Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and welcome to History.

We're learning all about the Shang Dynasty.

And in today's lesson we're going to be asking this question, how do empires collapse? We've already looked at the fall of the Shang Dynasty.

And today we're going to take a little bit more of a general view of how these large empires can collapse.

I can't wait to get started.

Our lesson will look like this.

First of all we're going to look at the Age of Empires.

We're going to look at some of the different empires that have ruled over parts of the world throughout history.

Just some of them.

There are lots and lots.

We're just going to pick a few today.

We'll then look at a few different factors, or reasons for why empires collapse.

Why they no longer exist.

And the three reasons that we will look at are economic, military, and political.

And I'll talk more about each of those when we get to it.

We'll then apply some of that learning to the fall of the Shang Dynasty, and take another look at the fall the Shang Dynasty using that new knowledge of these different factors.

And we'll end with our end of lesson quiz, to lock in some of that key information as usual.

So first of all, the Age of Empires.

This is a map of what the world looks like now today.

So take a closer look at it.

And you will see that different countries or nations are coloured in different colours.

And you'll see that there's lots of different countries or nations around the world.

There are hundreds of countries around the world.

But the world didn't always look like this.

Countries, nations with these sorts of borders, that's quite recent.

It's quite recent that a lot of these countries emerged.

The world didn't used to be ruled in this way.

It's only until quite recently that the world looks like this in terms of a map with these different borders that we can see, marking the different places.

So if we go back in a time machine 200 years, and have a look at a map of Europe, then you'll notice it looks slightly different.

And you'll notice the names of some of these places are a bit different.

So you'll see that there is the Russian Empire over here, and the Ottoman Empire down here, and the Empire of Austria, and the Prussian Empire, and the British Empire.

And these empires ruled large areas of land.

So an empire is when one central state, or person, or group of people rule over large amounts of area, and different groups of people.

Now, these empires usually expand through force, through violence.

And they often subjugate, or oppress, or enslave the people that they take over.

And we're going to look at a few different empires now.

One of them is the Portuguese Empire.

The Portuguese Empire was one of the first global empires.

So Portugal is just here on this red part of the map here, and it's still a country now.

And because it's by the Atlantic ocean here, the Portuguese were able over 500 years ago, they were able to get in boats and travel to places like West Africa, and even across to places like India, and especially South America, especially Brazil.

And using the weapons that they had, and other technology that they had, they took over those places.

So there were already people living there, but they took over those places, with the weapons that they had.

And very often took lots of the resources, took people.

So made people slaves, and sold those people.

And also took other resources, like the precious metals, or the plants that they had.

And the Portuguese Empire was one of the first global empires that started to sell to other countries and do that.

It's not the only empire from history.

There's also one of the great empires in the Middle East was the Abbasid Empire.

And this was a caliphate, which means that it was a religious empire.

So it was a few generations after the prophet Muhammad, who was born in Saudi Arabia, and created an Islamic state, an Islamic nation.

A nation based on the ideas of the religion of Islam.

And the Abbasid Empire was one of the first empires in that region.

And the Abbasid Empire.

So although it was a state where Islam was the sort of official religion, they let other people practise their own religion.

So they said, look, if we take over your area and you have your own religion, then you can keep practising that religion, but you have to pay us some money.

And the Abbasid Empire made Baghdad their capital.

Now, Baghdad became an incredible centre of philosophy, and science, and culture, and inventions during this time.

It was often known as the golden age of the Islamic civilization, where amazing discoveries were made by people living in Baghdad.

There's also a major empire in Asia called the Mongol Empire.

You can see the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, about 800 years ago, expanding out over huge areas.

And the Mongol Empire was the largest empire with just one border.

So other empires took lots of different nations, colonised lots of different nations, took them over using force, but the Mongol Empire was just one big, mass of land.

And it was the largest single border empire.

And you can see it expanding over a hundred years, here, using this animation.

And that was the Mongol Empire in Asia.

And lastly, the last empire we're going to look at.

There are lots of other empires that we could have looked at, because there were lots of empires around over the last 1000 years and even further back.

But the British Empire.

So the British Empire was the largest empire in history in terms of the amount of land that it colonised places it took over.

