Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #94

by Walter Scheidel

The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world

The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world?

In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil ensured competitive fragmentation between and within states. This rich diversity encouraged political, economic, scientific, and technological breakthroughs that allowed Europe to surge ahead while other parts of the world lagged behind, burdened as they were by traditional empires and predatory regimes that lived by conquest. It wasn't until Europe "escaped" from Rome that it launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.

What has the Roman Empire ever done for us? Fall and go away.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Economics, Ancient History, World History, Politics, Anthropology

670 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version, which was offered as “included” with my Audible subscription. I thought I would give it a try since I quite like “big” history books. I only just made it – the book is being withdrawn from Audible on 24 October!

It turned to be a fascinating book for me. My rating is not so much because I agree with everything the author says, but reflects the level of enjoyment I had in listening to this hugely thought-provoking work.

The title suggests this is a book about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It isn’t. It’s about the Great Divergence (which the author calls the “Second Great Divergence”). Prof. Scheidel takes the long view, directly connecting the emergence of the modern world with the fall of the Roman Empire.

You might sum up his argument in the phrase “small is beautiful”. Although many factors played a part in the creation of the modern world, he argues that the single biggest was the political and social fragmentation of Latin Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to intense and often bloody, but also extremely productive competition between the various polities. In this, Latin Europe was a contrast to many other parts of Eurasia, especially China. This is not a new theory, but the book seeks to explain why Latin Europe and China developed these very different forms of political organisation (which he calls “the First Great Divergence”).

At its height, the Roman Empire controlled around 80% of the population of Europe, and did so for centuries. After its fall, no other hegemonic empire in Europe came close to achieving this outcome, and the multi-state system of Latin Europe proved extremely robust. Prof. Scheidal sets out arguments as to how the Roman Empire arose, and why it was never repeated. He examines those polities that had the opportunity to re-impose hegemonic rule on Latin Europe, and why they did not succeed.

Hegemonic empire proved resilient in China, where it was repeatedly re-imposed following periods of temporary fragmentation. The book also looks at the Middle East-North Africa region and at India. In both cases hegemonic empire was more common than in Latin Europe, but less so than in China. He also briefly considers South East Asia, a region where large-scale empire did not become well-established.

The author considers proximity to the steppe to have been a significant factor. Latin Europe was largely spared invasion from steppe peoples, whereas China, India and Iran were all repeatedly invaded by Turkic or Mongol nomads, who frequently ruled through conquest dynasties. The book explains how the military threat of steppe nomads affected the political organisation of the agrarian societies of Asia.

The book also considers the role of institutions. Other writers have commented that medieval Latin Europe contained a number of unusual societal features, not least the supranational Roman Catholic Church, which was so powerful it could sometimes dominate secular rulers. Individual states also contained multiple sources of power, such as the feudal aristocracy, and cities with considerable legal autonomy. There were significant controls on rulers in NW Europe, and the author links this to the development of the parliaments and assemblies so characteristic of the region. Lastly, there is discussion about cultural factors. The intense inter-state competition in Europe fostered disruptive innovation, whereas hegemonic empires tend to claim legitimacy from maintenance of stability and adherence to tradition. The author notes a correlation between the lifespan of hegemonic empire and abatement of scientific enquiry and innovation, observing this in the later Roman Empire, the Islamic world, and Imperial China.

I suppose the inherent problem with this type of analysis is that we examine with the benefit of hindsight. We know how things turned out and it is thus easy to claim “X was always going to lead to Y”. It maybe wasn’t so obvious beforehand, and the author rehearses a variety of counter-factuals to try to counteract this problem.

The book is extremely well-written. It was one those that constantly left me thinking, “I wish I could set out an argument as well as that!”

As you can imagine, the book is on the chunky side. The audio version was 21hr 35 minutes. A great read though.

[Jacopo Quercia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially expected 'Escape from Rome' to offer yet-another account on the collapse of the Roman Empire, only this time with a title and cover in clever homage to John Carpenter's sci-fi classic 'Escape from New York.' To my surprise and sublime delight, Prof. Walter Scheidel of Stanford University has crafted something so much grander. This book is an encyclopedia on empires throughout world history, from the earliest in antiquity up to the modern era, and with carefully attention paid to both hemispheres, East and West. (His writings on the seafaring achievements of the Polynesians was a particularly welcome addition.) Scheidel unabashedly and convincing celebrates the fall of Rome while providing the most captivating explanation for why Europe, as opposed to nearly every other continent, came to dominate the modern world. 'Escape from Rome' explains this not only with prolific historical, geographical, and scientific analyses to back it up, but it also dives boldly into counterfactual scenarios—a fascinating subject of its own—to illustrate how and why the Roman Empire could not be duplicated. And best of all, Scheidel accomplishes all this in a single text that is both easy and—you heard it here first—fun to read! It covers enough material to fill several bookshelves. Simply book, this book is a triumph. It is one of the best academic texts I have ever read and has supplanted Gilbert and Large's 'The End of the European Era' as the best book on World History that I have ever come across.

It is not superfluous to say that Prof. Scheidel accomplished a herculean task in 'Escape from Rome.' Plenty of academics have offered grand explanations for human history only to have their theories crumble upon inspection, with Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' being a primary offender. 'Escape from Rome' provides more coherent and convincing explanations for the past 3,000 years of history not simply through its exhaustive research and evidence, but because it dares to ask a question absent all-too often from history writing: "What if?"

In his introduction, Scheidel states:

"Historians all too rarely highlight counterfactual reasoning in their research. This is a great loss. Explicit counterfactuals force us to confront the weakness of deterministic as well as revisionist assumptions, however implicit they might be: the notion that deviations from what happened might have proven short-lived and some approximation of actual outcomes would have happened anyway, or, conversely, that minor contingencies could have produced massive divergences from observed history. Merely to think about this makes us more careful about casual inferences. Just like comparative history—of which counterfactual history is a more exotic variant—"what-ifs" are a valuable means of assessing the relative weight of particular variables."

I cannot overstate how profound such an approach to history can be. Counterfactual history theorizing and exploration allows researchers to shine spotlights on what otherwise might be overlooked as trivial or mundane—a scrap of paper, a silver spoon, a change in temperature—while testing the bolt of history against added strain. It helps academics and their audiences better understand why Hitler could not conquer Russia, why the Mongols did not rule all Eurasia, and why the Roman Empire accomplished more in its collapse than it ever could have if it endured. It applaud Prof. Scheidel for demonstrating this controversial approach to history so persuasively in his text, and I am already looking forward to assigning it in class (World History). Furthermore, if 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' deserved a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, I say 'Escape from Rome' deserves higher honors.

Simply put, this work is masterful. It is one of the best books I have ever read. 5 stars.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book examines what it refers to as “two great divergences” in the history of civilization; (1) Why did the Roman Empire fail to survive while the Chinese Empire—and similar empires in other regions—continued to survive in various forms, and (2) Why did the scientific revolution and modern economic expansion originate in the Western Europe instead of occurring in some other part of the world.

In the analysis of the above divergencies this book explores various counterfactuals of what could have been, and in doing so speculates on the probabilities for the various paths history could have taken. The book’s conclusion is that the modern economic expansion including parallel improvements in the human welfare would have never occurred but for the polycentrism of Western Europe. It was the inherent competition between numerous European nations that prompted the scientific and industrial revolutions that allowed today's quality of life. In other words, the advanced global modern world would have never developed had the Roman Empire continued to exist.

