After watching an episode of Netflix’s the Crown and thinking about the decline of the British Empire and the rise of Pax Americana, I came across yet another story on the rise of China. That rise has suffered a few blows in the past few months as COVID-19 has taken at least some of the luster off China’s soft power. This all got me thinking about what it really takes to be a leading power, and what lasting contributions the great powers have left the world with. It’s a subject fit to fill more than few books at least, so I’ve confined my very brief meditations in this post to technology, and even communications technology specifically.

Of course there are certain great inventions coming from all societies and civilisations, but then there are some which move the whole human race forward and the rest of globe adopts the new way of doing things in the style of the pioneering civilisation.

The Royal Mail comes to mind, as the founder of the institution of a regular and government-backed mail service, the British Empire set the template which the rest of the world followed, and to this day the United Kingdom is the only country whose name does not appear on international postage stamps. This default of being the first-mover means you have no need to explain yourself. Similarly, all global time is still based around the line of longitude which bisects the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. By first discovering a reliable method of measuring longitude (by building a reliable clock, no less), the British Empire forever established itself as the home of world time and all time is still calculated by reference to this point.

As the world shifted to Pax Americana, we can see the lead the United States has taken on technological development. To dial the US (and Canada) via international phone, the country code is 1. Even more notably, like the dog that didn’t bark, there is no country code suffix for US-based websites, unlike every other country in the world. The ubiquity of English not just in general and diplomatic communication, but specifically in internet terminology and all widely-used coding languages is perhaps a further example.

Looking further back, it’s not quite communications technology, but the Roman Empire left us with globally accepted standards like the numbering of our years.

What exactly all this means I’m not, it remains to be seen whether China or any other great emerging power will make a similarly lasting contribution to the world.