And you can see here that there was often a saying that the sun never set on the British Empire, because somewhere the sun was shining on parts of the British Empire, where Britain had colonised different nations.

And again, by colonising, we mean sending ships with soldiers, and weapons, and taking things from those nations.

So those are just some of the empires that we've looked at.

We've only taken a very, very close look, and we're not going to look in depth in terms of the sorts of things that the empires did.

We can leave that for another day.

What I'd like you to do is just give just some of the key facts, some of the main things that are associated with the empire.

So we've got the Abbasid Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the British Empire.

And one of these was the largest single border empire.

One had a capital city in Baghdad.

One was the largest empire in history.

And when was the first global empire.

Can you pause the video and match up the empires with their key fact? Okay, let's see if you are right.

So the Abbasid Empire, that had its capital city in Baghdad.

Became that cultural centre.

Portuguese Empire was the first global empire.

Lots of other, specially European nations then built their own empires, including Britain.

The Mongol Empire is the single.

the largest empire in terms of just one single border.

And the British Empire was the largest empire in history.

All of these empires have fell.

All of these empires collapsed.

They were no more.

And empires are very complicated things.

Empires change over time, and they're not one single thing.

They change over time.

They lose certain territories, they gained certain territories, They have certain aims, and goals, and those aims and goals change, the way that they govern or rule over the people in their empire changes.

And they usually fall over a long period of time.

So they collapse over a long period of time.

And there are lots of different reasons.

It's not very often that there's just one thing that happens, and then an empire ends.

There are different things that happen that slowly start to unravel the empire.

And these can often be categorised into EMP, E, economic, M, military, and P, political.

So let's look at some of those.

Economic factors is to do with money and resources that an empire has, and then how they use that wealth.

So money can become a reason that an empire does very well or does very badly, and starts to collapse.

There's also military factors.

So military is to do with the army.

So the aims and the action of the armies, the battles they go into, how quickly they try to take new land using the armies, and where they try to invade.

These are military factors.

And lastly, there are political factors.

So political factors are to do with the leaders, the rulers, the people in charge, the decisions they make, how they rule the people, and how they rule the places that they become in charge of.

So let's see if we can try and work out whether some different some factors would be political or economic or military.

So I'm going to give you some imaginary scenarios.

I'm going to tell you about a particular empire, and I want you to decide if this is a political factor, an economic factor, or a military factor.

So first of all, imagine that an army invades another land.

Tries to take over.

But the army doesn't have enough soldiers, and then they lose the battle.

Would that be a political factor, an economic factor, or a military factor? Write down the scenario, write down this situation, and then write down whether it's a political, economic, or military factor.

And you can pause the video to do that now.

Let's see if you were right.

Well done if you said this is a military factor.

It's to do with the army, so it's a military factor.

Let's try another one.

It could be political, economic, or military.

The emperor is greedy and makes lots of bad decisions.

Other leaders get cross with the emperor, but he doesn't listen to anyone.

Is that a political, an economic, or military factor? Write out the scenario, then write out whether it's political, economic, or military, and you can pause the video and do that now.

Okay.

Let's see if you were right.

Did you say it was a political factor? Well done if you did.

Give yourself a tick.

If you didn't, then you can quickly edit it.

Now, let's try another scenario.

This time an empire becomes very big and lots of people live under the ruler.

However, there isn't enough money to look after the cities, and the people all become very poor.

Would that be an economic, a political, or a military factor? Write out the scenario, and then write out political, economic, or military.

Let's see how you did.

Did you say that was an economic factor? Well done if you did.

Give yourself a big tick.

It's to do with money and the resources, and how they're used, and that could be an economic factor.

So we have these political factors, these economic factors, the military factors, and sometimes there's some other factors that are not to do with one of those.

Some other random factors.

And empires, these all interact with each other, because the more money you have, then the bigger army you can have, the better decisions you make, the more money that you make.

And so these factors all overlap, and empires usually collapsed because of a combination of these different factors, which are all interacting with each other.

So it's very complicated and that's okay.

Let's look at the Shang Dynasty now.

So we know that the Shang Dynasty fell with King Zhou, or Emperor Zhou, who is in charge of all of the Shang Dynasty, and all the people that were underneath it.

This big empire, that had grown over 500 years with the Shang.