This is a big book (704 pages, 21.5 hrs audio) thus a lot of history gets referenced while the author is arguing his case. The Roman and Chinese empires are the primary focus of comparison, but there are also multiple discussions about other parts of the world including South Asia, Middle East and North Africa. So this book ends up being a good review of world history.

Conclusion, the world owes a debt of gratitude to the Western world for our “escape from Rome.” Otherwise most of us would be living in subsistence farming, and most of us wouldn't exist at all because premodern farming methods could not feed the current world population. There's even a question as to whether the people living in Eurasia would even know of the existence of the American Continents had Europe remained in a unified empire.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

the Roman empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back

Fascinating stuff but I found the counterfactual arguments really aggravating because I tend to switch back and forth from being a determinist (it could only have happened this way) and whatever you call the opposite (any change would bring about too much chaos for us to argue about what would happen). Still really fun to ponder what would happen if Henry VIII died young (England stays Catholic and helps Spain purge Germany of Protestants?) or what if the Mongols take France (Low Countries flood preventing rise of industrial and democratic revolutions, Pre-reformation death of Pope devolves Christianity into a discrete sects).

The stuff about Rome as an anomaly and empires bordering steppeland was really good, though sometimes I found the writing a bit tedious. His explanation that the Great Divergence happened where it did because Rome existed but then gave away permanently to polycentrism seems plausible.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hmmm...I have to think about this one a bit, but I will take an initial stab at a review.

This is a really good book on European macro-history, with a strong economic flavor. It tells a broad and really abstract/general story that ties together a lot. I am sure some do not like this sort of exercise. After all, if you abstract away too much from all the messy details, what are you left with? ...and what do you get from going through the exercise?

To understand what Professor Scheidel is attempting to accomplish, note that there are entire subgroups or literatures of history that grow up around different topics. You do not get one or two books on a topic area, but dozens and even hundreds. Keeping track of the research and coming to any conclusions about the state of knowledge in a given topic area is daunting for professionals and even harder for more general readers. Enter the macro historian ...

In “Escape from Rome”, Scheidel is merging two different historical literatures. The first has to do with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, both its causes and consequences. This area began in earnest with Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” - first published in the eventful year of 1776 and still in print today — and has continued on unabated (most recently “The Darkening Age” by Catherine Nixey in 2018).

The second literature of interest to Scheidel concerns the history of the Industrial Revolution and the “Great Divergence” of the England and Europe from the rest of the world. This is actually a set of separate but related literatures. How did the takeoff happen? Why did England lead the way? Why was it focused on Europe? Why did Asian empires lag behind?

Scheidel’s argument begins by noting that virtually all of the contending explanations involved in the literature on the Great Divergence have one element in common - they presume that the fragmented and polycentric political world in Europe that existed following the fall of Rome and which matured into the modern European state system was central to the story of why Europe took off and why the rest of the world did not.

That is the intuition. The fall of Rome was critical to the emergence of modernity and the economic revolution. This links both of the literatures together. The remainder of the book comprises his efforts to make the case and tie up all of the loose ends of the story. This is an involved and complex effort, There are numerous parts to the argument and all of them are fascinating. This is accompanied by tables and graphs, some of them quite whimsical. There is even a chapter on economic geography!

For readers who want more, there are lots of references. For readers who might not have read all the relevant argumentative contenders, Scheidel provides clear summaries of the various positions. Best of all for me, the book provides a clear articulation of the argument and the logic behind it.

In terms of style, the book is well written, although one should know going in that this is not a beach book but rather a relatively dense book on the economic history of empires. By the end, I will admit to feeling a bit like I had just had a good workout (a little stiff). It is a fun book to read, sort of, and the last chapter on what Rome has or has not done for us is inspired. I think I was basically sold.

As to the proper place of Rome in European history, I am still not sure. I am left thinking of a paraphrase of an old pop song - “I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without Rome”.

I enjoyed the book.

[Vidur Kapur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Escape from Rome has to be one of the most ambitious books ever written. Erudite and exhilarating, it guides the reader through 3000 years of world history, all to spotlight what the author, Walter Scheidel, posits to be the (very) long road to prosperity.

Scheidel has little to say on the debate about the immediate effects on human welfare of the fall of Rome. Rather, his core thesis is that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to what Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton calls the Great Escape, which resulted in today’s unprecedented levels of health and wealth, documented not only by Deaton but by Steven Pinker and others. It did so by encouraging fragmentation in the West, which resulted in productive – but also deadly – competition.

The book also serves as a remarkable synthesis and meta-analysis of many of the competing (but sometimes overlapping) explanations for the Industrial Revolution. Scheidel contends that, regardless of whether one chooses to emphasise the role of institutions and political economy, or colonialism and slavery, or a culture of growth and Enlightenment values, they all depend on this competitive fracture of Europe. He thus productively draws upon the work of Kenneth Pomeranz, Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, Robert Allen and many others.

Especially important to the book is Scheidel’s use of both real-life comparison and counterfactual reasoning to highlight the relative importance of different factors and events on the path to prosperity. The former allows him to explain why the polycentric formation that emerged after the fall of Rome was both unique (nothing like it sustainably emerged in other civilisational centres such as East Asia, South Asia and the MENA region) and important in explaining modernity. The latter enables him to examine how deep rooted the path to prosperity was – did the fall of Rome inexorably lead to the Great Escape, or could Europe quite easily have been blown off course?

Of course, some readers may question the application of counterfactual reasoning. They might argue that nothing could have gone differently; nothing could possibly have blown history off its course. Counterfactuals can’t establish the importance of certain factors in explaining outcomes, because the absence of these factors was impossible. All that is required is a description of the chain of events. On this view, it suffices to say, for instance, that ‘Napoleon was a skilled leader, objectively’, without any reference to France’s prospects had he not been in power.

However, even if one accepts Scheidel’s rationale for the use of counterfactuals, it is interesting that the fall of Rome is given so much prominence – as with many of his other counterfactuals, it is unlikely that the fall would not have eventually occurred. Empires are bound to fall eventually, as he notes. In which case, why is the fall of Rome given much more credit for modernity than, say, the failure of the Mongols to re-establish a large, centralised empire in Europe?

There are two possible answers to this: firstly, Rome’s fall directly led to the emergence of competitive fragmentation in Europe, whereas other factors involve a failure to inhibit and reverse this trend. It is more interesting to note that X led to Y, as opposed to X merely failing to prevent Y. Secondly, as noted above, one of Scheidel’s goals is to work out how far back in time the roots of modernity lie. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire marked the beginning of the road to prosperity.

Or did it? Surprisingly, but in a way that fully reflects the book’s synthetic nature, Scheidel also follows scholars like Jared Diamond in placing heavy emphasis on the role of geography in explaining state formation and by extension (according to his thesis) economic, scientific and technological progress. In Scheidel’s case, he shows that Europe is a geographical outlier on a number of fronts: its peninsulas, islands and mountain ranges all contribute to a remarkable physical segmentation, unparalleled in places like China and India.

Therefore, while the Roman Empire managed to emerge thanks to a specific set of conditions that would never again be replicated, it was a historical fluke: the geography of Europe makes fragmentation much more likely. Moreover, proximity to the steppe, which Scheidel again convincingly argues is a powerful driver of imperial state formation, is lacking in Western Europe, again pushing it in the direction of polycentrism.

