Supernovas: How Survivals of Empires Impact on Geopolitics

I argue that, when empires arise, they are the bearers of (and are legitimized by) certain values, certain religious orthodoxies, certain technologies, certain norms of inter-sovereign politics, and certain cultural forms. Rather like supernovas in the present-day cosmos, their traces and effects can be seen in any later geopolitics. As obvious a feature of the contemporary world as the distribution of languages is an outcome of long-gone imperial expansion, producing an affinity between, for example, Arabic-speaking nations or Spanish-speaking ones.