Imperial endurance is ultimately decided by superior firepower, not culture

Evidence

If empires were permanent, everyone would be speaking Persian now, and I would be writing in my mother tongue. I write, instead, in the mother tongue of somebody else whose ancestors had guns more powerful than Cyrus the Great could ever have imagined. Thus (fortunately) I had to learn another imperial language. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 329

Categorization

• CANDY: A compact, quotable counterfactual — Persian as the world’s imperial lingua franca — easy conversational material.