Thus, if we really want to go back in time, the fall of Rome was preceded by natural, physical forces. As Scheidel writes:

Two circumstances, one exceedingly remote and the other [the aftermath of Rome’s fall] far less so, were critical for European fragmentation and polycentrism. From the late Cretaceous onward, the collision between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates caused the Alpine orogeny, a process that formed the Carpathians and Alps and raised them ever higher. Without the former, Transylvania would not have appeared and the great Eurasian steppe would extend to Vienna; and without the Alps, it might stretch even farther west…

Additionally, Scheidel allows for the possibility that Christianity, not because of its content, but because it acted as a glue that took an edge off the fragmented nature of the post-Roman West and provided some degree of unity, may have helped to spread the Enlightenment ‘culture of growth’ that likely contributed to the Industrial Revolution. This is, however, speculative.

Notwithstanding these quibbles about the book’s title and premise, Escape from Rome is a superb achievement. Scheidel describes the road to prosperity well, and makes a convincing case for his core thesis that the system of competitive fragmentation and polycentrism that inadvertently developed in Europe was likely to be necessary for modern developments in economics and public health. For such a broad and wide-ranging history, there were also very few mistakes (the only major one was repeatedly referring to Frederick I’s successor as Henry V rather than Henry VI).

Overall, this is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the roots of the modern world, or who wants to see Chinese, Indian, Islamic and European history and even geography being played with and analysed extensively.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many years ago my medieval history lecturer at university would preface any parts of his lectures on economic history with a quip like "and now for the boring-but-actually-most-important bits". Scheidel's book is heavily focused on economics (among many other things) because when it comes to the question of the "Great Divergence", economics is essential. But his book is far from boring.

This is a book I've wanted to get around to since reading reviews on its release. I ended up listening to it as an audiobook on my morning runs, but have now bought it in hardcover to read and refer to again. I lost count of how many times a remarkable piece of information or keen new insight in it made me wish you could highlight and annotate audiobooks. The idea that the fall of the Roman Empire was a "bad" thing and that it was the horrible Middle Ages that we thankfully "escaped" via the glorious Renaissance is deep in our culture, largely because this is a foundational myth of Modernity. Modern historians' better understanding of the Middle Ages as far more than a benighted "dark age" is very slowly beginning, finally, to permeate popular consciousness. But the romanticisation of "the glory that was Rome" remains firmly entrenched.

Scheidel has little interest in the childish division of history into "good" and "bad" periods. But this book provides a substantial and robust support to the insight that the division and disintegration of the early medieval period actually provided a stimulus to innovation and the polycentric, competing and often warring states of medieval and early modern Europe were the key to the revolutions in agriculture, finance, warfare, commerce and industry that propelled Europe toward global domination. The idea that empires stifle innovation and collapse can and usually does lead to revival and invention runs strongly counter to how many people have been trained to see the past. But Scheidel's arguments are compelling because they are so thorough and carefully examined.

There is a lot to like about this remarkable book. One is the way it marries and synthesises a broad range of scholarship across many different periods and disciplines. I have not studied Chinese history in any detail, so the extensive analysis of Chinese analogues and examples and comparison of them to Roman and European equivalents was fascinating. It could be that a specialist in Chinese history would have issues with this that I can't see, but when discussing periods and topics I do know well - medieval history, for example - I found very little I would disagree with in his analysis. Every time I thought of an objection 0r counter argument, Scheidel would soon address that very point and deal with it carefully, often in exhaustive detail.

Of course, even the best-read historian can't be an expert on everything and most specialists will find things to quibble over. Some of the analysis of cultural and intellectual currents and trends is necessarily going to be subjective, so I was not wholly convinced that, say, Protestants were more likely to be innovative and hard working than Catholics. And in a broad overview it's hard to get into the minutiae of certain concepts. So the many references to "feudalism" and its decline as a factor in Europe would probably raise an eyebrow among medievalists, particularly those who consider the whole concept of "feudalism" a modern construct that is useful only for high school textbooks and which bore little resemblance to anything that actually existed as an economic system or even a social one.

But quibbles and question marks aside, overall this is an impressively persuasive book. By pulling together so much disparate material, Scheidel has likely done a great service to future researchers. And by turning many assumptions in their heads, he's done what any historian should be happy to do: make the reader look at the past in a new and fruitful way.

[Reid tries to read · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Scheidel argues that the collapse of Rome was both overdetermined (meaning there were so many deep structural factors that led to it that it was extremely likely to happen) and necessary for the development of capitalism. For most of the world’s history, patterns of empire followed a similar cycle: empires rose and controlled large swathes of a region's population (although Scheidel makes note of the fact that this control was extremely limited by the ancient and pre-modern worlds undeveloped communication and transportation technology), fell for a time as ‘restructuring’ occurred, then rose again. This is how imperial formation happened in the Indian subcontinent, in South and East Asia, and in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In other areas, such as the Americas, empires never really rose to a large degree due to ecological constraints. Only in Europe, though, did an empire rise (Rome), collapse, and then never be replicated again. Instead, Rome’s collapse created a Europe characterized by “intense and persistent polycentrism”. Escape from Rome seeks to answer why this occurred and tell us why it was a good thing.

Why Rome rose
For an empire to rise and expand its control over a large population, there needs to be a state with a strong core capable of facilitating imperial expansion. This state then needs to be surrounded by a periphery that cannot adequately defend itself from this expansion.

Core:
Rome was located on a hill next to the river Tiber, the largest river in Italy. This gave it early ecological and material advantages to its closest neighbors. It was also situated between two more powerful Latin and Etruscan city-state systems, which meant it was incentivized early on to defend itself and encourage military organization and state building. The city state system that Rome was embedded in was important for Roman development and expansion. City-states typically have difficulty absorbing and conquering other city-states; this means they are incentivized to develop systems of alliances. Rome was the most powerful city state of all the Latins and therefore was the leader of a coalition of those city-states. Rome’s interaction within the city-state system provided the blueprint for how it interacted with future polities it conquered. It did so by establishing a mode of cooperation where Rome had a degree of military dominance over the city-states while still allowing them to maintain local self-rule. The social glue binding these disparate polities to Rome was joint war-making, as this yielded resources that could be shared, and benefited farming commoners who made up the rank-and-file of the armies as well as aristocratic leaders.

Rome maintained its imperial system by constant expansion. Most state revenue came from conquest plunder (and later via forced tribute) rather than taxation. This allowed the Roman to keep taxes low on local elites, and in return these local elites supplied large numbers of troops to be led by Roman generals. Although offices, the most lucrative occupation in the Roman Empire, were only available to citizens, non-citizens often benefitted from the loot-by-conquest system. Even still, those who were once considered “non-citizens” were often converted to citizens as another ideological pillar holding the Roman system up. Either way, the ability of Rome to mobilize a large number of people for its conquests gave it a distinct advantage when it came to imperial warfare. Instead of disarming former enemies, Rome actively enabled them to build up forces for Rome to use in future wars. Rome backed certain local elites that they trusted to adhere to this system, thus ensuring these large local forces would not be used to rebel against Rome. Ensuring local acquiesce also required giving them a modicum of political rights and participation in the political process via citizenship. Finally, military service itself functioned as a social binding agent. It was a way to create multi-ethnic teams of soldier-citizens from entirely different communities and backgrounds who, through the process of collective conquest, earned themselves the right to be seen as ‘Roman’. Even the elites were inculcated into Roman mass military culture, as ten years of military service became a prerequisite for running for office. Therefore, political ambition and the material rewards that came with successful campaigns for office were directly tied to military service. This obviously encouraged long-term military service amongst the political elites and ensured their loyalty to the Roman military as an institution.

