text: The Chinese had a particularly well-developed notion of world government in the form of Great Unity, or  (), a historical model for a united and just society bound by moral virtue and principles of good governance. The Han dynasty, which successfully united much of China for over four centuries, evidently aspired to this vision by erecting an Altar of the Great Unity in 113 BCE.
  Contemporaneously, the ancient Greek historian Polybius described Roman rule over much of the known world at the time as a "marvelous" achievement worthy of consideration by future historians. The Pax Romana, a roughly two-century period of stable Roman hegemony across three continents, reflected the positive aspirations of a world government, as it was deemed to have brought prosperity and security to what was once a politically and culturally fractious region. The Adamites were a Christian sect who desired to organize an early form of world government.
  Dante's Universal Monarchy
  The idea of world government outlived the fall of Rome for centuries, particularly in its former heartland of Italy. Medieval peace movements such as the Waldensians gave impetus to utopian philosophers like Marsilius of Padua to envision a world without war. In his fourteenth-century work De Monarchia, Florentine poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri, considered by some English Protestants to be a proto-Protestant, appealed for a universal monarchy that would work separate from and uninfluenced by the Roman Catholic Church to establish peace in humanity's lifetime and the afterlife, respectively: