to me wasn't the size of it. It was the shading. A map is supposed to tell you where something is. Those maps told you who it belonged to, and the answer was always the same color.
The shading was an argument.
Hilbert: The shading was the argument. The geography was just the paper it was printed on. And I'd say the same about the list you two just built. The act of listing is a claim about what counts. You didn't find that list. You made it.
That's fair.
Hilbert: There was one volume. The India volume. Somebody had gone through it with a pencil, in a hand that looked contemporary to the printing, and crossed out "British" in the margin notes and written "disputed" next to about a dozen territories.
Who would have done that?
Hilbert: No idea. It wasn't a librarian's hand. It wasn't a student's. It was somebody who cared enough to bring a pencil to a reference book, which you weren't supposed to do.
Did you ever find out?
Hilbert: No.
And the library still has it?
Hilbert: I have a delivery coming that needs a signature and the window shuts at four.
So the penciled corrections. You never traced them.
Hilbert: Never traced them. Somebody sat in a reading room in, I'd guess, the nineteen hundreds, arguing with an atlas in the margins, and then closed it and went home. That's the whole story.
Alright. Then I'll take the point you left us. If the word "superpower" was invented in nineteen forty-four to describe exactly three states, and we've spent the last twenty minutes applying it to Akkad and the Mongols, then the list isn't a discovery. It's a preference.
It's a preference with footnotes.
And the footnotes are getting contested in real time. The Gallup poll has the US and China tied. The BRICS summit just happened. The next entry on the list may already be in dispute, or the list may be the wrong shape entirely.
Carafano's line is the one I keep coming back to. Presenting a ranked roster of all-time all-stars is ultimately arbitrary. He wrote the roster and then said that.
Which is the most honest thing anyone in this episode has said.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the atlas.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us something, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
See you tomorrow.