Rome, then, was the definition of a ‘total war society’ if there ever could be one. Military campaigns provided Romans with their lands and riches (even the average farmer could take advantage of land opened up by Roman ‘colonization’ campaigns), while military service provided Romans with a shared culture and system of socialization from a young age. As a militarized society geared towards nothing more than expansion, Rome was extremely effective in subordinating competing powers within ‘Roman’ territory, preventing nearby states from rivaling Rome, protecting allied states from rivals, and extracting tribute and loot throughout this entire process. Rome was geared towards success in war, and only through continuously succeeding in war could Rome maintain its empire. When the spoils of war dried up and could no longer lubricate the gears of the Roman system, Rome collapsed. As constant warfare ate into the possibly male peasantry, slaves from conquest were readily used to replace the men tied up in military campaigns , killed in battle, or indebted due to their fields falling into disrepair whilst serving abroad. The rise of slavery in place of a peasantry was the first internal sign of Roman weakening.

Periphery:
Rome was founded in a very fortuitous location. Besides the benefits of being on the River Tiber, the region of Italy as a whole was far away and shielded from the stronger imperial states in the Middle East and the Levant that preceded Rome. Likewise, Rome was close enough to trade-based city-states in Greece and Carthage that it could benefit from trading interactions with them. The Italian peninsula helped shield Rome on three sides via the Mediterranean, while its North was shielded from the outside world thanks to the Alps. This allowed Rome to conquer the Italian peninsula without being harassed too harshly from external forces. Once unified under Roman rule and integrated into the Roman-imperialist-system, the full might of Italy could be put to work against its nearby neighbors. The Greeks, Carthaginians, and Macedonians, despite being older imperial powers, could not mobilize the manpower the Romans could as cheaply, quickly, and efficiently as Rome.

After Rome defeated Carthage and their navy in 241 BCE, they had near-hegemonic power over the Mediterranean Sea. The only other power they shared the sea with was Ptolemaic Egypt, whose capital was 2,000 miles away. The Ptolemaics then proceeded to collapse quickly enough that a rivalry between the two empires never developed. Once hegemonic control over the sea was in place, Rome gained two massive advantages from it that no other empire in Europe ever replicated. Advantage 1 was that the sea allowed Rome to quickly, cheaply, and efficiently transport troops and their supplies to distant theaters of war. Advantage 2 was that any border of the empire touching the Mediterranean was effectively safe from invasion. This allowed Rome to spend relatively few resources on defending its Mediterranean borders, and these resources could be used on further imperialistic endeavors.

Why Rome fell and never rose again
Scheidel is not incredibly interested in the reasons why Rome fell. He states that it would be more unusual if it didn’t, as every pre-modern empire eventually fell at some point. He writes: “Somewhat paradoxically, the question of why Rome fell is both over- and underresearched. Overresearched, because when in 1984 the German ancient historian Alexander Demandt published a massive historiographical survey of all the various explanations for the demise of the Roman empire that had been put forward from late antiquity to the present, he was able to enumerate no fewer than 210 different causes that had by then been proposed. This figure alone leaves no doubt that our understanding of this event would surely benefit from a healthy dose of self-critical reflection and interpretive restraint. At the same time, this event nevertheless remains underresearched because it has never been properly contextualized. After all, most empires in history that did not eventually morph into stable nation-states “fell” at some point. Even the patron saint of modern students of Rome’s decline and fall, Edward Gibbon, had already suggested that ‘instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long’“. Rome had both internal and external stressors which influenced each other to bring the empire down. Internally, economic weaknesses of a slave-based economy and constant power struggles between rival generals/politicans worsened issues with barbarians and plagues emanating from the periphery. Rome’s advance had primarily been at the expense of stateless groups of ‘barbarians’; once it came into contact with stronger states in its later periods, it cost more resources to defeat its enemies. Resources were also being used to help upkeep the constantly expanding administrative system needed to coordinate and organize the rapidly expanding empire. State revenue needed to increase due to these issues, but local elites balked at any attempts to cooperate in the process of increasing state revenue. Without the loot from conquests to entice local elites to provide troops, Rome’s military capabilities declined. Declining military capabilities mixed with increasingly difficult opponents to force Rome into bribing states at its borders for peace. Most of the Roman system relied on revenue generated from a few key areas, such as North Africa, to finance the other areas of the empire. Once these areas were eventually lost to states/groups who no longer saw a need to accept Roman bribes when they could go for the whole pie (or, like the Huns, were forced by external factors directly into the path of Rome), the Roman Empire could no longer finance itself.

Failed attempt to restore Rome 1: The Eastern Roman Empire
By 500 CE the Western half of Rome had collapsed and was controlled by 5 new powers: Italy was controlled by the Ostrogoths, the Iberian peninsula by the Visigoths, North Africa by the Vandals, and Gaul (parts of modern day France, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium) by the Franks and Burgundians. The Eastern half of the Roman Empire, with its capital based in Constantinople (located in modern day Turkey), still controlled around 40% of the population of the former Roman Empire. Yet the East was unable to re-conquer and control its former territory. Its neighbors were, at this point, very weak and by 540 the Eastern empire had reconquered territory controlled by the Vandals and Ostrogoths. The visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula and Franks (who had by then absorbed the Burgundians) in Gaul were all that seemed to stand in the way of imperial reunification. Then, in the 540s-550s the Ostrogoths recoordinated and marched a counteroffensive in Italy, while an invasion of the Iberian coastline failed in the 550s. In 540 plague began to kill huge swaths of people across the empire, and by 570 the Eastern Roman empire’s main rivals in Mesopotamia and Iran, the Sassanid empire, were resurging after decades of weakness. This resurgence coincided with a large push throughout mainland Europe to eject the Eastern Roman invaders. By 580 the empire was struggling to fund its armies, and by the 600s expansion of the empire had all but ceased. For the next century it slowly gave up ground and territory to rival Arab empires. There is no realistic scenario where the Eastern Roman Empire could have weathered all these storms to reform the empire to its former glory; it had too many strong enemies and lacked the capacity to mobilize manpower that the former empire once had.

Failed attempt at a European empire 2: 8th century Arab conquests
The Sassanian Empire (not Arabic) was the first empire outside of Europe that could have theoretically attempted to restore hegemonic imperial power over the continent soon after Rome collapsed, but its distance (centered in Iran) and lack of military success (suffered many defeats to Romans and Arabs between 627-641) shows that they simply were incapable of doing so. The only other early credible contenders to surpass the Roman Empire’s grip over Europe were the Arab empires.

From 629-642 the Arabs seized territories formerly controlled by Rome and the Sassanians, including Palestine, Syria, and most of Mesopotamia. They also challenged Eastern Roman sea hegemony, and invaded the Iberian Peninsula by land and sea in the 710s. Eventually, the Umayyad Caliphate of 750 CE ruled 40 million people and controlled 80% of all inhabitants of the Middle Eastern and North African region. Still, they never projected power very deeply into Europe, and by 900 the caliphate had fractured irreparably. The initial success of Arab expansion had been due to the fact that the peripheral client states that had once been a part of the Roman or Sassanian empires had broken off by the late 500s. The Arab advance easily defeated these weak states who now had to fully fund, train, and staff their own militaries. The areas they took that were formally controlled by the Roman or Sassanian empires had only recently been reincorporated into those empires, and were thus extremely weak as well. Finally, these regions had also been ravaged by plague for generations, further adding to their weakness. The growth of the Arab empire did not inherently spur more growth like the Roman did; rather, it produced divisions as the armies of conquest were never really unified into a single fighting force. Each army was rooted in tribal allegiance systems, and when they subjugated an area and its populace, the decentralized Arab army who conquered the region tended to settle there and draw the resources of that region for themselves. There lacked a strong centralized force capable of combining all of the Arab empire’s resources together for further expansion, and thus the empire tended to fragment and compete within itself.

Failed attempt to restore a unified European empire 3: the Franks
Since the Eastern Roman Empire and the Arab empires were unable to reform a unified Europe after the fall of Rome, the last remaining option was that of the Germanic states which controlled what was once Roman Europe. The most powerful of these was the Franks of what was once Roman Gaul. However, they too were unable to conquer their neighbors and the farther from the time of the Roman Empire Europe got, the more difficult and expensive it became to try and reconquer it. The most impressive phase of Frankish imperial expansion occurred under Charlemagne from 772-814 CE, where he claimed around 40% of Europe’s population (for reference, Rome peaked probably near 80%). Yet after his death the empire fragmented due to the system of primogeniture (passing lands to sons) which had dominated Frankish traditions for centuries. Instead of growing, it never reached these heights again. Succession wars never could reunify the empire because structurally, centers of power throughout Europe were extremely localized. States struggled to manage local power holders, raise armies, and claim and redistribute surpluses for imperial expansion and maintenance. Where Rome had been able to use decentralized power structures to its advantage by using conquest loot to essential bribe local elites for soldiers and surplus, imperial expansion post-Rome was too costly and difficult to uphold any similar arrangement. “During the High Middle Ages, Western Europe filled up with castles. A disproportionate share of the growing wealth generated by the economic expansion of this period ended up in the hands of nobles who used it to shore up their defenses against the central authorities and their peers… For the same reason, progress in defensive capabilities coincided with stagnation in offensive capacities”.

[Julius Lehtinen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Todella raskasta luettava – kuten ehkä lukemisen kestosta voi päätellä – mutta erittäin kutkuttava ja kattavasti perusteltu hypoteesi modernin maailman ja teollisen vallankumouksen synnystä. Kenties paras asia Roomassa olikin sen tuhoutuminen, se loi olosuhteet moninapaiselle fragmentaatiolle ja kilpailulle Euroopassa.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some fun meta-analysis in this book. Most of it will seem familiar if you've read much European history. But the author does a good job of zeroing in on the main factor that set Western Europe on the path to modernity: Ceaseless warfare after the fall of the Roman Empire. As the author notes, "Humanity paid a staggering price for modernity." Because long-ago generations paid that terrible price, we now enjoy greater levels of prosperity (and far longer lifespans) than most people could have dreamed of even a few hundred years ago.

When the western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century CE, its former provinces devolved to  successor Germanic kingdoms -- none of which was strong enough to defeat all the others and re-establish hegemonic empire. Instead, over the next several hundred years, these kingdoms slowly coalesced into the nation states of modern Europe. As they grew larger (and impinged on one another's territory), each state continually sought competitive advantage against the others through ever-better weapons technology, expanded trade, and overseas expansion. Which set off a chain reaction of innovation that led to modern science and the Industrial Revolution.

Throughout this book, the author compares the fissile character of Western Europe to the more stable regimes of empires, especially imperial China. Empires clearly are more peaceful, but they also tend to resist change and become heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. 

The author sets out an array of interesting questions and counterfactuals: Could the rise of Rome have been derailed by other powers? (In the early days, yes. But by the time of the Second Punic War, it had become unstoppable.) Could an outside power have re-established empire in Western Europe after Rome fell? (Very unlikely given its geography and distance from major powers. The Mongols, for instance, had a long-term impact on Eastern Europe, but Western Europe was probably too much of a stretch). 

And the most interesting counterfactual of all: What if the Roman Empire had never existed? The author concludes that it might not have made much difference in the end. We wouldn't have romance languages or Christianity, but other languages and religions would have taken their place.
This conclusion may seem odd given historians' fascination with ancient Rome. But in fact modernization took off most spectacularly in areas where Roman influence was less pronounced. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, where Roman dominance arrived later (and collapsed sooner) than on the Continent. 

So despite its fascinating history, Rome was just another empire that came and (fortunately) went. As the author notes, "the Roman Empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back."

[Tony Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

What’s an historian to do when everything about a topic has already been written? Write about what didn’t happen!

That’s a rather cheeky way to introduce what’s really a tour de force of world history by Stanford University classics professor Walter Scheidel in Escape from Rome. He aims to answer the question of why Western Civilization bounded past the rest of the world economically in the eighteen century – what historians generally call the Great Divergence – by asking a different question: could history have unfolded differently?

Over hundreds of pages, Scheidel imagines dozens of counterfactuals: what if the Roman empire had never gotten off the ground? What if Alexander the Great had lived past 33? What if Charlemagne or Napoleon had succeeded in building a European empire? What if, instead of being divided by the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps, Europe’s geography consisted of vast steppes, like Asia? What if Islam had gained a foothold in Europe?

Read the rest of my review in The Christian Century.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly subversive history book, Escape from Rome offers a refreshingly novel perspective on the fall of Rome and the rise of Europe. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2021...

[Chuck Abdella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. It was a gift from thoughtful students and it promised a counter-intuitive thesis: that the world was better because the Roman Empire fell. Unfortunately, "Escape from Rome" did not live up to my expectations.

Good: There is some good here. Prof. Scheidel has a really broad knowledge which permits pertinent analogies from other times or places. Unlike the stereotypical professor who knows "a lot about a little", Scheidel has educated himself in many fields and knows "a little about a lot." His counterfactuals are fun at first and it's a bold argument to make about the fall of Rome. No one should doubt his scholarly credentials or his wide reading of the primary and secondary sources. He knows his stuff.

Bad: Alas, the book is epically overwritten. Even when one considers that historians are taught to "tell me what you're going to tell me; tell me; tell me what you told me", there's a lot of "I will do this and then in chapter X, I will do that." His editor could have saved a lot of pages by excising all of those and probably slashing in half the number of charts he uses. Focus is a big problem with such an ambitious work. Prof. Scheidel's argument is ostensibly about the fall of Rome, but he spends 100 pages talking about history before Rome and his book could start 300 pages in without really affecting his argument. This volume is probably at least two books--one on cause and one on effect--and I think his editor didn't really do him any favors because he is all over the place. Even the counterfactuals get old, especially at the end when he's spinning off into ridiculousness (What if there was no Christianity? What if Rome never happened?). His argument about the Romans gets buried in there and I wasn't convinced by his theory that the Romans (to paraphrase Monty Python, as he does) didn't do anything for us except die and never return. Like Mary Beard, he's a Roman historian who has fallen out of love with the Romans and that blinds his analysis sometimes. For example, towards the end of the book, he's noting that the steam engine did not arise in China and in the same paragraph, he compared that to the "abatement of technological innovation in the mature Roman Empire." Didn't Hero of Alexandria basically invent the steam engine in the mature Roman Empire? A small point, but meant to illustrate a larger one. Prof. Scheidel is over the Romans and feels that their disappearance allowed Europe to rise to prominence because small states are better. Despite his scholarship, I was not compelled by this.

What I don't understand is who the audience is here. The cover and title is meant to evoke the 1981 movie "Escape from NY", and one would think it's meant as a popular history for a mass audience who see Hadrian's severed head and think about the movie poster with the decapitated Statue of Liberty. But this is not a book for the casual reader who has a little interest in history. It's not written that way. I'm a professional historian with degrees in Roman history who teaches World History and I found the book to be a slog and a chore. I don't know if a "normal" person would enjoy reading it.

