Let's Travel That Road Again.

AuthorLemieux, Pierre

Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity By Walter Scheidel 670 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2019

Reading Stanford classicist Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome, one is struck by how human history is in large part a history of violence, war, looting, and atrocities. The Roman empire, which lasted from about 200 BCE to the 5th century CE, committed its share of the standard atrocities against vanquished people, including enslaving and killing civilians. It did, however, provide security to both Roman citizens and allied populations, which together comprised about three-quarters of Europe's inhabitants. The book is mainly concerned with the western, or European, part of the empire; the eastern part, under its capital Constantinople, survived until the 15th century.

With its 670 pages, including 65 pages of instructive endnotes, this scholarly and remarkable book also shows the incredible diversity and richness of human history since antiquity.

Scheidel explains how the Roman empire established its dominion and how its fall affected the rest of Western history and especially the crucial event that was the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Europe. What distinguishes Western Europe from other parts of the world is that it was wholly dominated by an imperial government only once. Using counterfactuals or "rewrites of history" (what would have happened if, say, Rome had not, early on, conquered most of the Italian peninsula?), Scheidel argues that only unusual or accidental conditions allowed the empire to dominate Europe.

Polycentrism vs. empire / To review this book, it is useful to first discuss what happened after Rome fell, and then look back on how those events were rooted in the empire.

After Rome fell to barbarians in the 5th century CE, Europe splintered into numerous local polities such as small kingdoms, aristocratic domains, urban communes, and city-states. It never again fell under imperial government, except partly and briefly under Charlemagne in the 9th century and Napoleon in the early 19th. What happened in Europe after the 5th century is what Scheidel calls the "First Great Divergence," as other parts of the world--China prominently--continued to be dominated by empires. According to medievalist Joseph Strayer, "By the year 1000 it would have been difficult to find anything like a state anywhere on the continent in Europe."

Decentralized Europe proved very resilient, even at an early stage. In the 13th century, for example, Mongol forces attacked Russia and the east of Europe, "sacking most of the principal cities ... and killing their ruling families." They proceeded to Poland, Hungary, and Austria...

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