THE FATE OF EMPIRES
and
SEARCH FOR SURVIVAL
Sir John Glubb
John Bagot Glubb was born in 1897, his father being a regular officer in the Royal Engineers.
At the age of four he left England for Mauritius, where his father was posted for a three-year
tour of duty. At the age of ten he was sent to school for a year in Switzerland. These youthful
travels may have opened his mind to the outside world at an early age.
He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in September 1914, and was
commissioned in the Royal Engineers in April 1915. He served throughout the first World War
in France and Belgium, being wounded three times and awarded the Military Cross. In 1920 he
volunteered for service in Iraq, as a regular officer, but in 1926 resigned his commission and
accepted an administrative post under the Iraq Government.
In 1930, however, he signed a contract to serve the Transjordan Government (now Jordan).
From 1939 to 1956 he commanded the famous Jordan Arab Legion, which was in reality the
Jordan Army. Since his retirement he has published seventeen books, chiefly on the Middle
East, and has lectured widely in Britain, the United States and Europe.
William Blackwood & Sons Ltd
32 Thistle Street
Edinburgh EH1 1HA
Scotland
© J. B. G. Ltd, 1976, 1977
ISBN 0 85158 127 7
Printed at the Press of the Publisher
Introduction
As we pass through life, we learn by
experience. We look back on our behaviour
when we were young and think how foolish
we were. In the same way our family, our
community and our town endeavour to avoid
the mistakes made by our predecessors.
The experiences of the human race have
been recorded, in more or less detail, for
some four thousand years. If we attempt to
study such a period of time in as many
countries as possible, we seem to discover
the same patterns constantly repeated under
widely differing conditions of climate,
culture and religion. Surely, we ask
ourselves, if we studied calmly and
impartially the history of human institutions
and development over these four thousand
years, should we not reach conclusions
which would assist to solve our problems
today? For everything that is occurring
around us has happened again and again
before.
No such conception ever appears to have
entered into the minds of our historians. In
general, historical teaching in schools is
limited to this small island. We endlessly
mull over the Tudors and the Stewarts, the
Battle of Crecy, and Guy Fawkes. Perhaps
this narrowness is due to our examination
system, which necessitates the careful
definition of a syllabus which all children
must observe.
I remember once visiting a school for
mentally handicapped children. “Our
children do not have to take examinations,”
the headmaster told me,” and so we are able
to teach them things which will be really
useful to them in life.”
However this may be, the thesis which I
wish to propound is that priceless lessons
could be learned if the history of the past
four thousand years could be thoroughly and
impartially studied. In these two articles,
which first appeared in Blackwood’s
Magazine, I have attempted briefly to sketch
some of the kinds of lessons which I believe
we could learn. My plea is that history
should be the history of the human race, not
of one small country or period.
The Fate of Empires
I Learning from history
‘The only thing we learn from history,’ it
has been said, ‘is that men never learn from
history’, a sweeping generalisation perhaps,
but one which the chaos in the world today
goes far to confirm. What then can be the
reason why, in a society which claims to
probe every problem, the bases of history are
still so completely unknown?
Several reasons for the futility of our
historical studies may be suggested.
First, our historical work is limited to short
periods—the history of our own country, or
that of some past age which, for some
reason, we hold in respect.
Second, even within these short periods,
the slant we give to our narrative is governed
by our own vanity rather than by objectivity.
If we are considering the history of our own
country, we write at length of the periods
when our ancestors were prosperous and
victorious, but we pass quickly over their
shortcomings or their defeats. Our people
are represented as patriotic heroes, their
enemies as grasping imperialists, or
subversive rebels. In other words, our
national histories are propaganda, not wellbalanced
investigations.
Third, in the sphere of world history, we
study certain short, usually unconnected,
periods, which fashion at certain epochs has
made popular. Greece 500 years before
Christ, and the Roman Republic and early
Roman Empire are cases in point. The
intervals between the ‘great periods’ are
neglected. Recently Greece and Rome have
become largely discredited, and history tends
to become increasingly the parochial history
of our own countries.
To derive any useful instruction from
history, it seems to me essential first of all to
grasp the principle that history, to be
meaningful, must be the history of the
human race. For history is a continuous
process, gradually developing, changing and
turning back, but in general moving forward
in a single mighty stream. Any useful lessons
to be derived must be learned by the study of
the whole flow of human development, not
by the selection of short periods here and
there in one country or another.
Every age and culture is derived from its
predecessors, adds some contribution of its
own, and passes it on to its successors. If we
boycott various periods of history, the
origins of the new cultures which succeeded
them cannot be explained.
_______________________________
Sir John Glubb, better known as Glubb
Pasha, was born in 1897, and served in
France in the First World War from 1915 to
1918. In 1926 he left the regular army to
serve the Iraq Government. From 1939 to
1956, he commanded the famous Jordan
Arab Legion. Since retirement, he has
published sixteen books, chiefly on the
Middle East, and has lectured widely.
The Fate of Empires
2
Physical science has expanded its knowledge
by building on the work of its predecessors,
and by making millions of careful experiments,
the results of which are meticulously
recorded. Such methods have not yet been
employed in the study of world history. Our
piecemeal historical work is still mainly
dominated by emotion and prejudice.
II The lives of empires
If we desire to ascertain the laws which
govern the rise and fall of empires, the
obvious course is to investigate the imperial
experiments recorded in history, and to
endeavour to deduce from them any lessons
which seem to be applicable to them all.
The word ‘empire’, by association with the
British Empire, is visualised by some people
as an organisation consisting of a homecountry
in Europe and ‘colonies’ in other
continents. In this essay, the term ‘empire’ is
used to signify a great power, often called
today a superpower. Most of the empires in
history have been large landblocks, almost
without overseas possessions.
We possess a considerable amount of
information on many empires recorded in
history, and of their vicissitudes and the
lengths of their lives, for example:
The nation Dates of rise and fall Duration in years
Assyria 859-612 B.C. 247
Persia 538-330 B.C. 208
(Cyrus and his descendants)
Greece 331-100 B.C. 231
(Alexander and his successors)
Roman Republic 260-27 B.C. 233
Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 180 207
Arab Empire A.D. 634-880 246
Mameluke Empire 1250-1517 267
Ottoman Empire 1320-1570 250
Spain 1500-1750 250
Romanov Russia 1682-1916 234
Britain 1700-1950 250
This list calls for certain comments.
(1) The present writer is exploring the facts,
not trying to prove anything. The dates given
are largely arbitrary. Empires do not usually
begin or end on a certain date. There is
normally a gradual period of expansion and
then a period of decline. The resemblance in
the duration of these great powers may be
queried. Human affairs are subject to many
chances, and it is not to be expected that they
The Fate of Empires
3
could be calculated with mathematical
accuracy.
(2) Nevertheless, it is suggested that there is
sufficient resemblance between the life
periods of these different empires to justify
further study.
(3) The division of Rome into two periods
may be thought unwarranted. The first, or
republican, period dates from the time when
Rome became the mistress of Italy, and ends
with the accession of Augustus. The imperial
period extends from the accession of
Augustus to the death of Marcus Aurelius. It
is true that the empire survived nominally
for more than a century after this date, but it
did so in constant confusion, rebellions, civil
wars and barbarian invasions.
(4) Not all empires endured for their full lifespan.
The Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar,
for example, was overthrown by
Cyrus, after a life duration of only some
seventy-four years.
(5) An interesting deduction from the figures
seems to be that the duration of empires
does not depend on the speed of travel or the
nature of weapons. The Assyrians marched
on foot and fought with spears and bow and
arrows. The British used artillery, railways
and ocean-going ships. Yet the two empires
lasted for approximately the same periods.
There is a tendency nowadays to say that
this is the jet-age, and consequently there is
nothing for us to learn from past empires.
Such an attitude seems to be erroneous.
(6) It is tempting to compare the lives of
empires with those of human beings. We
may choose a figure and say that the average
life of a human being is seventy years. Not all
human beings live exactly seventy years.
Some die in infancy, others are killed in
accidents in middle life, some survive to the
age of eighty or ninety. Nevertheless, in spite
of such exceptions, we are justified in saying
that seventy years is a fair estimate of the
average person’s expectation of life.
(7) We may perhaps at this stage be allowed
to draw certain conclusions:
(a) In spite of the accidents of fortune, and
the apparent circumstances of the human
race at different epochs, the periods of
duration of different empires at varied
epochs show a remarkable similarity.
(b) Immense changes in the technology of
transport or in methods of warfare do not
seem to affect the life-expectation of an
empire.
(c) The changes in the technology of transport
and of war have, however, affected the
shape of empires. The Assyrians, marching
on foot, could only conquer their neighbours,
who were accessible by land—the
Medes, the Babylonians, the Persians and
the Egyptians.
The British, making use of ocean-going
ships, conquered many countries and subcontinents,
which were accessible to them
by water—North America, India, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand—but
they never succeeded in conquering their
neighbours, France, Germany and Spain.
But, although the shapes of the Assyrian
and the British Empires were entirely
different, both lasted about the same
length of time.
III The human yardstick
What then, we may ask, can have been the
factor which caused such an extraordinary
similarity in the duration of empires, under
such diverse conditions, and such utterly
different technological achievements?
The Fate of Empires
4
One of the very few units of measurement
which have not seriously changed since the
Assyrians is the human ‘generation’, a period
of about twenty-five years. Thus a period of
250 years would represent about ten generations
of people. A closer examination of the
characteristics of the rise and fall of great
nations may emphasise the possible significance
of the sequence of generations.
Let us then attempt to examine the stages
in the lives of such powerful nations.
IV Stage one. The outburst
Again and again in history we find a small
nation, treated as insignificant by its
contemporaries, suddenly emerging from its
homeland and overrunning large areas of the
world. Prior to Philip (359-336 B.C.), Macedon
had been an insignificant state to the
north of Greece. Persia was the great power
of the time, completely dominating the area
from Eastern Europe to India. Yet by 323
B.C., thirty-six years after the accession of
Philip, the Persian Empire had ceased to
exist, and the Macedonian Empire extended
from the Danube to India, including Egypt.
This amazing expansion may perhaps he
attributed to the genius of Alexander the
Great, but this cannot have been the sole
reason; for although after his death everything
went wrong—the Macedonian generals
fought one another and established rival
empires—Macedonian pre-eminence survived
for 231 years.
In the year A.D. 600, the world was divided
between two superpower groups as it has
been for the past fifty years between Soviet
Russia and the West. The two powers were
the eastern Roman Empire and the Persian
Empire. The Arabs were then the despised
and backward inhabitants of the Arabian
Peninsula. They consisted chiefly of wandering
tribes, and had no government, no
constitution and no army. Syria, Palestine,
Egypt and North Africa were Roman
provinces, Iraq was part of Persia.
The Prophet Mohammed preached in
Arabia from A.D. 613 to 632, when he died.
In 633, the Arabs burst out of their desert
peninsula, and simultaneously attacked the
two super-powers. Within twenty years, the
Persian Empire had ceased to exist. Seventy
years after the death of the Prophet, the
Arabs had established an empire extending
from the Atlantic to the plains of Northern
India and the frontiers of China.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the Mongols were a group of savage tribes in
the steppes of Mongolia. In 1211, Genghis
Khan invaded China. By 1253, the Mongols
had established an empire extending from
Asia Minor to the China Sea, one of the
largest empires the world has ever known.
The Arabs ruled the greater part of Spain
for 780 years, from 712 A.D. to 1492. (780
years back in British history would take us to
1196 and King Richard Coeur de Lion.)
During these eight centuries, there had been
no Spanish nation, the petty kings of Aragon
and Castile alone holding on in the
mountains.
The agreement between Ferdinand and
Isabella and Christopher Columbus was
signed immediately after the fall of Granada,
the last Arab kingdom in Spain, in 1492.
Within fifty years, Cortez had conquered
Mexico, and Spain was the world’s greatest
empire.
Examples of the sudden outbursts by
which empires are born could be multiplied
indefinitely. These random illustrations must
suffice.
The Fate of Empires
5
V Characteristics of the outburst
These sudden outbursts are usually
characterised by an extraordinary display of
energy and courage. The new conquerors are
normally poor, hardy and enterprising and
above all aggressive. The decaying empires
which they overthrow are wealthy but
defensive-minded. In the time of Roman
greatness, the legions used to dig a ditch
round their camps at night to avoid surprise.
