Should the study of economic ascendancies be restricted to a sequencing of the rise of nations over time? Such a chronological emphasis sidelines the geographies involved, and the spaces integral to a nation during its ascent. This paper argues that the geographic dimension is the key to understanding the “individual” and “collective” rise of nations; a differentiation that gets blurred when spaces are assumed constant. It seeks to establish how geographies create the very paradigms in which ascendancies have emerged. For this purpose, the paper creates an alternative framework that factors in the impact of global spatial rearrangements on ascendancies. The temporal-historical sequence of the rise of nations remains the same. But using geography as a tool, it tries to deduce the logic behind such a sequence. In other words, why did it happen the way it happened?