[Allan Aksiim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is long, a tad academic but quite readable and explains quite thoroughly why the the modern capitalist world emerged from Europe. The scope of history encompassed within is large - from the reasons of the rise and collapse of Rome to myriad different polities in medieval Europe and several dynasties of imperial China and periods of disunity in that region. In many ways it reminded me of Francis Fukuyamas The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

Empire is bad because it discourages innovation and protection and nurture of innovative enterprises. Several states that in close proximity and are economically and militarily comparable is good because that encourages the rulers of those states to find new ways to compete with rivals and to support merchants and the development of new technologies. This is what happened in Europe and what failed to happen in China (except in times of imperial disunity when China more resembled what Europe became). This is why for the author we had to "Escape From Rome" - Rome was an empire and as an empire it blocked development.

This book is a must read for all who are interested in macro-history and the big reasons why the modern world came to be.

[Riq Hoelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This addresses a very big picture - reminiscent of Toynbee - asking questions such as "why in Europe did only the Romans manage to dominate a large area whereas in East Asia multiple dynasties did so?", "what was so special about the Romans that they managed to do so in the first place?", "what made northwest Europe a special case in the world?", and so on.

But in the end I found this much too long for the number of ideas it has, and the presentation disappointing. There's so much preamble and summary while the actual good stuff is so brief.

In addition, the audiobook reader does not seem to know any foreign or obscure word. Upon encountering one, he first takes a deep breath, like a tightrope walker about to step on the wire, and then 90% of the time proceeds to completely mispronounce it. Is it really so difficult to find talented readers?

[Aneece · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh, hell yeah. it's time to bring back that old Whig-interpretation-of-history feeling.

[Erik Champenois · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Escape from Rome" is a carefully argued book that convincingly shows how the fall of the Roman Empire ultimately made modernity possible. The book shows how the Roman Empire was the only large-scale/dominant Empire in European history - as opposed to other regions, most of all China, where Empire persisted (and persists) again and again, even after periods of fracture. Europe went a different path - one that resulted in persistent fragmentation and polycentrism. In the end, these conditions made modern technological change possible. Instead of a uniform empire, the polycentrism of Europe allowed for movement between countries and power centers by innovators, competition within and between states, and ultimately for the conditions that made the advent of modern scientific and technological revolutions possible.

In covering this argument Scheidel goes beyond scholarship on the "great divergence" (of economic and political power between China and the West) to argue for two great divergences. The first great divergence is the persistence of Empire in the East and its post-Roman irrecoverability and unlikelihood in the West. This is the most rigorous and tightly analyzed part of the book. He covers the eight points in European history where a resurgent Empire was most likely - (1) the eastern Roman Empire in the mid-sixth century, (2) the Umayyad caliphate, (3) Charlemagne and the Frankish Empire, (4) the German Empire in the 10th-13th centuries, (5) the Mongols, (6) the Habsburgs under Charles V and Phillip II, (7) the Ottoman Empire, and (8) the French struggles for hegemony from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Using counterfactual history to postulate what would have needed to change for any of these examples to succeed in reestablishing a hegemonic European empire, he convincingly demonstrates that none of these attempts would have likely succeeded without significantly different and historically unrealistic starting conditions. The European landscape of power was simply too fractured for any of these attempts to succeed, for multiple extremely interesting reasons covered in depth for each example.

The coverage of the second great divergence - the later rise of the West above the East (especially China) - is less tightly argued as it reviews the smorgasbord of reasons "divergence scholarship" has provided for this change. He covers multiple explanations under three wide rubrics - institutions, new worlds (including the Americas and European colonialism), and "understanding" (cultures of knowledge, science, and technology). The unifying principle behind most of these explanations, however, is that European polycentrism is the underlying condition behind most of these divergence explanations. Without a post-imperial fragmentation of power, institutions would not have developed the way they did in Europe; without limited territorial resources, countries would not have ventured out to colonize and extract resources from other parts of the world (something China had no need for, given its vast resources); and without competition within and between states (including war), scientific and technological advancements would not have been prioritized the way they were. China, with a uniform hierarchical and centralized power, being at peace for significant periods of time, and with little competition from other power centers from the middle Ming onwards, did not experience the same drivers of change that the West did - ultimately resulting in the dominance of the West. This inversion was therefore only made possible by the collapse of empire in the West. Scheidel's compelling conclusion is that the best thing the Romans ever did for us was to fall and go away.

One of the best books on history and international relations that I have read this year and highly recommended to anybody interested in understanding the underlying causes of deep historical trajectories.

[Cody Moser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book asking several questions: what precipitated the rise of the Roman Empire? Why did it never return? Why did empires everywhere else continuously collapse and restructure?

Within the framework of all these questions, Scheidel asks if any of these factors lead to the Great Divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. The book is well worth a read and is less about Rome than the world that followed it, as well as about overall patterns of empire development around the world.

The only disappointment in the book is a lack of coverage for Southeast Asia, which followed some interesting patterns akin to Europe. Overall, highly recommend to anyone wondering about the history of modernity and tired of reading books asking about "why Rome fell" or what its contribution to the modern world is (which, per Scheidel, seems to have been very little).

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book whose premise has me skeptical from the start, and that dragged on quite a bit . . .

So, a book based on the premise that the fall of Rome created the conditions for modern Western prosperity - the attempt to celebrate the catastrophe of the fall of civilization had me skeptical from the start. I'm not an economist, and the economics jargon bored me to tears. There are bizarre digressions into meaningless counterfactual ( "could the modern world as we know it have emerged from China if Asia was closer to America than Europe is?" Who cares?). Some occasional points do seem to be made about the nature of decentralized authority in Renaissance Europe setting the stage for the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but most of the book seemed to me the worst sort of navel-gazing.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A discussion of what produces empires and how Europe turned polycentric, and an argument for its causes and what it caused. Complex subject.

[Benjamin Anders, PhD History and Political Theory · Rating 5 out of 5]

The core argument of this book will be familiar to most readers of social and economic history. Europe’s, and particularly Great Britain's, economic takeoff in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would never have come to fruition were the continent organized as a single politically united empire on the model of ancient Rome or China rather than as multiple independent countries whose military and economic competition provided incentives for economic growth and scientific innovation. Further, European societies were not just divided amongst each other in ways that supported the emergence of growth and free economies. European countries were perhaps more importantly, internally divided between competing groups and institutions enjoying an autonomous moral status. Think of the king, church, independent aristocracy, independent cities, and even at times, the peasantry or third estate, all of whom had formal legal and political status as independent actors whose rights–at least formally–could not simply be ignored.

From this cauldron of competing groups, a momentous innovation arose: what we call today representative or parliamentary institutions. These began as formal assemblies of magnates who had the right to approve and constrain public spending even, in some cases, against the express wish of the king. These representative bodies, though aristocratic, emerged as a crucial institutional and moral check on the power of kings and provided many of the institutions, skills, and mentalities that eventually facilitated the transition to parliamentary democracy in Europe and its spread abroad through colonies, and eventually, imitation by new societies seeking to develop a liberal democratic model. Originally a product of the need of relatively weak kings in the early middle ages to coax quasi-independent warlords who controlled independent military retinues into participation in large campaigns against other kings, parliamentary bodies and the system of interstate competition combined they supported helped to produce industrialization and modernity by producing societies capable of restraining the impulses of kings to confiscate property and restrain scientific investigation.

