Day Of Empire Chapter Summary

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The non-fictional work Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall, by Amy Chua, evaluates how hyperpowers came to be, how they maintained strength, and how they declined. Chua’s thesis is exercised throughout many segments of her writing and is as follows, “For all their enormous differences, every single world hyperpower in history ... was extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during it’s rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was the indispensable to … hegemony. But … It was also tolerance that sowed the seeds of decline. In virtually every case tolerance … [led to] conflict, hatred, and violence.” Chua’s thesis is strongly supported through her examples of how great empires like The Persians, Romans, Chinese, and Mongols surged to power and the reasons for their deterioration. The book starts off with how the Great Achaemenid Empire rose to become a hyperpower through the strategies of its rulers, beginning with Cyrus. Whenever he conquered a new empire, Cyrus would remove or “decapitate” the head of the current government and replace them with persian aristocracy, known as a satraps. One of the many things Cyrus did to exercise tolerance was how he rarely interfered with the lives of his conquered people. This supports Chua’s thesis by proving …show more content…

The Persian empire was ruled by mainly kings and satraps, as the kingdom began to extend it’s reaches to other civilizations, this way of government became more dominant than the form of government before. A lot of the empire’s success is based on pulling skills from different cultures and bringing them together to better the empire. The Persians greatly affected culture because they set the basis for all empire to come and how those empires should use their resources to become a culturally diverse

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