But the ditches were mere earthworks, and
between them wide spaces were left through
which the Romans could counter-attack. But
as Rome grew older, the earthworks became
high walls, through which access was given
only by narrow gates. Counterattacks were
no longer possible. The legions were now
passive defenders.
But the new nation is not only distinguished
by victory in battle, but by unresting
enterprise in every field. Men hack their way
through jungles, climb mountains, or brave
the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans in tiny
cockle-shells. The Arabs crossed the Straits
of Gibraltar in A.D. 711 with 12,000 men,
defeated a Gothic army of more than twice
their strength, marched straight over 250
miles of unknown enemy territory and seized
the Gothic capital of Toledo. At the same
stage in British history, Captain Cook discovered
Australia. Fearless initiative characterises
such periods.
Other peculiarities of the period of the
conquering pioneers are their readiness to
improvise and experiment. Untrammelled by
traditions, they will turn anything available
to their purpose. If one method fails, they try
something else. Uninhibited by textbooks or
book learning, action is their solution to
every problem.
Poor, hardy, often half-starved and ill-clad,
they abound in courage, energy and
initiative, overcome every obstacle and
always seem to be in control of the situation.
VI The causes of race outbursts
The modern instinct is to seek a reason for
everything, and to doubt the veracity of a
statement for which a reason cannot be
found. So many examples can be given of the
sudden eruption of an obscure race into a
nation of conquerors that the truth of the
phenomenon cannot be held to be doubtful.
To assign a cause is more difficult. Perhaps
the easiest explanation is to assume that the
poor and obscure race is tempted by the
wealth of the ancient civilisation, and there
would undoubtedly appear to be an element
of greed for loot in barbarian invasions.
Such a motivation may be divided into two
classes. The first is mere loot, plunder and
rape, as, for example, in the case of Attila
and the Huns, who ravaged a great part of
Europe from A.D. 450 to 453. However, when
Attila died in the latter year, his empire fell
apart and his tribes returned to Eastern
Europe.
Many of the barbarians who founded
dynasties in Western Europe on the ruins of
the Roman Empire, however, did so out of
admiration for Roman civilisation, and
themselves aspired to become Romans.
VII A providential turnover?
Whatever causes may be given for the
overthrow of great civilisations by
barbarians, we can sense certain resulting
benefits. Every race on earth has distinctive
characteristics. Some have been distinguished
in philosophy, some in administration,
some in romance, poetry or religion, some in
The Fate of Empires
6
their legal system. During the pre-eminence
of each culture, its distinctive characteristics
are carried by it far and wide across the
world.
If the same nation were to retain its
domination indefinitely, its peculiar qualities
would permanently characterise the whole
human race. Under the system of empires
each lasting for 250 years, the sovereign race
has time to spread its particular virtues far
and wide. Then, however, another people,
with entirely different peculiarities, takes its
place, and its virtues and accomplishments
are likewise disseminated. By this system,
each of the innumerable races of the world
enjoys a period of greatness, during which its
peculiar qualities are placed at the service of
mankind.
To those who believe in the existence of
God, as the Ruler and Director of human
affairs, such a system may appear as a
manifestation of divine wisdom, tending
towards the slow and ultimate perfection of
humanity.
VIII The course of empire
The first stage of the life of a great nation,
therefore, after its outburst, is a period of
amazing initiative, and almost incredible
enterprise, courage and hardihood. These
qualities, often in a very short time, produce
a new and formidable nation. These early
victories, however, are won chiefly by
reckless bravery and daring initiative.
The ancient civilisation thus attacked will
have defended itself by its sophisticated
weapons, and by its military organisation
and discipline. The barbarians quickly
appreciate the advantages of these military
methods and adopt them. As a result, the
second stage of expansion of the new empire
consists of more organised, disciplined and
professional campaigns.
In other fields, the daring initiative of the
original conquerors is maintained—in
geographical exploration, for example:
pioneering new countries, penetrating new
forests, climbing unexplored mountains, and
sailing uncharted seas. The new nation is
confident, optimistic and perhaps contemptuous
of the ‘decadent’ races which it has
subjugated.
The methods employed tend to be practical
and experimental, both in government and
in warfare, for they are not tied by centuries
of tradition, as happens in ancient empires.
Moreover, the leaders are free to use their
own improvisations, not having studied
politics or tactics in schools or in textbooks.
IX U.S.A. in the stage of the pioneers
In the case of the United States of America,
the pioneering period did not consist of a
barbarian conquest of an effete civilisation,
but of the conquest of barbarian peoples.
Thus, viewed from the outside, every
example seems to be different. But viewed
from the standpoint of the great nation,
every example seems to be similar.
The United States arose suddenly as a new
nation, and its period of pioneering was
spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not
an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life
history of the United States has followed the
standard pattern which we shall attempt to
trace—the periods of the pioneers, of
commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism
and of decadence.
X Commercial expansion
The conquest of vast areas of land and
their subjection to one government
The Fate of Empires
7
automatically acts as a stimulant to commerce.
Both merchants and goods can be
exchanged over considerable distances.
Moreover, if the empire be an extensive one,
it will include a great variety of climates,
producing extremely varied products, which
the different areas will wish to exchange with
one another.
The speed of modern methods of transportation
tends to create in us the impresssion
that far-flung commerce is a modern
development, but this is not the case. Objects
made in Ireland, Scandinavia and China
have been found in the graves or the ruins of
the Middle East, dating from 1,000 years
before Christ. The means of transport were
slower, but, when a great empire was in
control, commerce was freed from the
innumerable shackles imposed upon it today
by passports, import permits, customs,
boycotts and political interference.
The Roman Empire extended from Britain
to Syria and Egypt, a distance, in a direct
line, of perhaps 2,700 miles. A Roman
official, transferred from Britain to Syria,
might spend six months on the journey. Yet,
throughout the whole distance, he would be
travelling in the same country, with the same
official language, the same laws, the same
currency and the same administrative
system. Today, some twenty independent
countries separate Britain from Syria, each
with its own government, its own laws,
politics, customs fees, passports and
currencies, making commercial co-operation
almost impossible. And this process of
disintegration is still continuing. Even within
the small areas of the modern European
nations, provincial movements demanding
secession or devolution tend further to
splinter the continent.
The present fashion for ‘independence’ has
produced great numbers of tiny states in the
world, some of them consisting of only one
city or of a small island. This system is an
insuperable obstacle to trade and cooperation.
The present European Economic
Community is an attempt to secure commercial
cooperation among small independent
states over a large area, but the plan meets
with many difficulties, due to the mutual
jealousies of so many nations.
Even savage and militaristic empires
promoted commerce, whether or not they
intended to do so. The Mongols were some of
the most brutal military conquerors in
history, massacring the entire populations of
cities. Yet, in the thirteenth century, when
their empire extended from Peking to
Hungary, the caravan trade between China
and Europe achieved a remarkable degree of
prosperity—the whole journey was in the
territory of one government.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the
caliphs of Baghdad achieved fabulous wealth
owing to the immense extent of their
territories, which constituted a single trade
bloc. The empire of the caliphs is now
divided into some twenty-five separate
‘nations’.
XI The pros and cons of empires
In discussing the life-story of the typical
empire, we have digressed into a discussion
of whether empires are useful or injurious to
mankind. We seem to have discovered that
empires have certain advantages, particularly
in the field of commerce, and in the
establishment of peace and security in vast
areas of the globe. Perhaps we should also
include the spread of varied cultures to many
races. The present infatuation for indepenThe
Fate of Empires
8
dence for ever smaller and smaller units will
eventually doubtless be succeeded by new
international empires.
The present attempts to create a European
community may be regarded as a practical
endeavour to constitute a new super-power,
in spite of the fragmentation resulting from
the craze for independence. If it succeeds,
some of the local independencies will have to
be sacrificed. If it fails, the same result may
be attained by military conquest, or by the
partition of Europe between rival superpowers.
The inescapable conclusion seems,
however, to be that larger territorial units are
a benefit to commerce and to public stability,
whether the broader territory be achieved by
voluntary association or by military action.
XII Sea power
One of the more benevolent ways in which
a super-power can promote both peace and
commerce is by its command of the sea.
From Waterloo to 1914, the British Navy
commanded the seas of the world. Britain
grew rich, but she also made the Seas safe for
the commerce of all nations, and prevented
major wars for 100 years.
Curiously enough, the question of sea
power was never clearly distinguished, in
British politics during the last fifty years,
from the question of imperial rule over other
countries. In fact, the two subjects are
entirely distinct. Sea power does not offend
small countries, as does military occupation.
If Britain had maintained her navy, with a
few naval bases overseas in isolated islands,
and had given independence to colonies
which asked for it, the world might well be a
more stable place today. In fact, however, the
navy was swept away in the popular outcry
against imperialism.
XIII The Age of Commerce
Let us now, however, return to the lifestory
of our typical empire. We have already
considered the age of outburst, when a littleregarded
people suddenly bursts on to the
world stage with a wild courage and energy.
Let us call it the Age of the Pioneers.
Then we saw that these new conquerors
acquired the sophisticated weapons of the
old empires, and adopted their regular
systems of military organisation and
training. A great period of military expansion
ensued, which we may call the Age of
Conquests. The conquests resulted in the
acquisition of vast territories under one
government, thereby automatically giving
rise to commercial prosperity. We may call
this the Age of Commerce.
The Age of Conquests, of course, overlaps
the Age of Commerce. The proud military
traditions still hold sway and the great
armies guard the frontiers, but gradually the
desire to make money seems to gain hold of
the public. During the military period, glory
and honour were the principal objects of
ambition. To the merchant, such ideas are
but empty words, which add nothing to the
bank balance.
XIV Art and luxury
The wealth which seems, almost without
effort, to pour into the country enables the
commercial classes to grow immensely rich.
How to spend all this money becomes a
problem to the wealthy business community.
Art, architecture and luxury find rich
patrons. Splendid municipal buildings and
wide streets lend dignity and beauty to the
wealthy areas of great cities. The rich
merchants build themselves palaces, and
money is invested in communications,
The Fate of Empires
9
highways, bridges, railways or hotels,
according to the varied patterns of the ages.
The first half of the Age of Commerce
appears to be peculiarly splendid. The
ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and
devotion to duty are still in evidence. The
nation is proud, united and full of selfconfidence.
Boys are still required, first of all,
to be manly—to ride, to shoot straight and to
tell the truth. (It is remarkable what
emphasis is placed, at this stage, on the
manly virtue of truthfulness, for lying is
cowardice—the fear of facing up to the
situation.)
Boys’ schools are intentionally rough. Frugal
eating, hard living, breaking the ice to
have a bath and similar customs are aimed at
producing a strong, hardy and fearless breed
of men. Duty is the word constantly drummed
into the heads of young people.
The Age of Commerce is also marked by
great enterprise in the exploration for new
forms of wealth. Daring initiative is shown in
the search for profitable enterprises in far
corners of the earth, perpetuating to some
degree the adventurous courage of the Age of
Conquests.
XV The Age of Affluence
There does not appear to be any doubt that
money is the agent which causes the decline
of this strong, brave and self-confident
people. The decline in courage, enterprise
and a sense of duty is, however, gradual.
The first direction in which wealth injures
the nation is a moral one. Money replaces
honour and adventure as the objective of the
best young men. Moreover, men do not
normally seek to make money for their
country or their community, but for themselves.
Gradually, and almost imperceptibly,
the Age of Affluence silences the voice of
duty. The object of the young and the
ambitious is no longer fame, honour or
service, but cash.
Education undergoes the same gradual
transformation. No longer do schools aim at
producing brave patriots ready to serve their
country. Parents and students alike seek the
educational qualifications which will
command the highest salaries. The Arab
moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains in
these very same words of the lowering of
objectives in the declining Arab world of his
time. Students, he says, no longer attend
college to acquire learning and virtue, but to
obtain those qualifications which will enable
them to grow rich. The same situation is
everywhere evident among us in the West
today.