Why is this the case for Scheidel, and many others? (See William H. Mcniel, John A. Hall, Geoffery Parker, and Douglas North). First, because the competitive state dynamic facilitated innovation and change in financial institutions and military technology: effectuating an “adapt or perish '' dynamic similar to that of the marketplace that incentivized states to pursue risk to survive. European states were the first to develop reliable systems of bond issue and public debt, which paved the way for the expansion of military power, commercial culture, and the accumulation of private wealth not concentrated in land. European navies catalyzed the Age of Discovery in their competition with one another. Multiple artillery revolutions equipped European, and for some time Ottoman, armies with firepower that soon surpassed that of China, where gunpowder in fact originated. This was in contrast to “unipolar” empires like China and Rome in the age of the Antonies, who pursued the maintenance of existing territories and economic institutions with static and well-known methods.

Secondly, and in my own view much more importantly, the competitive state dynamic allowed men and women with crucial skills (what economists refer to as human capital) and unpopular beliefs to flee from one country to another, safer, haven when their rulers chose to oppress them, expropriate their wealth, or deny them rewards for their skills in line with the social returns produced by those skills. French Huguenots fled Louis XIV’s revocation of French religious toleration to bring their technical skills to England and the Dutch Republic. Jews from Spain and Portugal likewise fled to the Dutch Republic, the Ottoman Empire, and Eastern Europe. In a distinct but connected vein, small independent polities like the Republic of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, were able to leverage their independence from exploitative and rent seeking kings and to empower their mercantile classes to pursue commerce with relatively secure property rights and more robust networks of reciprocity and risk-pooling. Not only did these developments shield many innovative people and groups from expropriation, but they also imposed huge costs on states who chose to make the intellectual freedom and property rights precarious. Such costs to expropriation and attacks on intellectual independence and creativity simply did not exist in societies dominated by a single political unit. This dynamic eventually created a state that shielded property rights and intellectual innovations particularly well: Great Britain. Great Britain benefited massively, though certainly not without hardship and cruelty, from the skills and powerful ideas it had shielded from persecution and expropriation. The industrial revolution was born.

Scheidel makes an elaborate case for each of these propositions, and before saying something about the nature of his argument, it will be worth briefly thinking through why he considers his book necessary. The book is a peculiar intervention into what historians know as the “Great Divergence” debate, that is, the debate over why the industrial and scientific revolutions took place in Europe rather than China despite Chinese technology and science having been more advanced than that of Europe up to the year 1500. There are far too many complexities of this debate to state here, suffice to say that some explanations privilege ecological and material causes. These explanations focus on the huge amount of coal and iron ore in England, or the crucial role played by the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the textile economy that powered the early phases of the industrial revolution. Other explanations of the Great Divergence emphasize the cultural and institutional differences that separated Europe from China, such as the greater protections afforded to private property and commercial wealth by European city states and liberal regimes. I believe it is already clear where the author of the present review stands.

Scheidel's point in this book is that whatever one’s favored explanation, Europe’s industrial revolution could never have taken place without what he calls, in a somewhat unpleasant academic neologism, its “polycentrism” (by which he means the formal division of power both between and within states that European politics sustained). If one believes that the most important cause of modernity was the development of liberal regimes that shielded intellectual diversity and human capital from persecution and confiscation–as I do–one must recognize that these developments were unlikely to take place if Europe was dominated by a single empire that could snuff out dissent and innovations of which it disapproved. Similarly, if one is convinced that the capital accumulation wrought at the sickening and evil cost of the slave trade is at the root of modern industrialism, one must still recognize that European powers would have been unlikely to risk voyages of discovery absent a competitive interstate dynamic. In this I find Scheidel's argument entirely convincing, without polycentrism, no modernity.

The true thrill of this book is the astoundingly erudite intellectual voyage Scheidel takes one on to get to this conclusion. Scheidel is by training and profession an economic historian of the ancient world and this allows him to go far back to the history of the Roman Republic to make his argument. The journey is far from arbitrary. Republican Rome plays a crucial role in Scheidel's case because it allows him to demonstrate that Europe was never particularly ecologically suitable for the development of a single unipolar empire. Europe is divided by numerous mountain ranges (the Alps, the Carpathians, and Scandinavian ranges–all of which facilitate political divisions in conditions of premodern transport and communications). Even Rome halted at the Rhine River Valley stopped its futile attempts to conquer much of what is now Germany following its conquest of Gaul. Rome also united for the only time in its history, the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. What Scheidel seeks to show us is that these conquests were in fact extraordinarily atypical. Because of its diverse geography and mountain ranges, Europe’s natural state is to be divided politically. Because of the difficulty of holding the East and West Mediterranean together politically under conditions of pre-modern communications and administration, the natural state of the Mediterranean world is to be divided between multiple points of political control–as the Romans eventually learned when the Empire was divided by Diocletian into an Eastern and Western half in the late third century.

Rome only united these lands with gargantuan military and political effort, reaching levels of military mobilization not seen again until the Napoleonic Wars in both their density (men deployed per capita) and absolute numbers. The statistical estimates Scheidel makes for these processes are truly astounding, though, as they deal with ancient history, the estimates must remain quite rough. He compares Rome's conquest of central Italy in the 4th century BC to Iowa taking over the United States in terms of the ratio of Rome’s fifth century population to that of the peninsula. Further, Rome mobilized twenty five percent of its able-bodied men at the height of the Second Punic War in 210s BC. By comparison, Germany fielded a little under four million men in 1914, out of a male population of 33 million. The number of German men at arms reached 11 million under Hitler, finally ahead of Republican Rome in per capita terms by about four percent. These early chapters were for me one of the most interesting aspects of the book, proving how utterly relentless and all consuming the Roman military machine had to be to unite large chunks of Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean as it did and underlining Scheidel's thesis that their gruesome achievement was a historical aberration.

One of the most interesting speculations Sciedel entertains is that Rome may have played a key role in the rise of modernity both by conquering so much of Europe and by fading away: its crucial legacy for him was not Roman law or its classical ideals of liberty but Latin Christianity. The conversion of Europe’s pagan peoples to the faith, Scheidel speculates, gave European states a common culture and set of reference points that structured their competition productively. Had these common cultural reference points not existed and been shared by European regimes even after the reformation, the dense networks of cooperation and discussion between European scholars, political philosophers, scientists, and entrepreneurs that produced modernity might not have occurred. If this thesis is true, and Scheidel only entertains it rather than committing to it, then the conversion of Europe’s barbarian peoples to Christianity might be regarded as a more momentous event in the journey to political modernity than the founding of Athenian democracy, the writings of Plato and Aristotle, or the magna carta.

The middle third of the book drives Scheidel's point home by surveying a number of attempts to unite Europe into a single political empire following the collapse of Rome’s western empire. All failed (Justinian, Charlemagne, Ghenghis Khan, Charles V, Napoleon, etc). In each of these cases, Scheidel argues that it was the structural features of European politics and geography, its diverse landscapes, its dense castle-based systems of defense, and its decentralized institutions, that in the end preserved political diversity in the country. Each of these features made it so that all resistance to a new empire could never be crushed by occupying a political center, as one could much more easily, though not without hardship, assume control of the Confucian Chinese bureaucracy by defeating the emperor in battle. As he examines multiple failures to unite Europe politically and militarily, Scheidel entertains the question of whether counterfactual alternations in contingent historical outcomes might alter the trajectory and produce a politically united Europe after all. What would have happened, for instance, if the Mongol invaders of central Europe had not turned back from their planned conquest of Western Europe to deal with a succession crisis following the death of the Great Khan Ögedei in Mongolia? In each case he finds that chances of Europe being united again were slim. Rome was unique. I am somewhat dubious about this argument, particularly in the case of the Mongols who were thwarted in their move Westward by a succession crisis and Napoleon who could easily have maintained hegemony over Western and Central Europe had he decided not invaded Russia and even made peace with the British and reopened trade with them, as a better statesman surely would have. Personalities and contingencies simply do matter in world history more than Scheidel thinks. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and unique tour through world history and the argument that attends it is worth considering deeply.

