I don’t know about peaceful, but Giovanni Arrighi explains in The Long Twentieth Century , how and why during the history of capitalism, power passed from one Italian city state to another, then to the Dutch empire, to the British empire, to the American empire and is now in the process of passing to China.

There is a newer edition from 2010 and in it, Arrighi writes about China:

accommodating the upward mobility of a state that by itself accounts for about one-fifth of the world population is an altogether different matter. It implies a fundamental subversion of the very pyramidal structure of the hierarchy. Indeed, to the extent that recent research on world income inequality has detected a statistical trend towards declining inter-country inequality since 1980, this is due entirely to the rapid economic growth of China

we pointed out two major obstacles to a non-catastrophic transition to a more equitable world order. The first obstacle was US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. Paraphrasing David Calleo, (1987: 142) we noted that the Dutchand the British-centered world systems had broken down under the impact of two tendencies: the emergence of aggressive new powers, and the attempt of the declining hegemonic power to avoid adjustment and accommodation by cementing its slipping preeminence into an exploitative domination. Writing in 1999, we maintained: there are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the US-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 288-9).

About the US response to the burst of the new economy bubble and the war on terror, Arrighi writes:

Indeed, to a far greater extent than in previous hegemonic transitions, the terminal crisis of US hegemony — if that is what we are observing, as I think we are — has been a case of great power “suicide”

Less immediate but equally important, however, is a second obstacle: the still unverified capacity of the agencies of the East Asian economic expansion to “open up a new path of development for themselves and for the world that departs radically from the one that is now at a dead-end.” This would require a fundamental departure from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western development in which the costs for the reproduction of humans and nature have been largely “externalized” (see figure P1), in important measure by excluding the majority of the world’s population from the benefits of economic development. This is an imposing task whose trajectory will in large part be shaped by pressure from movements of protest and self-protection from below.

The growing economic weight of China in the global political economy does not in itself guarantee the emergence of an East Asia-centered world market society based on the mutual respect of the world’s cultures and civilizations. As noted above, such an outcome presupposes a radically different model of development that, among other things, is socially and ecologically sustainable and that provides the global South with a more equitable alternative to continuing Western domination. All previous hegemonic transitions were characterized by long periods of systemic chaos, and this remains a possible alternative outcome. Which of the alternative future scenarios set out in thee Long Twentieth Century materialize remains an open question whose answer will be determined by our collective human agency.

Seems like China, with belt and road, is on a good path for dealing with this second obstacle, so the task for leftists in the imperial core is to deal with the first one: contain the violent lashing out of the dying empire and focus our organizing efforts against war.

Britain basically passed the baton of premier power to the US so that it could secure as much of its own position as possible when it became clear that its Empire’s time was numbered after World War 2.

Maybe the best example would be the collapse of the USSR, where massive pieces of state-owned infrastructure were privatized and sold for scrap to unscrupulous opportunists who were able to capitalize at the moment of crisis, while the majority of the population suffered a loss of retirements and the extenuating circumstances of a collapsing state (death, poverty, food insecurity, addiction, homelessness, etc). Yes I’m replying to my own post

Spain slowly collapsed over the course of 300 years. By the time the revolutions across South America took place, it had become pretty much irrelevant as an empire.

Sorry to be a doomer here but I’m convinced that the USA will attempt to at least launch some of its nukes. (Israel already may have used a tactical nuke in Syria; the USA already used nukes when only an insane person would have thought it was necessary.) The guys who work in the nuclear silos are complete lunatics who will launch the nukes without orders—if they sense that it’s over, basically. If the George Floyd protests had really started seizing territory and organizing a revolutionary government, the nukes might have been launched. All the minutemen do is listen to nazis, and all nazis talk about is how every last problem on Earth is China’s fault. We’ll only be safe when China figures out how to disable the nukes (and yes, I know this is extremely difficult but not impossible).

Nukes + total obvious insanity are the difference. No other world empire had nukes when they collapsed and the Soviets were not insane (even though they had definitely lost the plot, let us say).