XVI High Noon
That which we may call the High Noon of
the nation covers the period of transition
from the Age of Conquests to the Age of
Affluence: the age of Augustus in Rome, that
of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, of Sulaiman
the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, or
of Queen Victoria in Britain. Perhaps we
might add the age of Woodrow Wilson in the
United States.
All these periods reveal the same
characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated
in the nation dazzles the onlookers.
Enough of the ancient virtues of courage,
energy and patriotism survive to enable the
state successfully to defend its frontiers. But,
beneath the surface, greed for money is
gradually replacing duty and public service.
Indeed the change might be summarised as
being from service to selfishness.
The Fate of Empires
10
XVII Defensiveness
Another outward change which invariably
marks the transition from the Age of
Conquests to the Age of Affluence is the
spread of defensiveness. The nation, immensely
rich, is no longer interested in glory or
duty, but is only anxious to retain its wealth
and its luxury. It is a period of defensiveness,
from the Great Wall of China, to Hadrian’s
Wall on the Scottish Border, to the Maginot
Line in France in 1939.
Money being in better supply than courage,
subsidies instead of weapons are employed
to buy off enemies. To justify this departure
from ancient tradition, the human mind
easily devises its own justification. Military
readiness, or aggressiveness, is denounced as
primitive and immoral. Civilised peoples are
too proud to fight. The conquest of one
nation by another is declared to be immoral.
Empires are wicked. This intellectual device
enables us to suppress our feeling of
inferiority, when we read of the heroism of
our ancestors, and then ruefully contemplate
our position today. ‘It is not that we are
afraid to fight,’ we say, ‘but we should
consider it immoral.’ This even enables us to
assume an attitude of moral superiority.
The weakness of pacifism is that there are
still many peoples in the world who are
aggressive. Nations who proclaim themselves
unwilling to fight are liable to be conquered
by peoples in the stage of militarism—
perhaps even to see themselves incorporated
into some new empire, with the status of
mere provinces or colonies.
When to be prepared to use force and when
to give way is a perpetual human problem,
which can only be solved, as best we can, in
each successive situation as it arises. In fact,
however, history seems to indicate that great
nations do not normally disarm from
motives of conscience, but owing to the
weakening of a sense of duty in the citizens,
and the increase in selfishness and the desire
for wealth and ease.
XVIII The Age of Intellect
We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided
the life-story of our great nation into four
ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the
Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of
Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The
great wealth of the nation is no longer
needed to supply the mere necessities, or
even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are
available also for the pursuit of knowledge.
The merchant princes of the Age of
Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by
endowing works of art or patronising music
and literature. They also found and endow
colleges and universities. It is remarkable
with what regularity this phase follows on
that of wealth, in empire after empire,
divided by many centuries.
In the eleventh century, the former Arab
Empire, then in complete political decline,
was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah.
The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the
intellectual leaders of the world. During the
reign of Malik Shah, the building of
universities and colleges became a passion.
Whereas a small number of universities in
the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab
glory, now a university sprang up in every
town.
In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the
same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain.
When these nations were at the height of
their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and
Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now
almost every city has its university.
The Fate of Empires
11
The ambition of the young, once engaged
in the pursuit of adventure and military
glory, and then in the desire for the
accumulation of wealth, now turns to the
acquisition of academic honours.
It is useful here to take note that almost all
the pursuits followed with such passion
throughout the ages were in themselves
good. The manly cult of hardihood, frankness
and truthfulness, which characterised
the Age of Conquests, produced many really
splendid heroes.
The opening up of natural resources, and
the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which
marked the age of commercialism, appeared
to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in
culture and in the arts. In the same way, the
vast expansion of the field of knowledge
achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to
mark a new high-water mark of human
progress. We cannot say that any of these
changes were ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
The striking features in the pageant of
empire are:
(a) the extraordinary exactitude with which
these stages have followed one another, in
empire after empire, over centuries or even
millennia; and
(b) the fact that the successive changes
seem to represent mere changes in popular
fashion—new fads and fancies which sweep
away public opinion without logical reason.
At first, popular enthusiasm is devoted to
military glory, then to the accumulation of
wealth and later to the acquisition of
academic fame.
Why could not all these legitimate, and
indeed beneficent, activities be carried on
simultaneously, each of them in due moderation?
Yet this never seemed to happen.
XIX The effects of intellectualism
There are so many things in human life
which are not dreamt of in our popular
philosophy. The spread of knowledge seems
to be the most beneficial of human activities,
and yet every period of decline is characterrised
by this expansion of intellectual
activity. ‘All the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing
else, but either to tell or to hear some new
thing’ is the description given in the Acts of
the Apostles of the decline of Greek
intellectualism.
The Age of Intellect is accompanied by
surprising advances in natural science. In the
ninth century, for example, in the age of
Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference
of the earth with remarkable
accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass
before Western Europe discovered that the
world was not flat. Less than fifty years after
the amazing scientific discoveries under
Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful
and beneficent as was the progress of
science, it did not save the empire from
chaos.
The full flowering of Arab and Persian
intellectualism did not occur until after their
imperial and political collapse. Thereafter
the intellectuals attained fresh triumphs in
the academic field, but politically they
became the abject servants of the often
illiterate rulers. When the Mongols conquered
Persia in the thirteenth century, they
were themselves entirely uneducated and
were obliged to depend wholly on native
Persian officials to administer the country
and to collect the revenue. They retained as
wazeer, or Prime Minister, one Rashid al-
Din, a historian of international repute. Yet
The Fate of Empires
12
the Prime Minister, when speaking to the
Mongol II Khan, was obliged to remain
throughout the interview on his knees. At
state banquets, the Prime Minister stood
behind the Khan’s seat to wait upon him. If
the Khan were in a good mood, he
occasionally passed his wazeer a piece of
food over his shoulder.
As in the case of the Athenians,
intellectualism leads to discussion, debate
and argument, such as is typical of the
Western nations today. Debates in elected
assemblies or local committees, in articles in
the Press or in interviews on television—
endless and incessant talking.
Men are interminably different, and
intellectual arguments rarely lead to
agreement. Thus public affairs drift from bad
to worse, amid an unceasing cacophony of
argument. But this constant dedication to
discussion seems to destroy the power of
action. Amid a Babel of talk, the ship drifts
on to the rocks.
XX The inadequacy of intellect
Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of
the Age of Intellect is the unconscious
growth of the idea that the human brain can
solve the problems of the world. Even on the
low level of practical affairs this is patently
untrue. Any small human activity, the local
bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club,
requires for its survival a measure of selfsacrifice
and service on the part of the
members. In a wider national sphere, the
survival of the nation depends basically on
the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the citizens.
The impression that the situation can be
saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness
or human self-dedication, can only
lead to collapse.
Thus we see that the cultivation of the
human intellect seems to be a magnificent
ideal, but only on condition that it does not
weaken unselfishness and human dedication
to service. Yet this, judging by historical
precedent, seems to be exactly what it does
do. Perhaps it is not the intellectualism
which destroys the spirit of self-sacrifice—the
least we can say is that the two,
intellectualism and the loss of a sense of
duty, appear simultaneously in the life-story
of the nation.
Indeed it often appears in individuals, that
the head and the heart are natural rivals. The
brilliant but cynical intellectual appears at
the opposite end of the spectrum from the
emotional self-sacrifice of the hero or the
martyr. Yet there are times when the perhaps
unsophisticated self-dedication of the hero is
more essential than the sarcasms of the
clever.
XXI Civil dissensions
Another remarkable and unexpected
symptom of national decline is the intensification
of internal political hatreds. One
would have expected that, when the survival
of the nation became precarious, political
factions would drop their rivalry and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country.
In the fourteenth century, the weakening
empire of Byzantium was threatened, and
indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks.
The situation was so serious that one would
have expected every subject of Byzantium to
abandon his personal interests and to stand
with his compatriots in a last desperate
attempt to save the country. The reverse
occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty
years of their history in fighting one another
in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans
The Fate of Empires
13
moved in and administered the coup de
grâce.
Britain has been governed by an elected
parliament for many centuries. In former
years, however, the rival parties observed
many unwritten laws. Neither party wished
to eliminate the other. All the members
referred to one another as honourable
gentlemen. But such courtesies have now
lapsed. Booing, shouting and loud noises
have undermined the dignity of the House,
and angry exchanges are more frequent. We
are fortunate if these rivalries are fought out
in Parliament, but sometimes such hatreds
are carried into the streets, or into industry
in the form of strikes, demonstrations,
boycotts and similar activities. True to the
normal course followed by nations in
decline, internal differences are not
reconciled in an attempt to save the nation.
On the contrary, internal rivalries become
more acute, as the nation becomes weaker.
XXII The influx of foreigners
One of the oft-repeated phenomena of
great empires is the influx of foreigners to
the capital city. Roman historians often
complain of the number of Asians and
Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in
the ninth century, was international in its
population—Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians,
Egyptians, Africans and Greeks
mingled in its streets.
In London today, Cypriots, Greeks,
Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans and
Indians jostle one another on the buses and
in the underground, so that it sometimes
seems difficult to find any British. The same
applies to New York, perhaps even more so.
This problem does not consist in any
inferiority of one race as compared with
another, but simply in the differences
between them.
In the age of the first outburst and the
subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is
normally ethnically more or less
homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates
a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But
in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence,
every type of foreigner floods into the great
city, the streets of which are reputed to be
paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great
city is also the capital of the empire, the
cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of empire
exercises a political influence greatly in
excess of its relative numbers.
Second- or third-generation foreign
immigrants may appear outwardly to be
entirely assimilated, but they often constitute
a weakness in two directions. First, their
basic human nature often differs from that of
the original imperial stock. If the earlier
imperial race was stubborn and slowmoving,
the immigrants might come from
more emotional races, thereby introducing
cracks and schisms into the national policies,
even if all were equally loyal.
Second, while the nation is still affluent, all
the diverse races may appear equally loyal.
But in an acute emergency, the immigrants
will often be less willing to sacrifice their
lives and their property than will be the
original descendants of the founder race.
Third, the immigrants are liable to form
communities of their own, protecting
primarily their own interests, and only in the
second degree that of the nation as a whole.
Fourth, many of the foreign immigrants
will probably belong to races originally
conquered by and absorbed into the empire.
While the empire is enjoying its High Noon
of prosperity, all these people are proud and
The Fate of Empires
14
glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline
sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory
of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is
suddenly revived, and local or provincial
movements appear demanding secession or
independence. Some day this phenomenon
will doubtless appear in the now apparently
monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire.
It is amazing for how long such provincial
sentiments can survive.
Historical examples of this phenomenon
are scarcely needed. The idle and captious
Roman mob, with its endless appetite for
free distributions of food—bread and
games—is notorious, and utterly different
from that stern Roman spirit which we
associate with the wars of the early republic.
In Baghdad, in the golden days of Harun
al-Rashid, Arabs were a minority in the
imperial capital. Istanbul, in the great days
of Ottoman rule, was peopled by inhabitants
remarkably few of whom were descendants
of Turkish conquerors. In New York,
descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are few
and far between.
This interesting phenomenon is largely
limited to great cities. The original conquering
race is often to be found in relative
purity in rural districts and on far frontiers.
It is the wealth of the great cities which
draws the immigrants. As, with the growth of
industry, cities nowadays achieve an ever
greater preponderance over the countryside,
so will the influence of foreigners increasingly
dominate old empires.
Once more it may be emphasised that I do
not wish to convey the impression that
immigrants are inferior to older stocks. They
are just different, and they thus tend to
introduce cracks and divisions.
XXIII Frivolity
As the nation declines in power and
wealth, a universal pessimism gradually
pervades the people, and itself hastens the
decline. There is nothing succeeds like
success, and, in the Ages of Conquest and
Commerce, the nation was carried
triumphantly onwards on the wave of its own
self-confidence. Republican Rome was
repeatedly on the verge of extinction—in 390
B.C. when the Gauls sacked the city and in
216 B.C. after the Battle of Cannae. But no
disasters could shake the resolution of the
early Romans. Yet, in the later stages of
Roman decline, the whole empire was deeply
pessimistic, thereby sapping its own
resolution.
