(9) WALTER SCHEIDEL –

ESCAPE FROM ROME: THE FAILURE OF EMPIRE & THE ROAD TO PROSPERITY (2019)

 

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the fall of Rome.

 

Playing on Monty Python’s Life of Brian, what has the Roman empire ever done for us? This book gives its answer – fall and go away.

Or perhaps more precisely, fall and never come back – not just the Roman empire but any empire with the same extent of predominance in Europe.

Although at least that did impress me with the unique achievement of the Romans – that no one else, before or since, have ever been able to replicate their empire in Europe (or the Mediterranean). Even for the Romans it arose from applying their distinctive strengths at a unique, and limited, window of opportunity in time and place.

And that’s a good thing. In short, the thesis of this book is that the fall of Rome led to the Great Divergence – that divergence of “political, economic, scientific, and technological breakthroughs that allowed Europe to surge ahead while other parts of the world lagged behind”. Essentially, that’s because of “competitive fragmentation”, both within states and perhaps more fundamentally between them, with “the enduring failure of empire-building” and no single state ever able to rise Rome’s imperial predominance in Europe. The main contrast is with China as polar opposite, with its consistent unitary imperial states, with the other Eurasian civilizations between them geographically also falling between them on this political scale.

Half of my top ten are entries for books about the fall of Rome but this one made me feel good about it!

However, unlike the other entries for the fall of Rome in my top ten, this book intentionally skirts any analysis of the fall itself. Its analysis is much broader – of the factors for the rise of Rome and why no state was able to replicate it, the factors for “competitive fragmentation” arising from the fall of Rome and contrast with China or the rest of Eurasia, and how that competitive fragmentation gave rise to the Great Divergence.

 

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