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 within the fissures of empire. The basic contradiction of modernity – freedom as an ideal, domination as a practice – became unavoidable.

1725 – The Enlightenment’s double shadow

By 1725, the Enlightenment offered a new vocabulary for human possibility. Rights, liberty and rationality were no longer restricted to monarchs or priests. But the same era systematised racial science, deepened colonial rule and strengthened capitalist expansion. Slave revolts intensified across the Caribbean, Indigenous polities resisted encroachment, and plebeian politics erupted in cities. The Enlightenment dreamed of universality; grassroots movements demanded it be applied.

1825 – Industrial capitalism and the birth of modern mass struggle

The industrial revolution transformed society by turning land, labour and time into commodities. Liberalism praised free markets while obscuring the violence that made them possible. Workers, facing new forms of exploitation, shattered the illusion of inevitability. Luddites destroyed machinery that destroyed them. Chartists demanded democratic rights. Abolitionists and Indigenous nations fought dispossession and enslavement. Modern capitalism created its own opposition, as every dominant system does.

1925 – Mass ideologies and the world on edge

By 1925 the world was becoming defined by mass ideologies – fascism, communism, liberal democracy – each promising a total explanation of the human condition. Colonial empires still dominated, yet anti-colonial movements multiplied from India to Egypt to Vietnam. Workers organised unions; women expanded political rights; Indigenous peoples asserted survival against assimilation states. The century that followed would see both the worst atrocities and the greatest expansions of collective rights in human history.

2025 – Fragmentation, exhaustion, and the new front lines

Today’s dominant ideologies - neoliberalism, techno-solutionism, nationalist-populism – are less ambitious than those of 1925 but no less controlling. They promise stability while delivering precarity; they defend growth on a planet exhausted by it. Climate collapse, digital concentration, financial oligarchy, inequality, and democratic erosion define the political terrain.

Yet resistance is again reshaping the possible. Climate justice movements refuse the logic that sacrifice must always come from below. Indigenous resurgence challenges the legitimacy of states built on dispossession. Housing movements confront the property-based order. Digital rights activists push back against surveillance and algorithmic power. Post-growth, doughnut and ecological economics offer new intellectual architectures for a liveable future. The core struggle of 2025 is no longer merely about exploitation or representation – it is about survival with dignity on a finite planet.

2025 to 2125 – Three possible pathways, one necessary struggle

Speculating about the next hundred years is less an act of prediction than of recognising the forces already in motion. The currents of power and resistance visible today will determine which of several broad futures emerges.

I. The path of collapse: extraction without end

One future is a continuation of the present: a world that refuses to decarbonise in time, doubles down on authoritarian nationalism, treats refugees as threats, and relies on surveillance and AI to stabilise an unjust order. Such a future leads to intensified climate disasters, food instability, and mass displacement. In this scenario, democracy withers and inequality hardens into a permanent caste structure. Australia, like much of the world, becomes both fortress and furnace.

II. The path of adaptation: reform at the edge of breakdown

A second future sees governments belatedly managing crises but without altering structural dynamics. Renewable energy expands, but growth ideology remains intact. Inequality is moderated but not reversed. Automation enriches the few while destabilising labour markets. Climate shocks are endured rather than prevented. Grassroots movements win important but partial victories; states concede enough to stabilise themselves but not enough to alter the deep logic of extraction.

III. The path of transformation: a politics equal to the century

The third future – difficult but possible – arises from the same grassroots energies that transformed earlier epochs. In this future, Indigenous law and ecological stewardship become foundations of governance rather than symbolic gestures. Post-growth economics replaces the fetish of endless expansion. Cities reorient away from speculation and toward human-scale, climate-resilient design. The global South gains real autonomy; international institutions evolve beyond the post–1945 order. Digital technology is democratised rather than privatised; AI is regulated as infrastructure rather than weaponised as capital.

The great movements of the 21st century – climate justice, decolonisation, labour renewal, feminist and queer liberation, democratic innovation – coalesce into a broad civilisational shift comparable to the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution but grounded in ecological realism rather than dreams of mastery.

The deep continuity: resistance defines the future

Looking across 600 years – from the peasants of 1525 to the climate strikers of 2025 – one truth becomes clear: power always claims inevitability, and resistance always reveals possibility. The next hundred years will not be written by governments or markets alone, but by movements refusing to accept extinction as policy or inequality as nature.

2125 will not be determined by the crises we inherit, but by the courage and imagination we mobilise. The struggles of the coming century will decide not only who holds power, but whether civilisation endures – and what kind of civilisation it becomes.