Frivolity is the frequent companion of
pessimism. Let us eat, drink and be merry,
for tomorrow we die. The resemblance
between various declining nations in this
respect is truly surprising. The Roman mob,
we have seen, demanded free meals and
public games. Gladiatorial shows, chariot
races and athletic events were their passion.
In the Byzantine Empire the rivalries of the
Greens and the Blues in the hippodrome
attained the importance of a major crisis.
Judging by the time and space allotted to
them in the Press and television, football and
baseball are the activities which today chiefly
interest the public in Britain and the United
States respectively.
The heroes of declining nations are always
the same—the athlete, the singer or the
actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to
designate a comedian or a football player,
not a statesman, a general, or a literary
genius.
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15
XXIV The Arab decline
In the first half of the ninth century,
Baghdad enjoyed its High Noon as the
greatest and the richest city in the world. In
861, however, the reigning Khalif (caliph),
Mutawakkil, was murdered by his Turkish
mercenaries, who set up a military dictatorship,
which lasted for some thirty years.
During this period the empire fell apart, the
various dominions and provinces each
assuming virtual independence and seeking
its own interests. Baghdad, lately the capital
of a vast empire, found its authority limited
to Iraq alone.
The works of the contemporary historians
of Baghdad in the early tenth century are still
available. They deeply deplored the
degeneracy of the times in which they lived,
emphasising particularly the indifference to
religion, the increasing materialism and the
laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also
the corruption of the officials of the
government and the fact that politicians
always seemed to amass large fortunes while
they were in office.
The historians commented bitterly on the
extraordinary influence acquired by popular
singers over young people, resulting in a
decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers
of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs
on the lute, an instrument resembling the
modern guitar. In the second half of the
tenth century, as a result, much obscene
sexual language came increasingly into use,
such as would not have been tolerated in an
earlier age. Several khalifs issued orders
banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but
within a few years they always returned.
An increase in the influence of women in
public life has often been associated with national
decline. The later Romans complained
that, although Rome ruled the world, women
ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar
tendency was observable in the Arab Empire,
the women demanding admission to the
professions hitherto monopolised by men.
‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian,
Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk,
tax-collector or preacher to do with women?
These occupations have always been limited
to men alone.’ Many women practised law,
while others obtained posts as university
professors. There was an agitation for the
appointment of female judges, which,
however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and
public order collapsed, and foreign invaders
overran the country. The resulting increase
in confusion and violence made it unsafe for
women to move unescorted in the streets,
with the result that this feminist movement
collapsed.
The disorders following the military takeover
in 861, and the loss of the empire, had
played havoc with the economy. At such a
moment, it might have been expected that
everyone would redouble their efforts to save
the country from bankruptcy, but nothing of
the kind occurred. Instead, at this moment of
declining trade and financial stringency, the
people of Baghdad introduced a five-day
week.
When I first read these contemporary
descriptions of tenth-century Baghdad, I
could scarcely believe my eyes. I told myself
that this must be a joke! The descriptions
might have been taken out of The Times
today. The resemblance of all the details was
especially breathtaking—the break-up of the
empire, the abandonment of sexual morality,
the ‘pop’ singers with their guitars, the entry
of women into the professions, the five-day
The Fate of Empires
16
week. I would not venture to attempt an
explanation! There are so many mysteries
about human life which are far beyond our
comprehension.
XXV Political ideology
Today we attach immense importance to
the ideology of our internal politics. The
Press and public media in the U.S.A. and
Britain pour incessant scorn on any country
the political institutions of which differ in
any manner from our own idea of
democracy. It is, therefore, interesting to
note that the life-expectation of a great
nation does not appear to be in any way
affected by the nature of its institutions.
Past empires show almost every possible
variation of political system, but all go
through the same procedure from the Age of
Pioneers through Conquest, Commerce,
Affluence to decline and collapse.
XXVI The Mameluke Empire
The empire of the Mamelukes of Egypt
provides a case in point, for it was one of the
most exotic ever to be recorded in history. It
is also exceptional in that it began on one
fixed day and ended on another, leaving no
doubt of its precise duration, which was 267
years.
In the first part of the thirteenth century,
Egypt and Syria were ruled by the Ayoubid
sultans, the descendants of the family of
Saladin. Their army consisted of Mamelukes,
slaves imported as boys from the Steppes
and trained as professional soldiers. On 1st
May 1250, the Mamelukes mutinied,
murdered Turan Shah, the Ayoubid sultan,
and became the rulers of his empire.
The first fifty years of the Mameluke
Empire were marked by desperate fighting
with the hitherto invincible Mongols, the
descendants of Genghis Khan, who invaded
Syria. By defeating the Mongols and driving
them out of Syria, the Mamelukes saved the
Mediterranean from the terrible fate which
had overtaken Persia. In 1291, the Mamelukes
captured Acre, and put an end to the
Crusades.
From 1309 to 1341, the Mameluke Empire
was everywhere victorious and possessed the
finest army in the world. For the ensuing
hundred years the wealth of the Mameluke
Empire was fabulous, slowly leading to
luxury, the relaxation of discipline and to
decline, with ever more bitter internal
political rivalries. Finally the empire collapsed
in 1517, as the result of military defeat
by the Ottomans.
The Mameluke government appears to us
utterly illogical and fantastic. The ruling
class was entirely recruited from young boys,
born in what is now Southern Russia. Every
one of them was enlisted as a private soldier.
Even the sultans had begun life as private
soldiers and had risen from the ranks. Yet
this extraordinary political system resulted
in an empire which passed through all the
normal stages of conquest, commercialism,
affluence and decline and which lasted
approximately the usual period of time.
XXVII The master race
The people of the great nations of the past
seem normally to have imagined that their
pre-eminence would last for ever. Rome
appeared to its citizens to be destined to be
for all time the mistress of the world. The
Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad declared that
God had appointed them to rule mankind
until the day of judgement. Seventy years
ago, many people in Britain believed that the
The Fate of Empires
17
empire would endure for ever. Although
Hitler failed to achieve his objective, he
declared that Germany would rule the world
for a thousand years. That sentiments like
these could be publicly expressed without
evoking derision shows that, in all ages, the
regular rise and fall of great nations has
passed unperceived. The simplest statistics
prove the steady rotation of one nation after
another at regular intervals.
The belief that their nation would rule the
world forever, naturally encouraged the
citizens of the leading nation of any period to
attribute their pre-eminence to hereditary
virtues. They carried in their blood, they
believed, qualities which constituted them a
race of supermen, an illusion which inclined
them to the employment of cheap foreign
labour (or slaves) to perform menial tasks
and to engage foreign mercenaries to fight
their battles or to sail their ships.
These poorer peoples were only too happy
to migrate to the wealthy cities of the empire,
and thereby, as we have seen, to adulterate
the close-knit, homogeneous character of the
conquering race. The latter unconsciously
assumed that they would always be the
leaders of mankind, relaxed their energies,
and spent an increasing part of their time in
leisure, amusement or sport.
In recent years, the idea has spread widely
in the West that ‘progress’ will be automatic
without effort, that everyone will continue to
grow richer and richer and that every year
will show a ‘rise in the standard of living’. We
have not drawn from history the obvious
conclusion that material success is the result
of courage, endurance and hard work—a
conclusion nevertheless obvious from the
history of the meteoric rise of our own
ancestors. This self-assurance of its own
superiority seems to go hand-in-hand with
the luxury resulting from wealth, in
undermining the character of the dominant
race.
XXVIII The welfare state
When the welfare state was first introduced
in Britain, it was hailed as a new high-water
mark in the history of human development.
History, however, seems to suggest that the
age of decline of a great nation is often a
period which shows a tendency to
philanthropy and to sympathy for other
races. This phase may not be contradictory
to the feeling described in the previous
paragraph, that the dominant race has the
right to rule the world. For the citizens of the
great nation enjoy the role of Lady Bountiful.
As long as it retains its status of leadership,
the imperial people are glad to be generous,
even if slightly condescending. The rights of
citizenship are generously bestowed on every
race, even those formerly subject, and the
equality of mankind is proclaimed. The
Roman Empire passed through this phase,
when equal citizenship was thrown open to
all peoples, such provincials even becoming
senators and emperors.
The Arab Empire of Baghdad was equally,
perhaps even more, generous. During the
Age of Conquests, pure-bred Arabs had
constituted a ruling class, but in the ninth
century the empire was completely
cosmopolitan.
State assistance to the young and the poor
was equally generous. University students
received government grants to cover their
expenses while they were receiving higher
education. The State likewise offered free
medical treatment to the poor. The first free
public hospital was opened in Baghdad in
The Fate of Empires
18
the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786-809), and
under his son, Mamun, free public hospitals
sprang up all over the Arab world from Spain
to what is now Pakistan.
The impression that it will always be
automatically rich causes the declining
empire to spend lavishly on its own
benevolence, until such time as the economy
collapses, the universities are closed and the
hospitals fall into ruin.
It may perhaps be incorrect to picture the
welfare state as the high-water mark of
human attainment. It may merely prove to
be one more regular milestone in the lifestory
of an ageing and decrepit empire.
XXIX Religion
Historians of periods of decadence often
refer to a decline in religion, but, if we
extend our investigation over a period
covering the Assyrians (859-612 B.C.) to our
own times, we have to interpret religion in a
very broad sense. Some such definition as
‘the human feeling that there is something,
some invisible Power, apart from material
objects, which controls human life and the
natural world’.
We are probably too narrow and
contemptuous in our interpretation of idol
worship. The people of ancient civilisations
were as sensible as we are, and would
scarcely have been so foolish as to worship
sticks and stones fashioned by their own
hands. The idol was for them merely a
symbol, and represented an unknown,
spiritual reality, which controlled the lives of
men and demanded human obedience to its
moral precepts.
We all know only too well that minor
differences in the human visualisation of this
Spirit frequently became the ostensible
reason for human wars, in which both sides
claimed to be fighting for the true God, but
the absurd narrowness of human
conceptions should not blind us to the fact
that, very often, both sides believed their
campaigns to have a moral background.
Genghis Khan, one of the most brutal of all
conquerors, claimed that God had delegated
him the duty to exterminate the decadent
races of the civilised world. Thus the Age of
Conquests often had some kind of religious
atmosphere, which implied heroic selfsacrifice
for the cause.
But this spirit of dedication was slowly
eroded in the Age of Commerce by the action
of money. People make money for
themselves, not for their country. Thus
periods of affluence gradually dissolved the
spirit of service, which had caused the rise of
the imperial races.
In due course, selfishness permeated the
community, the coherence of which was
weakened until disintegration was
threatened. Then, as we have seen, came the
period of pessimism with the accompanying
spirit of frivolity and sensual indulgence, byproducts
of despair. It was inevitable at such
times that men should look back yearningly
to the days of ‘religion’, when the spirit of
self-sacrifice was still strong enough to make
men ready to give and to serve, rather than
to snatch.
But while despair might permeate the
greater part of the nation, others achieved a
new realisation of the fact that only readiness
for self-sacrifice could enable a community
to survive. Some of the greatest saints in
history lived in times of national decadence,
raising the banner of duty and service
against the flood of depravity and despair.
The Fate of Empires
19
In this manner, at the height of vice and
frivolity the seeds of religious revival are
quietly sown. After, perhaps, several
generations (or even centuries) of suffering,
the impoverished nation has been purged of
its selfishness and its love of money, religion
regains its sway and a new era sets in. ‘It is
good for me that I have been afflicted,’ said
the psalmist, ‘that I might learn Thy
Statutes.’
XXX New combinations
We have traced the rise of an obscure race
to fame, through the stages of conquest,
commercialism, affluence, and intellectualism,
to disintegration, decadence and
despair. We suggested that the dominant
race at any given time imparts its leading
characteristics to the world around, being in
due course succeeded by another empire. By
this means, we speculated, many successive
races succeeded one another as superpowers,
and in turn bequeathed their
peculiar qualities to mankind at large.
But the objection may here be raised that
some day the time will come when all the
races of the world will in turn have enjoyed
their period of domination and have
collapsed again in decadence. When the
whole human race has reached the stage of
decadence, where will new energetic conquering
races be found?
The answer is at first partially obscured by
our modern habit of dividing the human race
into nations, which we seem to regard as
water-tight compartments, an error responsible
for innumerable misunderstandings.
