Human history cannot be understood as separate national or civilizational stories but only as a single unfolding sequence continuous with geological and biological time. The rise and fall of any one people is a local episode within one species-wide movement, so partial histories distort by severing their subject from the whole.
Early societies cohere through a 'community of obedience', binding people by fear, priest, and king into submission to an inherited order. These are gradually and incompletely displaced by 'communities of will', in which cooperation rests on shared ideas freely held rather than enforced deference.
Human political organization chronically lags behind the growth of knowledge, communication, and the practical scale of economic life, producing recurring breakdown. Wells frames the First World War as the catastrophe of sovereign nation-states persisting after technology had already made humanity one interdependent community.
Alexander of Macedon conquered from Greece to the Indus by around 323 BC, then died at thirty-two, whereupon his generals carved the empire into rival successor states within a generation. The conquest spread Greek language and ideas widely while demonstrating that military dominance by one personality leaves no durable structure once that person is gone.