But we know that King Zhou was seen as being very evil, very cruel, always drunk, really unkind to the people that he ruled.

And that a lot of the other important leaders, especially those nearby, they didn't like him.

And they thought that he was a bad leader.

So would that be a political factor, an economic factor, or a military factor? This is real now in terms of the Shang Dynasty, and why the empire around the Yellow River that was ruled by the Shang Dynasty collapsed.

So was that a political, an economic, or a military factor? Pause the video and write it out now.

Let's see if you are right.

Well this is all to do with the leader, and the decisions that their leader was making.

The sort of person that their leader was.

So this is a political factor.

Well done if you wrote that this was a political factor.

What about this one? The Shang had perfected bronze work, and made deadly weapons, and chariots.

Other armies learnt to make bronze weapons that were just as good as the Shang's.

So this is another reason that the Shang Dynasty started to fall.

Originally they were so successful in battle, because they had weapons that were much better than other armies'.

These amazing bronze weapons, chariots, and weaponry.

But then other people, other groups, they started to develop similar weapons.

And so the Shang lost that advantage.

Is that a political, an economic, or a military factor.

Pause the video, and write out your answer now.

Let's see if you were right.

It is a military factor.

So well done if you said a military factor.

It's all to do with the army and the battles.

Here's another one.

The empire had become very large, which required lots of money to look after, however, Emperor Zhou wasted lots of money on alcohol for him and his friends.

There wasn't much money left to look after the huge empire.

Is this a political, economic, or military factor? Let's see what you wrote out.

Did you write that this was an economic factor? If you did, well done.

It's to do with the money that the empire had.

The empire had become so big, and Emperor Zhou was wasting money, and not being responsible with that money.

And so that's another reason that it fell down.

Now you might might've said that actually that's a bit of a combination between political factor and the economic factors, because it was a political decision.

So it's to do with the leader that led to there not being much money, but it's mainly to do with the money, so it's an economic factor.

Now within the Shang Dynasty, there is one of these other factors.

So sometimes there are other factors.

So the Mongol Empire, for example, there was a huge disease that spread over the Mongol empire.

That's one of the reasons that the Mongol empire started to collapse.

So that's not really to do with military, political, or economic, it's just some other random factor that contributes to the collapse of the empire.

Let's look at this one from the Shang Dynasty.

Ancestor worship was important in the Shang Dynasty, who believed the stars could tell them about what should happen on earth.

When some planets aligned in a mandate of heaven, this was taken as a sign that a new leader was needed.

We've learned about the Mandate of Heaven and how people saw this as a sign that a new leader.

that the ancestors up in the sky said, it's time for a new leader.

So this would be an example of just another factor, a different kind of factor.

So let's put all of those together now, and write a paragraph all about what led to the downfall of the Shang Dynasty.

So I put there economic, military, political, and any other factors.

I would like you to write a paragraph or two answering the question, how did economic, military, and political factors lead to the downfall of the Shang Dynasty? How did they lead to this empire collapsing? So pause the video and write your best answer to that now.

Let's see how you did.

I'm going to show you an answer that I wrote, and you can compare yours to mine, and you can tick any ideas that you thought were similar.

And if there's anything that you missed out that I put in, then you can always add them in as well.

There were different reasons why the Shang Dynasty collapsed.

First, there was not enough money to look after the huge empire.

The military of the Shang also lost its advantage of bronze weapons, as other armies learnt how to make similar weapons.

The main reason for the downfall of the Shang, however, was King Zhou, who was a cruel and foolish leader.

One last reason for the fall of the Shang Dynasty was that the planets aligned in the night sky, which people thought meant the heavens wanted a new leader.

So if we go back, you can see that I've thought of an economic, military, political, and this other reason in my answer.

Pause the video now, and either tick any ideas that you got that were similar, or add in anything that you missed, so that you can improve your answer based on this one.

Super work.

That's the end of today's lesson.

And it was a tricky lesson, but you really started to master some very sophisticated, and difficult historical skills there, of thinking about how different factors, different reasons, cause certain events, especially bigger events like the downfall of empires.

And as we've seen, there've been empires across history, over thousands of years, all over the world.

And they rise, they gain power, and importance, and they also fall, they collapse.

So well done for working so hard.

I'll see you in our next lesson, take care.