In earlier times, warlike nomadic nations
invaded the territories of decadent peoples
and settled there. In due course, they
intermarried with the local population and a
new race resulted, though it sometimes
retained an old name. The barbarian
invasions of the Roman Empire probably
provide the example best known today in the
West. Others were the Arab conquests of
Spain, North Africa and Persia, the Turkish
conquests of the Ottoman Empire, or even
the Norman Conquest of England.
In all such cases, the conquered countries
were originally fully inhabited and the invaders
were armies, which ultimately settled
down and married, and produced new races.
In our times, there are few nomadic
conquerors left in the world, who could
invade more settled countries bringing their
tents and flocks with them. But ease of travel
has resulted in an equal, or probably an even
greater, intermixture of populations. The
extreme bitterness of modern internal political
struggles produces a constant flow of
migrants from their native countries to
others, where the social institutions suit
them better.
The vicissitudes of trade and business
similarly result in many persons moving to
other countries, at first intending to return,
but ultimately settling down in their new
countries.
The population of Britain has been
constantly changing, particularly in the last
sixty years, owing to the influx of immigrants
from Europe, Asia and Africa, and the exit of
British citizens to the Dominions and the
United States. The latter is, of course, the
most obvious example of the constant rise of
new nations, and of the transformation of
the ethnic content of old nations through this
modern nomadism.
The Fate of Empires
20
XXXI Decadence of a system
It is of interest to note that decadence is
the disintegration of a system, not of its
individual members. The habits of the
members of the community have been
corrupted by the enjoyment of too much
money and too much power for too long a
period. The result has been, in the
framework of their national life, to make
them selfish and idle. A community of selfish
and idle people declines, internal quarrels
develop in the division of its dwindling
wealth, and pessimism follows, which some
of them endeavour to drown in sensuality or
frivolity. In their own surroundings, they are
unable to redirect their thoughts and their
energies into new channels.
But when individual members of such a
society emigrate into entirely new surroundings,
they do not remain conspicuously
decadent, pessimistic or immoral among the
inhabitants of their new homeland. Once
enabled to break away from their old
channels of thought, and after a short period
of readjustment, they become normal
citizens of their adopted countries. Some of
them, in the second and third generations,
may attain pre-eminence and leadership in
their new communities.
This seems to prove that the decline of any
nation does not undermine the energies or
the basic character of its members. Nor does
the decadence of a number of such nations
permanently impoverish the human race.
Decadence is both mental and moral
deterioration, produced by the slow decline
of the community from which its members
cannot escape, as long as they remain in
their old surroundings. But, transported
elsewhere, they soon discard their decadent
ways of thought, and prove themselves equal
to the other citizens of their adopted country.
XXXII Decadence is not physical
Neither is decadence physical. The citizens
of nations in decline are sometimes
described as too physically emasculated to be
able to bear hardship or make great efforts.
This does not seem to be a true picture.
Citizens of great nations in decadence are
normally physically larger and stronger than
those of their barbarian invaders.
Moreover, as was proved in Britain in the
first World War, young men brought up in
luxury and wealth found little difficulty in
accustoming themselves to life in the frontline
trenches. The history of exploration
proves the same point. Men accustomed to
comfortable living in homes in Europe or
America were able to show as much
endurance as the natives in riding camels
across the desert or in hacking their way
through tropical forests.
Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease,
resulting from too long a period of wealth
and power, producing cynicism, decline of
religion, pessimism and frivolity. The
citizens of such a nation will no longer make
an effort to save themselves, because they
are not convinced that anything in life is
worth saving.
XXXII Human diversity
Generalisations are always dangerous.
Human beings are all different. The variety
in human life is endless. If this be the case
with individuals, it is much more so with
nations and cultures. No two societies, no
two peoples, no two cultures are exactly the
same. In these circumstances, it will be easy
The Fate of Empires
21
for critics to find many objections to what
has been said, and to point out exceptions to
the generalisations.
There is some value in comparing the lives
of nations to those of individuals. No two
persons in the world are identical. Moreover
their lives are often affected by accidents or
by illness, making the divergences even more
obvious. Yet, in fact, we can generalise about
human life from many different aspects. The
characteristics of childhood, adolescence,
youth, middle and old age are well known.
Some adolescents, it is true, are prematurely
wise and serious. Some persons in middle
age still seem to he young. But such
exceptions do not invalidate the general
character of human life from the cradle to
the grave.
I venture to submit that the lives of nations
follow a similar pattern. Superficially, all
seem to be completely different. Some years
ago, a suggestion was submitted to a certain
television corporation that a series of talks
on Arab history would form an interesting
sequence. The proposal was immediately
vetoed by the director of programmes with
the remark, “What earthly interest could the
history of medieval Arabs have for the
general public today?”
Yet, in fact, the history of the Arab imperial
age—from conquest through commercialism,
to affluence, intellectualism, science and
decadence—is an exact precursor of British
imperial history and lasted almost exactly
the same time.
If British historians, a century ago, had
devoted serious study to the Arab Empire,
they could have foreseen almost everything
that has happened in Britain down to 1976.
XXXIV A variety of falls
It has been shown that, normally, the rise
and fall of great nations are due to internal
reasons alone. Ten generations of human
beings suffice to transform the hardy and
enterprising pioneer into the captious citizen
of the welfare state. But whereas the life
histories of great nations show an unexpected
uniformity, the nature of their falls
depends largely on outside circumstances
and thus shows a high degree of diversity.
The Roman Republic, as we have seen, was
followed by the empire, which became a
super-state, in which all the natives of the
Mediterranean basin, regardless of race,
possessed equal rights. The name of Rome,
originally a city-state, passed from it to an
equalitarian international empire.
This empire broke in half, the western half
being overrun by northern barbarians, the
eastern half forming the East Roman or
Byzantine Empire.
The vast Arab Empire broke up in the
ninth century into many fragments, of which
one former colony, Moslem Spain, ran its
own 250-year course as an independent
empire. The homelands of Syria and Iraq,
however, were conquered by successive
waves of Turks to whom they remained
subject for 1,000 years.
The Mameluke Empire of Egypt and Syria,
on the other hand, was conquered in one
campaign by the Ottomans, the native
population merely suffering a change of
masters.
The Spanish Empire (1500-1750) endured
for the conventional 250 years, terminated
only by the loss of its colonies. The homeland
of Spain fell, indeed, from its high estate of a
The Fate of Empires
22
super-power, but remained as an independent
nation until today.
Romanov Russia (1682-1916) ran the
normal course, but was succeeded by the
Soviet Union.
It is unnecessary to labour the point, which
we may attempt to summarise briefly. Any
regime which attains great wealth and power
seems with remarkable regularity to decay
and fall apart in some ten generations. The
ultimate fate of its component parts,
however, does not depend on its internal
nature, but on the other organisations which
appear at the time of its collapse and succeed
in devouring its heritage. Thus the lives of
great powers are surprisingly uniform, but
the results of their falls are completely
diverse.
XXXV Inadequacy of our historical
studies
In fact, the modern nations of the West
have derived only limited value from their
historical studies, because they have never
made them big enough. For history to have
meaning, as we have already stated, it must
be the history of the human race.
Far from achieving such an ideal, our
historical studies are largely limited to the
history of our own country during the
lifetime of the present nation. Thus the timefactor
is too short to allow the longer
rhythms of the rise and fall of nations even to
be noticed. As the television director
indicated, it never even crosses our minds
that longer periods could be of any interest.
When we read the history of our own
nation, we find the actions of our ancestors
described as glorious, while those of other
peoples are depicted as mean, tyrannical or
cowardly. Thus our history is (intentionally)
not based on facts. We are emotionally
unwilling to accept that our forbears might
have been mean or cowardly.
Alternatively, there are ‘political’ schools of
history, slanted to discredit the actions of
our past leaders, in order to support modern
political movements. In all these cases,
history is not an attempt to ascertain the
truth, but a system of propaganda, devoted
to the furtherance of modern projects, or the
gratification of national vanity.
Men can scarcely be blamed for not
learning from the history they are taught.
There is nothing to learn from it, because it
is not true.
XXXVI Small nations
The word ‘empires’ has been used in this
essay to signify nations which achieve the
status of great powers, or super-powers, in
the jargon of today—nations which have
dominated the international scene for two or
three centuries. At any given time, however,
there are also smaller states which are more
or less self-contained. Do these live the same
‘lives’ as the great nations, and pass through
the same phases?
It seems impossible to generalise on this
issue. In general, decadence is the outcome
of too long a period of wealth and power. If
the small country has not shared in the
wealth and power, it will not share in the
decadence.
XXXVII The emerging pattern
In spite of the endless variety and the
infinite complications of human life, a
general pattern does seem to emerge from
these considerations. It reveals many
successive empires covering some 3,000
years, as having followed similar stages of
The Fate of Empires
23
development and decline, and as having, to a
surprising degree, ‘lived’ lives of very similar
length.
The life-expectation of a great nation, it
appears, commences with a violent, and
usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and
ends in a lowering of moral standards,
cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.
If the present writer were a millionaire, he
would try to establish in some university or
other a department dedicated solely to the
study of the rhythm of the rise and fall of
powerful nations throughout the world.
History goes back only some 3,000 years,
because before that period writing was not
sufficiently widespread to allow of the
survival of detailed records. But within that
period, the number of empires available for
study is very great.
At the commencement of this essay, the
names of eleven such empires were listed,
but these included only the Middle East and
the modern nations of the West. India, China
and Southern America were not included,
because the writer knows nothing about
them. A school founded to study the rise and
fall of empires would probably find at least
twenty-four great powers available for
dissection and analysis.
The task would not be an easy one, if
indeed the net were cast so wide as to cover
virtually all the world’s great nations in 3,000
years. The knowledge of language alone, to
enable detailed investigations to be pursued,
would present a formidable obstacle.
XXXVIII Would it help?
It is pleasing to imagine that, from such
studies, a regular life-pattern of nations
would emerge, including an analysis of the
various changes which ultimately lead to
decline, decadence and collapse. It is
tempting to assume that measures could be
adopted to forestall the disastrous effects of
excessive wealth and power, and thence of
subsequent decadence. Perhaps some means
could be devised to prevent the activist Age
of Conquests and Commerce deteriorating
into the Age of Intellect, producing endless
talking but no action.
It is tempting to think so. Perhaps if the
pattern of the rise and fall of nations were
regularly taught in schools, the general
public would come to realise the truth, and
would support policies to maintain the spirit
of duty and self-sacrifice, and to forestall the
accumulation of excessive wealth by one
nation, leading to the demoralisation of that
nation.
Could not the sense of duty and the
initiative needed to give rise to action be
retained parallel with intellectual development
and the discoveries of natural science?
The answer is doubtful, though we could
but try. The weaknesses of human nature,
however, are so obvious, that we cannot be
too confident of success. Men bursting with
courage, energy and self-confidence cannot
easily be restrained from subduing their
neighbours, and men who see the prospect of
wealth open to them will not readily be
prevented from pursuing it.
Perhaps it is not in the real interest of
humanity that they should be so prevented,
for it is in periods of wealth that art,
architecture, music, science and literature
make the greatest progress.
Moreover, as we have seen where great
empires are concerned, their establishment
may give rise to wars and tragedies, but their
periods of power often bring peace, security
and prosperity to vast areas of territory. Our
The Fate of Empires
24
knowledge and our experience (perhaps our
basic human intellects) are inadequate to
pronounce whether or not the rise and fall of
great nations is the best system for the best
of all possible worlds.
These doubts, however, need not prevent
us from attempting to acquire more
knowledge on the rise and fall of great
powers, or from endeavouring, in the light of
such knowledge, to improve the moral
quality of human life.
Perhaps, in fact, we may reach the
conclusion that the successive rise and fall of
great nations is inevitable and, indeed, a
system divinely ordained. But even this
would be an immense gain. For we should
know where we stand in relation to our
human brothers and sisters. In our present
state of mental chaos on the subject, we
divide ourselves into nations, parties or
communities and fight, hate and vilify one
another over developments which may
perhaps be divinely ordained and which
seem to us, if we take a broader view,
completely uncontrollable and inevitable. If
we could accept these great movements as
beyond our control, there would be no
excuse for our hating one another because of
them.
