Scandanavia?

No, wait.

Canadia.

Mr Ferguson might have added two other factors, which are exclusive to the twenty-first century.

According to a Pentagon report commissioned by influential Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall and leaked by the London Observer, "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies."

"Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network. "

Western energy supplies are already dwindling as China and India continue to grow their oil-importing economies just as existing sources of oil appear to be in decline. As General Norman Schwarzkopf testified to Congress in 1990: "Middle East oil is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry."

Two good reasons to dramatically reduce our dependance on fossil fuels now. Otherwise, there's not much of a future for our grandchildren.

On my blog I linked this post and mused over the ingredients of the 20th century's 100 million nonmilitary deaths under Communism. I identified two: "brutal and grand-scale slavery" (Pol Pot and Mao are key examples) and totalitarianism itself ("Under Communism, the citizen is disposable, having no value outside of his or her conformity to the State's preconditions for class identity").

On the original topic, Ferguson doesn't do much to explain the economic volatility in the Middle East. It is worth noting that Middle East countries tend to rank poorly in the Index of Economic Freedom The only ones scoring "mostly free" - 2.00 (best) to 2.99 (worst) - are

Bahrain (2.23), Israel (2.36), Jordan (2.80), Kuwait (2.74), Saudi Arabia (2.84), and UAE (2.93). For comparison, economically quagmired France is a 2.51.

If you want to find poverty and economic unfreedom, sub-Saharan Africa is a great place to look. Ethnic disintegration seems to be the rule of the day, too. But no empires, in ascent or in decline.