If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentralized and on the whole non-imperial, productively as opposed to lethally competitive: first Europe, then the West, then perhaps the World. Today the space for marcher lords—outsiders or borderland primitives who could suddenly take over the advanced centres and turn them into something more powerful and dynamic, only to fall to new outsiders—has vanished. The last marcher lords were the empires of the US and USSR, which took centre stage as a result of World War II. However powerful China has become, it will not be another marcher lord. For the PRC is already on the inside. It may well become the new ‘leading edge’, but it is and will remain part of a multipower actor civilization (recent US unilateralism being doomed to failure).