However varied, confusing and contradictory
the religious history of the world may
appear, the noblest and most spiritual of the
devotees of all religions seem to reach the
conclusion that love is the key to human life.
Any expansion of our knowledge which may
lead to a reduction in our unjustified hates is
therefore surely well worth while.
XXXIX Summary
As numerous points of interest have arisen
in the course of this essay, I close with a brief
summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.
(a) We do not learn from history because
our studies are brief and prejudiced.
(b) In a surprising manner, 250 years
emerges as the average length of national
greatness.
(c) This average has not varied for 3,000
years. Does it represent ten generations?
(d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence.
(e) Decadence is marked by:
Defensiveness
Pessimism
Materialism
Frivolity
An influx of foreigners
The Welfare State
A weakening of religion.
(f) Decadence is due to:
Too long a period of wealth and power
Selfishness
Love of money
The loss of a sense of duty.
(g) The life histories of great states are
amazingly similar, and are due to internal
factors.
(h) Their falls are diverse, because they are
largely the result of external causes.
(i) History should be taught as the history
of the human race, though of course with
emphasis on the history of the student’s own
country.
[The Heartland Plan and the same section in The Albany Plan Re-Visited offer solution to some of these problems. Ex. the article creating a federal university from which the federal government must get its statistics and facts solves some of the problems listed above as does the Article on federal citizenship. Another example is the section that requires the death penalty for official corruption.
Along with this essay, should be read Chittum’s Civil War Two and Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed.]
Justplainbill's Weblog 
TWSJ Investigative Report: Google [16/11/2019]
How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results
The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see
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Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.
They are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of commerce.
Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web for useful information than humans. Google executives have said repeatedly—in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional testimony—that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous, unsullied by human biases or business considerations.
The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system.
But that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes. Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation, the Journal found.
Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.
More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:
• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.
• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.
• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics.
• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.
• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.
THE JOURNAL’S FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power—that the company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users. Regulators’ areas of concern include anticompetitive practices, political bias and online misinformation.
Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit. Google is now the most highly trafficked website in the world, surpassing 90% of the market share for all search engines. The market capitalization of its parent, Alphabet Inc., is more than $900 billion.
Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithms in 2018, up from more than 2,400 in 2017 and from about 500 in 2010, according to Google and a person familiar with the matter. Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.
A Google spokeswoman disputed the Journal’s conclusions, saying, “We do today what we have done all along, provide relevant results from the most reliable sources available.”
Lara Levin, the spokeswoman, said the company is transparent in its guidelines for evaluators and in what it designs the algorithms to do.
AS PART OF ITS EXAMINATION, the Journal tested Google’s search results over several weeks this summer and compared them with results from two competing search engines, Microsoft Corp. ’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused company that builds its results from syndicated feeds from other companies, including Verizon Communications Inc. ’s Yahoo search engine.
The testing showed wide discrepancies in how Google handled auto-complete queries and some of what Google calls organic search results—the list of websites that Google says are algorithmically sorted by relevance in response to a user’s query. (Read about the methodology for the Journal’s analysis.)
Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on specific results of the Journal’s testing. In general, she said, “Our systems aim to provide relevant results from authoritative sources,” adding that organic search results alone “are not representative of the information made accessible via search.”
The Journal tested the auto-complete feature, which Google says draws from its vast database of search information to predict what a user intends to type, as well as data such as a user’s location and search history. The testing showed the extent to which Google doesn’t offer certain suggestions compared with other search engines.
Typing “Joe Biden is” or “Donald Trump is” in auto-complete, Google offered predicted language that was more innocuous than the other search engines. Similar differences were shown for other presidential candidates tested by the Journal.
The Journal also tested several search terms in auto-complete such as “immigrants are” and “abortion is.” Google’s predicted searches were less inflammatory than those of the other engines.
Bernie Sanders is
Boeing is
Democratic debate
Donald Trump is
Elizabeth Warren is
Guns are
Heroin dosage
Hobbs and Shaw
How do I kill myself
Ilhan Omar is
Immigrants are
Joe Biden is
Kamala Harris is
New England Patriots
Recession
Where do I buy heroin
View Interactive
Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s chief executive, said that for certain words or phrases entered into the search box, such as ones that might be offensive, DuckDuckGo has decided to block all of its auto-complete suggestions, which it licenses from Yahoo. He said that type of block wasn’t triggered in the Journal’s searches for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo operator Verizon Media said, “We are committed to delivering a safe and trustworthy search experience to our users and partners, and we work diligently to ensure that search suggestions within Yahoo Search reflect that commitment.”
Said a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We work to ensure that our search results are as relevant, balanced, and trustworthy as possible, and in general, our rule is to minimize interference with the normal algorithmic operation.”
In other areas of the Journal analysis, Google’s results in organic search and news for a number of hot-button terms and politicians’ names showed prominent representation of both conservative and liberal news outlets.
ALGORITHMS ARE effectively recipes in code form, providing step-by-step instructions for how computers should solve certain problems. They drive not just the internet, but the apps that populate phones and tablets.
Algorithms determine which friends show up in a Facebook user’s news feed, which Twitter posts are most likely to go viral and how much an Uber ride should cost during rush hour as opposed to the middle of the night. They are used by banks to screen loan applications, businesses to look for the best job applicants and insurers to determine a person’s expected lifespan.
In the beginning, their power was rarely questioned. At Google in particular, its innovative algorithms ranked web content in a way that was groundbreaking, and hugely lucrative. The company aimed to make the web useful while relying on the assumption that code alone could do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to rank information.
But bad actors are increasingly trying to manipulate search results, businesses are trying to game the system and misinformation is rampant across tech platforms. Google found itself facing a version of the pressures on Facebook, which long said it was just connecting people but has been forced to more aggressively police content on its platform.
A 2016 internal investigation at Google showed between a 10th of a percent and a quarter of a percent of search queries were returning misinformation of some kind, according to one Google executive who works on search. It was a small number percentage-wise, but given the huge volume of Google searches it would amount to nearly two billion searches a year.
By comparison, Facebook faced congressional scrutiny for Russian misinformation that was viewed by 126 million users.
Google’s Ms. Levin said the number includes not just misinformation but also a “wide range of other content defined as lowest quality.” She disputed the Journal’s estimate of the number of searches that were affected. The company doesn’t disclose metrics on Google searches.
Google assembled a small SWAT team to work on the problem that became known internally as “Project Owl.” Borrowing from the strategy used earlier to fight spam, engineers worked to emphasize factors on a page that are proxies for “authoritativeness,” effectively pushing down pages that don’t display those attributes.
Other tech platforms, including Facebook, have taken a more aggressive approach, manually removing problem content and devising rules around what it defines as misinformation. Google, for its part, said its role “indexing” content versus “hosting” content, as Facebook does, means it shouldn’t take a more active role.
One Google search executive described the problem of defining misinformation as incredibly hard, and said the company didn’t want to go down the path of figuring it out.
Around the time Google started addressing issues such as misinformation, it started fielding even more complaints, to the point where human interference became more routine, according to people familiar with the matter, putting it in the position of arbitrating some of society’s most complicated issues. Some changes to search results might be considered reasonable—boosting trusted websites like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, for example—but Google has made little disclosure about when changes are made, or why.
Businesses, lawmakers and advertisers are worried about fairness and competition within the markets where Google is a leading player, and as a result its operations are coming under heavy scrutiny.
The U.S. Justice Department earlier this year opened an antitrust probe, in which Google’s search policies and practices are expected to be areas of focus. Google executives have twice been called to testify before Congress in the past year over concerns about political bias. In the European Union, Google has been fined more than $9 billion in the past three years for anticompetitive practices, including allegedly using its search engine to favor its own products.
In response, Google has said it faces tough competition in a dynamic tech sector, and that its behavior is aimed at helping create choice for consumers, not hurting rivals. The company is currently appealing the decisions against it in the EU, and it has denied claims of political bias.
GOOGLE RARELY RELEASES detailed information on algorithm changes, and its moves have bedeviled companies and interest groups, who feel they are operating at the tech giant’s whim.
In one change hotly contested within Google, engineers opted to tilt results to favor prominent businesses over smaller ones, based on the argument that customers were more likely to get what they wanted at larger outlets. One effect of the change was a boost to Amazon’s products, even if the items had been discontinued, according to people familiar with the matter.
The issue came up repeatedly over the years at meetings in which Google search executives discuss algorithm changes. Each time, they chose not to reverse the change, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Google engineers said it is widely acknowledged within the company that search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another, often with considerable impact on the businesses involved.
Ms. Levin said there is no guidance in Google’s rater guidelines that suggest big sites are inherently more authoritative than small sites. “It’s inaccurate to suggest we did not address issues like discontinued products appearing high up in results,” she added.
Many of the changes within Google have coincided with its gradual evolution from a company with an engineering-focused, almost academic culture into an advertising behemoth and one of the most profitable companies in the world. Advertising revenue—which includes ads on search as well as on other products such as maps and YouTube—was $116.3 billion last year.
Some very big advertisers received direct advice on how to improve their organic search results, a perk not available to businesses with no contacts at Google, according to people familiar with the matter. In some cases, that help included sending in search engineers to explain a problem, they said.
“If they have an [algorithm] update, our teams may get on the phone with them and they will go through it,” said Jeremy Cornfeldt, the chief executive of the Americas of Dentsu Inc.’s iProspect, which Mr. Cornfeldt said is one of Google’s largest advertising agency clients. He said the agency doesn’t get information Google wouldn’t share publicly. Among others it can disclose, iProspect represents Levi Strauss & Co., Alcon Inc. and Wolverine World Wide Inc.
One former executive at a Fortune 500 company that received such advice said Google frequently adjusts how it crawls the web and ranks pages to deal with specific big websites.
Google updates its index of some sites such as Facebook and Amazon more frequently, a move that helps them appear more often in search results, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“There’s this idea that the search algorithm is all neutral and goes out and combs the web and comes back and shows what it found, and that’s total BS,” the former executive said. “Google deals with special cases all the time.”
Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the search team’s practice is to not provide specialized guidance to website owners. She also said that faster indexing of a site isn’t a guarantee that it will rank higher. “We prioritize issues based on impact, not any commercial relationships,” she said.
Alphabet’s net income
$30
billion
20
10
0
2005
’10
’15
Note: 2017 figure reflects a one-time charge of $9.9 billion related to new U.S. tax law. Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.
Source: FactSet
Online marketplace eBay had long relied on Google for as much as a third of its internet traffic. In 2014, traffic suddenly plummeted—contributing to a $200 million hit in its revenue guidance for that year.
Google told the company it had made a decision to lower the ranking of a large number of eBay pages that were a big source of traffic.
EBay executives debated pulling their quarterly advertising spending of around $30 million from Google to protest, but ultimately decided to step up lobbying pressure on Google, with employees and executives calling and meeting with search engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. A similar episode had hit traffic several years earlier, and eBay had marshaled its lobbying might to persuade Google to give it advice about how to fix the problem, even relying on a former Google staffer who was then employed at eBay to work his contacts, according to one of those people.
This time, Google ultimately agreed to improve the ranking of a number of pages it had demoted while eBay completed a broader revision of its website to make the pages more “useful and relevant,” the people said. The revision was arduous and costly to complete, one of the people said, adding that eBay was later hit by other downrankings that Google didn’t help with.
“We’ve experienced significant and consistent drops in Google SEO for many years, which has been disproportionally detrimental to those small businesses that we support,” an eBay spokesman said. SEO, or search-engine optimization, is the practice of trying to generate more search-engine traffic for a website.
Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on eBay.
Companies without eBay’s clout had different experiences.
Dan Baxter can remember the exact moment his website, DealCatcher, was caught in a Google algorithm change. It was 6 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 17. Mr. Baxter, who founded the Wilmington, Del., coupon website 20 years ago, got a call from one of his 12 employees the next morning.
“Have you looked at our traffic?” the worker asked, frantically, Mr. Baxter recalled. It was suddenly down 93% for no apparent reason. That Saturday, DealCatcher saw about 31,000 visitors from Google. Now it was posting about 2,400. It had disappeared almost entirely on Google search.
