The next century will be shaped by resistance, not inevitability |
Across six centuries, power has claimed inevitability while resistance has redrawn the possible. As the world enters a century defined by climate, inequality and democratic strain, the forces that push back from below may once again shape the future.
History does not move in straight lines. It churns, convulses, recoils, and reimagines itself through an ongoing struggle between systems of concentrated power and the diffuse, persistent, often underestimated forces of grassroots resistance. Across the last half-millennium, from 1525 to 2025, the central story is not simply the rise of capitalism, empire, or technology but the way each dominant order has been challenged, reshaped, and sometimes overturned by those it sought to control. When this long arc is extended further – toward 2125, a century from now – the question becomes not whether new struggles will emerge, but which of them will determine whether the world remains habitable, just and democratic.
1525 – Hierarchy as destiny, resistance as necessity
In 1525, the world’s major political formations – whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas – justified themselves through divine authority, sacred kingship and rigid social hierarchy. Europe’s peasants rose up insisting that the world could be otherwise, challenging the claim that inequality was ordained. Their rebellions were crushed, but their challenge signalled the beginning of a new era: a time when ordinary people increasingly became actors in political history.
1625 – Empire consolidates, freedom survives underground
A century later, Europe’s wars had given way to commercial expansion, colonial seizure and the Atlantic slave system. Ideology followed power: racial hierarchies and mercantilist doctrines rationalised extraction on a global scale. Yet the plantation zone was never compliant. Enslaved people created maroon communities, disrupted production, evaded surveillance, and built alternative worlds........