Try negotiating a trade treaty with Gungans. Right, anyway, so the late 20th century was not the first time that empires disintegrated. Rome comes to mind, also the Persians, and of course the American Revolution ended one kind of European imperial experiment. But in all those cases, empire struck back. You see what I did there? I mean, Britain lost its 13 colonies, but later controlled half of Africa and all of India. What makes recent decolonization so special is that at least so far, no empires have emerged to replace the ones that fell.