Mr. Baxter said he didn’t know whom to contact at Google, so he hired a consultant to help him identify what might have happened. The expert reached out directly to a contact at Google but never heard back. Mr. Baxter tried posting to a YouTube forum hosted by a Google “webmaster” to ask if it might have been a technical problem, but the webmaster seemed to shoot down that idea.
One month to the day after his traffic disappeared, it inexplicably came back, and he still doesn’t know why.
“You’re kind of just left in the dark, and that’s the scary part of the whole thing,” said Mr. Baxter.
Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on DealCatcher.
(The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which has complained publicly about Google’s moves to play down news sites that charge for subscriptions. Google ended the policy after intensive lobbying by News Corp and other paywalled publishers. More recently, News Corp has called for an “algorithm review board” to oversee Google, Facebook and other tech giants. News Corp has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook, and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services. Google’s Ms. Levin and News Corp declined to comment.)
GOOGLE IN RECENT months has made additional efforts to clarify how its services operate by updating general information on its site. At the end of October it posted a new video titled “How Google Search Works.”
Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said Google has poorly defined how often or when it intervenes on search results. The company’s argument that it can’t reveal those details because it is fighting spam “seems nuts,” said Mr. Zittrain.
“That argument may have made sense 10 or 15 years ago but not anymore,” he said. “That’s called ‘security through obscurity,’ ” a reference to the now-unfashionable engineering idea that systems can be made more secure by restricting information about how they operate.
Google’s Ms. Levin said “extreme transparency has historically proven to empower bad actors in a way that hurts our users and website owners who play by the rules.”
“Building a service like this means making tens of thousands of really, really complicated human decisions, and that’s not what people think,” said John Bowers, a research associate at the Berkman Klein Center.
On one extreme, those decisions at Google are made by the world’s most accomplished and highest-paid engineers, whose job is to turn the dials within millions of lines of complex code. On the other is an army of more than 10,000 contract workers, who work from home and get paid by the hour to evaluate search results.
The rankings supplied by the contractors, who work from a Google manual that runs to hundreds of pages, can indirectly move a site higher or lower in results, according to people familiar with the matter. And their collective responses are measured by Google executives and used to affect the search algorithms.
Mixed Results
Google’s results page has become a complex mix of search results, advertisements and featured content, not always distinguishable by the user. While these features are all driven by algorithms, Google has different policies and attitudes toward changing the results shown in each of the additional features. Featured snippets and knowledge panels are two common features.
Other features
Organic search results
Featured snippet
Knowledge panel
Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.
Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.
search term
Organic search results
Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.
Other features
Organic search results
Knowledge panel
Featured snippet
Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.
Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.
search term
Organic search results
Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.
Other features
Organic search results
Featured snippet
Knowledge panel
Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.
Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.
search term
Organic search results
Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.
Other features
Organic search results
Featured snippet
Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.
search term
Organic
search results
Knowledge panel
Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.
Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.
One of those evaluators was Zack Langley, now a 27-year-old logistics manager at a tour company in New Orleans. Mr. Langley got a one-year contract in the spring of 2016 evaluating Google’s search results through Lionbridge Technologies Inc., one of several companies Google and other tech platforms use for contract work.
During his time as a contractor, Mr. Langley said he never had any contact with anyone at Google, nor was he told what his results would be used for. Like all of Google’s evaluators, he signed a nondisclosure agreement. He made $13.50 an hour and worked up to 20 hours a week from home.
Sometimes working in his pajamas, Mr. Langley was given hundreds of real search results and told to use his judgment to rate them according to quality, reputation and usefulness, among other factors.
At one point, Mr. Langley said he was unhappy with the search results for “best way to kill myself,” which were turning up links that were like “how-to” manuals. He said he down-ranked all the other results for suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was the No. 1 result.
Soon after, Mr. Langley said, Google sent a note through Lionbridge saying the hotline should be ranked as the top result across all searches related to suicide, so that the collective rankings of the evaluators would adjust the algorithms to deliver that result. He said he never learned if his actions had anything to do with the change.
Mr. Langley said it seemed like Google wanted him to change content on search so Google would have what he called plausible deniability about making those decisions. He said contractors would get notes from Lionbridge that he believed came from Google telling them the “correct” results on other searches.
He said that in late 2016, as the election approached, Google officials got more involved in dictating the best results, although not necessarily on issues related to the campaign. “They used to have a hands-off approach, and then it seemed to change,” he said.
Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the company “long ago evolved our approach to collecting feedback on these types of queries, which help us develop algorithmic solutions and features in this area.” She added that, “we provide updates to our rater guidelines to ensure all raters are following the same general framework.”
Lionbridge didn’t reply to requests for comment.
AT GOOGLE, EMPLOYEES routinely use the company’s internal message boards as well as a form called “go/bad” to push for changes in specific search results. (Go/bad is a reporting system meant to allow Google staff to point out problematic search results.)
One of the first hot-button issues surfaced in 2015, according to people familiar with the matter, when some employees complained that a search for “how do vaccines cause autism” delivered misinformation through sites that oppose vaccinations.
At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should “let the algorithms decide” what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.com—which states on its home page in large black letters, “They f—ing don’t.” (The phrase has become a meme within Google.)
Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.
In the fall of 2018, the conservative news site Breitbart News Network posted a leaked video of Google executives, including Mr. Brin and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, upset and addressing staffers following President Trump’s election two years earlier. A group of Google employees noticed the video was appearing on the 12th page of search results when Googling “leaked Google video Trump,” which made it seem like Google was burying it. They complained on one of the company’s internal message boards, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after, the leaked video began appearing higher in search results.
“When we receive reports of our product not behaving as people might expect, we investigate to see if there’s any useful insight to inform future improvements,” said Ms. Levin.
FROM GOOGLE’S FOUNDING, Messrs. Page and Brin knew that ranking webpages was a matter of opinion. “The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the [readers’] interests, knowledge and attitudes,” they wrote in their 1998 paper introducing the PageRank algorithm, the founding system that launched the search engine.
PageRank, they wrote, would measure the level of human interest and attention, but it would do so “objectively and mechanically.” They contended that the system would mathematically measure the relevance of a site by the number of times other relevant sites linked to it on the web.
Today, PageRank has been updated and subsumed into more than 200 different algorithms, attuned to hundreds of signals, now used by Google. (The company replaced PageRank in 2005 with a newer version that could better keep up with the vast traffic that the site was attracting. Internally, it was called “PageRankNG,” ostensibly named for “next generation,” according to people familiar with the matter. In public, the company still points to PageRank—and on its website links to the original algorithm published by Messrs. Page and Brin—in explaining how search works. “The original insight and notion of using link patterns is something that we still use in our systems,” said Ms. Levin.)
By the early 2000s, spammers were overwhelming Google’s algorithms with tactics that made their sites appear more popular than they were, skewing search results. Messrs. Page and Brin disagreed over how to tackle the problem.
Mr. Brin argued against human intervention, contending that Google should deliver the most accurate results as delivered by the algorithms, and that the algorithms should be tweaked only in the most extreme cases. Mr. Page countered that the user experience was getting damaged when users encountered spam rather than useful results, according to people familiar with the matter.
Google already had been taking what the company calls “manual actions” against specific websites that were abusing the algorithm. In that process, Google engineers demote a website’s ranking by changing its specific “weighting.” For example, if a website is artificially boosted by paying other websites to link to it, a behavior that Google frowns upon, Google engineers could turn down the dial on that specific weighting. The company could also blacklist a website, or remove it altogether.
Mr. Brin still opposed making large-scale efforts to fight spam, because it involved more human intervention. Mr. Brin, whose parents were Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union, even personally decided to allow anti-Semitic sites that were in the results for the query “Jew,” according to people familiar with the decision. Google posted a disclaimer with results for that query saying, “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”
Finally, in 2004, in the bathroom one day at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Mr. Page approached Ben Gomes, one of Google’s early search executives, to express support for his efforts fighting spam. “Just do what you need to do,” said Mr. Page, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “Sergey is going to ruin this f—ing company.”
Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said Messrs. Page, Brin and Gomes declined to comment.
After that, the company revised its algorithms to fight spam and loosened rules for manual interventions, according to people familiar with the matter.
Google has guidelines for changing its ranking algorithms, a grueling process called the “launch committee.” Google executives have pointed to this process in a general way in congressional testimony when asked about algorithm changes.
The process is like defending a thesis, and the meetings can be contentious, according to people familiar with them.
In part because the process is laborious, some engineers aim to avoid it if they can, one of these people said, and small changes can sometimes get pushed through without the committee’s approval. Mr. Gomes is on the committee that decides whether to approve the changes, and other senior officials sometimes attend as well.
Google’s Ms. Levin said not every algorithm change is discussed in a meeting, but “there are other processes for reviewing more straightforward launches at different levels of the organization,” such as an email review. Those reviews still involve members of the launch committee, she said.
Today, Google discloses only a few of the factors being measured by its algorithms. Known ones include “freshness,” which gives preference to recently created content for searches relating to things such as breaking news or a sports event. Another is where a user is located—if a user searches for “zoo,” Google engineers want the algorithms to provide the best zoo in the user’s area. Language signals—how meanings change when words are used together, such as April and fools—are among the most important, as they help determine what a user is actually asking for.
Other important signals have included the length of time users would stay on pages they clicked on before clicking back to Google, according to a former Google employee. Long stays would boost a page’s ranking. Quick bounce backs, indicating a site wasn’t relevant, would severely hurt a ranking, the former employee said.
Over the years, Google’s database recording this user activity has become a competitive advantage, helping cement its position in the search market. Other search engines don’t have the vast quantity of data that is available to Google, search’s market-leader.
That makes the impact of its operating decisions immense. When Pinterest Inc. filed to go public earlier this year, it said that “search engines, such as Google, may modify their algorithms and policies or enforce those policies in ways that are detrimental to us.” It added: “Our ability to appeal these actions is limited.” A spokeswoman for Pinterest declined to comment.
Search-engine optimization consultants have proliferated to try to decipher Google’s signals on behalf of large and small businesses. But even those experts said the algorithms remain borderline indecipherable. “It’s black magic,” said Glenn Gabe, an SEO expert who has spent years analyzing Google’s algorithms and tried to help DealCatcher find a solution to its drop in traffic earlier this year.
ALONG WITH ADVERTISEMENTS, Google’s own features now take up large amounts of space on the first page of results—with few obvious distinctions for users. These include news headlines and videos across the top, information panels along the side and “People also ask” boxes highlighting related questions.
Google engineers view the features as separate products from Google search, and there is less resistance to manually changing their content in response to outside requests, according to people familiar with the matter.
These features have become more prominent as Google attempts to keep users on its results page, where ads are placed, instead of losing the users as they click through to other sites. In September, about 55% of Google searches on mobile were “no-click” searches, according to research firm Jumpshot, meaning users never left the results page.
Two typical features on the results page—knowledge panels, which are collections of relevant information about people, events or other things; and featured snippets, which are highlighted results that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for—are areas where Google engineers make changes to fix results, the Journal found.
Curated Features
Google has looser policies about making adjustments to these features than organic search results. The features include Google News and People also ask.
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Top stories
News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.
People also ask
A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.
Organic
search results
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Top stories
News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.
People also ask
A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.
Organic
search results
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Top stories
News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.
People also ask
A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.
Organic
search results
Other features
Organic search results
Top stories
News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.
search term
Organic
search
results
People also ask
A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.
In April, the conservative Heritage Foundation called Google to complain that a coming movie called “Unplanned” had been labeled in a knowledge panel as “propaganda,” according to a person familiar with the matter. The film is about a former Planned Parenthood director who had a change of heart and became pro-life.
After the Heritage Foundation complained to a contact at Google, the company apologized and removed “propaganda” from the description, that person said.
Google’s Ms. Levin said the change “was not the result of pressure from an outside group, it was a violation of the feature’s policy.”
On the auto-complete feature, Google reached a confidential settlement in France in 2012 with several outside groups that had complained it was anti-Semitic that Google was suggesting the French word for “Jew” when searchers typed in the name of several prominent politicians. Google agreed to “algorithmically mitigate” such suggestions as part of a pact that barred the parties from disclosing its terms, according to people familiar with the matter.
In recent years, Google changed its auto-complete algorithms to remove “sensitive and disparaging remarks.” The policy, now detailed on its website, says that Google doesn’t allow predictions that may be related to “harassment, bullying, threats, inappropriate sexualization, or predictions that expose private or sensitive information.”
GOOGLE HAS BECOME more open about its moderation of auto-complete but still doesn’t disclose its use of blacklists. Kevin Gibbs, who created auto-complete in 2004 when he was a Google engineer, originally developed the list of terms that wouldn’t be suggested, even if they were the most popular queries that independent algorithms would normally supply.
For example, if a user searched “Britney Spears”—a popular search on Google at the time—Mr. Gibbs didn’t want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer’s name. The unfiltered results were “kind of horrible,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview.
He said deciding what should and shouldn’t be on the list was challenging. “It was uncomfortable, and I felt a lot of pressure,” said Mr. Gibbs, who worked on auto-complete for about a year, and left the company in 2012. “I wanted to make sure it represented the world fairly and didn’t leave out any groups.”
Google still maintains lists of phrases and terms that are manually blacklisted from auto-complete, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company internally has a “clearly articulated set of policies” about what terms or phrases might be blacklisted in auto-complete, and that it follows those rules, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Blacklists also affect the results in organic search and Google News, as well as other search products, such as Web answers and knowledge panels, according to people familiar with the matter.
Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.
Ms. Levin said those statements were related to blacklists targeting political groups, which she said the company doesn’t keep.
Google’s first blacklists date to the early 2000s, when the company made a list of spam sites that it removed from its index, one of those people said. This means the sites wouldn’t appear in search results.
Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.
The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an anti-misinformation blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products. The document says engineers should focus on “a publisher misrepresenting their ownership or web properties” and having “deceptive content”—that is, sites that actively aim to mislead—as opposed to those that have inaccurate content.
“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product sites,” the document states.
Ms. Levin said Google does “not manually determine the order of any search result.” She said sites that don’t adhere to Google News “inclusion policies” are “not eligible to appear on news surfaces or in information boxes in Search.”
SOME INDIVIDUALS and companies said changes made by the company seem ad hoc, or inconsistent. People familiar with the matter said Google increasingly will make manual or algorithmic changes that aren’t acknowledged publicly in order to maintain that it isn’t affected by outside pressure.
“It’s very convenient for us to say that the algorithms make all the decisions,” said one former Google executive.
In March 2017, Google updated the guidelines it gives contractors who evaluate search results, instructing them for the first time to give low-quality ratings to sites “created with the sole purpose of promoting hate or violence against a group of people”—something that would help adjust Google algorithms to lower those sites in search.
The next year, the company broadened the guidance to any pages that promote such hate or violence, even if it isn’t the page’s sole purpose and even if it is “expressed in polite or even academic-sounding language.”
Google has resisted entirely removing some content that outsiders complained should be blocked. In May 2018, Ignacio Wenley Palacios, a Spain-based lawyer working for the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that funds litigation to protect Jewish people, asked Google to remove an anti-Semitic article lauding a German Holocaust denier posted on a Spanish-language neo-Nazi blog.
The company declined. In an email to Mr. Wenley Palacios, lawyers for Google contended that “while such content is detestable” it isn’t “manifestly illegal” in Spain.
Mr. Wenley Palacios then filed a lawsuit, but in the spring of this year, before the suit could be heard, he said, Google lawyers told him the company was changing its policy on such removals in Spain.
According to Mr. Wenley Palacios, the lawyers said the firm would now remove from searches conducted in Spain any links to Holocaust denial and other content that could hurt vulnerable minorities, once they are pointed out to the company. The results would still be accessible outside of Spain. He said both sides agreed to dismiss the case.
Google’s Ms. Levin described the action as a “legal removal” in accordance with local law. Holocaust denial isn’t illegal in Spain, but if it is coupled with an intent to spread hate, it can fall under Spanish criminal law banning certain forms of hate speech.
“Google used to say, ‘We don’t approve of the content, but that’s what it is,’ ” Mr. Wenley Palacios said. “That has changed dramatically.”
Business Model
Google’s search results page has changed over the years, becoming much more ad-heavy.
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Ad
Ads
Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.
Ad
Vertical search results
Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.
Organic search results
As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Ad
Ads
Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.
Ad
Vertical search results
Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.
Organic search results
As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.
Other features
Organic search results
search term
Ad
Ads
Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.
Ad
Vertical search results
Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.
Organic search results
As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.
Other features
Organic search results
Ads
Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.
search term
Ad
Ad
Vertical
search results
Organic
search results
Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.
As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.
Health policy consultant Greg Williams said he helped lead a campaign to push Google to make changes that would stifle misleading results for queries such as “rehab.”
At the time, in 2017, addiction centers with spotty records were constantly showing up in search results, typically the first place family members and addicts go in search of help.
Google routed Diane Hentges several times over the last year to call centers as she desperately researched drug addiction treatment centers for her 22-year-old son, she said.
Each time she called one of the facilities listed on Google, a customer-service representative would ask for her financial information, but the representatives weren’t seemingly attached to any legitimate company.
“If you look at a place on Google, it sends you straight to a call center,” Ms. Hentges said, adding that parents who are struggling with a child with addiction “will do anything to get our child healthy. We’ll believe anything.”
After intense lobbying by Mr. Williams and others, Google changed its ad policy around such queries. But addiction industry officials also noticed a significant change to Google search results. Many searches for “rehab” or related terms began returning the website for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the national help hotline run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the top result.
A spokesman for SAMHSA said the agency had a partnership with Google.
Google never acknowledged the change. Ms. Levin said that “resources are not listed because of any type of partnership” and that “we have algorithmic solutions designed to prioritize authoritative resources (including official hotlines) in our results for queries like these as well as for suicide and self-harm queries.”
Google’s search algorithms have been a major focus of Hollywood in its effort to fight pirated TV shows and movies.
Alphabet’s revenue, by type
Advertising
Other
$150
billion
100
50
0
2005
’10
’15
Note: Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.
Source: the company
Studios “saw this as the potential death knell of their business,” said Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America from 2004 to 2010. The association has been a public critic of Google. “A hundred million dollars to market a major movie could be thrown away if someone could stream it illegally online.”
Google received a record 1.6 million requests to remove web pages for copyright issues last year, according to the company’s published Transparency Report and a Journal analysis. Those requests pertained to more than 740 million pages, about 12 times the number of web pages it was asked to take down in 2012.
A decade ago, in concession to the industry, Google removed “download” from its auto-complete suggestions after the name of a movie or TV show, so that at least it wouldn’t be encouraging searches for pirated content.
In 2012, it applied a filter to search results that would lower the ranking of sites that received a large number of piracy complaints under U.S. copyright law. That effectively pushed many pirate sites off the front page of results for general searches for movies or music, although it still showed them when a user specifically typed in the pirate site names.
In recent months the industry has gotten more cooperation from Google on piracy in search results than at any point in the organization’s history, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Google is under great cosmic pressure, as is Facebook,” Mr. Glickman said. “These are companies that are in danger of being federally regulated to an extent that they never anticipated.”
Mr. Pichai, who became CEO of Google in 2015, is more willing to entertain complaints about the search results from outside parties than Messrs. Page and Brin, the co-founders, according to people familiar with his leadership.
Google’s Ms. Levin said Mr. Pichai’s “style of engaging and listening to feedback has not shifted. He has always been very open to feedback.”
CRITICISM ALLEGING political bias in Google’s search results has sharpened since the 2016 election.
Interest groups from the right and left have besieged Google with questions about content displayed in search results and about why the company’s algorithms returned certain information over others.
Google appointed an executive in Washington, Max Pappas, to handle complaints from conservative groups, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Pappas works with Google engineers on changes to search when conservative viewpoints aren’t being represented fairly, according to interest groups interviewed by the Journal, although that is just one part of his job.
“Conservatives need people they can go to at these companies,” said Dan Gainor, an executive at the conservative Media Research Center, which has complained about various issues to Google.
Google also appointed at least one other executive in Washington, Chanelle Hardy, to work with outside liberal groups, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Levin said both positions have existed for many years. She said in general Google believes it’s “the responsible thing to do” to understand feedback from the groups and said Google’s algorithms and policies don’t attempt to make any judgment based on the political leanings of a website.
Mr. Pappas declined to comment, and Ms. Hardy didn’t reply to a request for comment.
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Over the past year, abortion-rights groups have complained about search results that turned up the websites of what are known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” organizations that counsel women against having abortions, according to people familiar with the matter.
One of the complaining organizations was Naral Pro-Choice America, which tracks the activities of anti-abortion groups through its opposition research department, said spokeswoman Kristin Ford.
Naral complained to Google and other tech platforms that some of the ads, posts and search results from crisis pregnancy centers are misleading and deceptive, she said. Some of the organizations claimed to offer abortions and then counseled women against it. “They do not disclose what their agenda is,” Ms. Ford said.
In June, Google updated its advertising policies related to abortion, saying that advertisers must state whether they provide abortions or not, according to its website. Ms. Ford said Naral wasn’t told in advance of the policy change.
Ms. Levin said Google didn’t implement any changes with regard to how crisis pregnancy centers rank for abortion queries.
The Journal tested the term “abortion” in organic search results over 17 days in July and August. Thirty-nine percent of all results on the first page had the hostname http://www.plannedparenthood.org, the site of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nonprofit, abortion-rights organization.
By comparison, 14% of Bing’s first page of search results and 16% of DuckDuckGo’s first page of results were from Planned Parenthood.
Ms. Levin said Google doesn’t have any particular ranking implementations aimed at promoting Planned Parenthood.
View Interactive
Bernie Sanders
Boeing
Democratic debate
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The practice of creating blacklists for certain types of sites or searches has fueled cries of political bias from some Google engineers and right-wing publications that said they have viewed portions of the blacklists. Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In one partial blacklist reviewed by the Journal, some conservative and right-wing websites, including The Gateway Pundit and The United West, were included on a list of hundreds of websites that wouldn’t appear in news or featured products, although they could appear in organic search results.
Google has said repeatedly it doesn’t make decisions based on politics, and current and former employees told the Journal they haven’t seen evidence of political bias. And yet, they said, Google’s shifting policies on interference—and its lack of transparency about them—inevitably force employees to become arbiters of what is acceptable, a dilemma that opens the door to charges of bias or favoritism.
Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.
DEMANDS FROM GOVERNMENTS for changes have grown rapidly since 2016.
From 2010 to 2018, Google fielded such requests from countries including the U.S. to remove 685,000 links from what Google calls web search. The requests came from courts or other authorities that said the links broke local laws or should be removed for other reasons.
Nearly 78% of those removal requests have been since the beginning of 2016, according to reports that Google publishes on its website. Google’s ultimate actions on those requests weren’t disclosed.
Russia has been by far the most prolific, demanding the removal of about 255,000 links from search last year, three-quarters of all government requests for removal from Google search in that period, the data show. Nearly all of the country’s requests came under an information-security law Russia put into effect in late 2017, according to a Journal examination of disclosures in a database run by the Berkman Klein Center.
Google said the Russian law doesn’t allow it to disclose which URLs were requested to be removed. A person familiar with the matter said the removal demands are for content ruled illegal in Russia for a variety of reasons, such as for promoting drug use or encouraging suicide.
Requests can include demands to remove links to information the government defines as extremist, which can be used to target political opposition, the person said.
Google, whose staff reviews the requests, at times declines those that appear focused on political opposition, the person said, adding that in those cases, it tries not to draw attention to its decisions to avoid provoking Russian regulators.
The approach has led to stiff internal debate. On one side, some Google employees say that the company shouldn’t cooperate at all with takedown requests from countries such as Russia or Turkey. Others say it is important to follow the laws of countries where they are based.
“There is a real question internally about whether a private company should be making these calls,” the person said.
Google’s Ms. Levin said, “Maximizing access to information has always been a core principle of Search, and that hasn’t changed.”
Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said. A few years ago, the company dismantled a global team focused on free-speech issues that, among other things, publicized the company’s legal battles to fight changes to search results, in part because Google had lost several of those battles in court, according to a person familiar with the change.
“Free expression was no longer a winner,” the person said.
—Keach Hagey, Andrea Fuller, Rob Copeland, Jim Oberman and Mythili Sankara contributed to this article.
—Illustrations by Martin Tognola
—Graphics by Elliot Bentley and Kara Dapena
Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com