Why, finally, should you read this book? For the intermediate reader of history, it provides a profound introduction to the global political economy of the premodern and early modern world, all at the service of a rewarding and engaging thesis. For the experienced reader, it provides what I think is irrefutable evidence that European polycentrism was central to the rise of modernity, and more broadly vindicates the central role of conflict and challenge and response dynamics to many forms of productive change (from Darwinian biological evolution, to political to economic).

I do disagree with Scheidel on a number of points. I believe he gives short shrift to the critical role the inheritance of Greek and Roman political and legal thought in making the West’s modernity possible. Roman law, for instance, possessed a concept of private property as a realm over which public political power ideally exercises little to no jurisdiction, a concept which simply didn’t exist in premodern China and indeed runs counter to Confucian thought. Western Europeans may have come to experience a greater degree of individual liberty for contingent reasons such as conflicts between kings and aristocracies that resulted in more limited and lawful governments. However, Europeans drew on intellectual resources from classical political theory–with its valorization of human freedom – in order to understand and celebrate the value of this experience. It was ultimately the memory of classical liberty, combined with the experience of early modern limited government, that allowed modern forms of freedom to endure and grow.

In a distinct matter, Scheidel's account of the scientific revolution and industrial revolution is not nearly individualist enough for me. I do not think any set of institutions is strong enough to just produce individuals like Francis Bacon, Newton, Montesquieu, or even Hargrave and Newcomen, like products on the assembly line. Ultimately people thought, acted, and changed the world in a way that was never entirely predictable from a Mount Olympus approach that traces the origins of blast furnaces and of railways all the way to sacking of Rome by the Visigoths. Still though this is a wonderful book that proves the creative mind would not have gone far had it not been protected in its efforts by a peculiar political arrangement.

[James Widdicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously great book. Sometimes really hits you over head with it/still think he underrated Christianity.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was interesting in several ways. Scheidel’s main argument is to account for the rise of modernity in the competitive pressures that dominated Western Europe, and to account those pressures to the unfavorable conditions for the development of a hegemonic empire in said area. Towards this latter point Scheidel dedicates a good portion of the book to exploring how the Roman empire formed, focusing on the geopolitical context in which it started its expansion. Scheidel then looks at all the subsequent points in post-Roman European history up to the present where one polity was close to hegemonic dominance of Europe and the aspects that prevented it. Shifting his analysis towards China, Scheidel examines the reverse case, the comparative ease with which successive dynasties reunified China and the exceptional, and comparatively short lived, moments when disunity prevailed. Scheidel then explores the impact of polycentrism vs. unity in the development of economic and technological progress focusing on the conditions rather than the locations where they developed. Scheidel also follows the train of thought of competing theories to show where they break down, indulging in quite interesting counterfactuals to show the robustness of the model he presents. The end result is a hefty volume that explores key points in European history as well as a critical analysis of the long-term trends that contributed to the development of modernity.

[Michael McLaren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was really good, probably the best 'big history' book I've read. Mostly because it understood it's scope and thesis. It's talked about vast swathes of time, huge empires and big narratives but it also rooted in Rome's collapse. Why it happened? it was a surprising, and exceptional, that Rome appeared in the first place. Why another Empire didn't replace Rome?There were a few attempts but partly because Europe was insulated from the steppes and therefore didn't need to centralise. Why Rome's collapse was beneficial? It allowed for a poly-centric system to appear, increasing competition and innovation.

Anyway the point is, the book is great because it's incredibly informative and targeted, while also being well written. It also debunks some crap theories I've read in other big history books. Such as the reason China didn't colonise America is because the ocean was too wide. How can that be the main reason, it's geographical determinism taken too it's most absurd. I think Escape from Rome does a much better job at riding the line between geographical - which is super in right now - versus cultural and other influences.

[Comes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I'll be able to look at many points of history the same again. Usually, I'm not a fan of big history, too disconnected and too broad but I picked up this book because it asked a question about my favourite period of history and why it was a good thing it ended. Why was the fall of Rome good?

The author uses 'counterfactuals' which I really just thought about as a fancy way of saying 'alt-history'. Most of them, I think are fun enough brain exercises. Some get rather ridiculous in proving points like changing where East Asia and Europe are on maps and changing plate tectonics.

The main point of the book is that competition produces innovation, while monopolies stifle it. China is used often as an analogy for this monopolistic empire (which you can see as a stand in for 'what if Rome continued?') and is contrasted against the competition faced in Western or Latin Europe

[John E Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Scheidel has written an interesting, informative and flawed attempt to sum up the reasons for the success of the Western World. Stripped to basics, his claim is that the West rose to prominence and prosperity because the Western Roman Empire fell. His somewhat Rube-Goldbergian model is that empires stifle creativity, that such creativity can only arise in a situation where there are a fair number of stable, competing states ("polycentricity"), and that Europe was free to develop polycentric states because no overarching empire could establish itself there, because in turn it was not close to a major steppe so that there was not enough horse fodder for significantly large barbarian cavalry to overrun it, unlike the case of China, India, Iran or the Islamic caliphates. Along the way, he introduces two fascinating, if flawed, ideas: (1) the use of counterfactuals to determine historical causation; and (2) a contrast between robust historical structures and contingent ones. Some entities in history are robust, such as races, ethnicities, languages and cultures. Some are more transient, such as most nation states. For example, China is very robust, but Han, Tang, or Song dynasties were quite transient.

Consider (1). Scheidel considers various ways Europe might have been molded into a single empire again, such as an Ottoman or Islamic conquest, and he plausibly shows why such outcomes would have been unlikely. The trouble is, he considers only the plausible effects of "big" historical counterfactuals such as those noted above. But what about very local counterfactuals? One he does use is a virtual history in which Alexander the Great does not die young. But if a single death raises a fair counterfactual, what about a world in which Jesus or Mohammed were never born? Well, the trouble with these two counterfactuals is that we do not have the foggiest idea how history would then have behaved -- only that the difference from the actual course of history would have been monumental. Scheidel would answer that his is dealing only with counterfactuals which would have had a limited and plausible outcome, even though he states earlier that virtual history can only be plausibly extended for a short period of time, because two many variables make such retroactive prophesy impossible. But why permit one sort of counterfactual and ignore the other? His technique is reminiscent of the drunk who searches for his keys under a street lamp because that is where the light is. Moreover, his conclusion that Western progress was facilitated by the fall of Rome is itself one big, thousand-year counterfactual.

As to (2) the contrast between robust and contingent or transient historical structures is fascinating and useful. Here, a digression. There are counterfactuals and counterfactuals. The most legitimate sort involve capacities. A historian, pondering the question of what if Alexander had invaded Italy, would have pondered the same sorts of considerations as Alexander would have considered if he had thought to invade Roman territory -- the size and experience of the two armirs, the logistics I of Italy, etc. The next most legitimate counterfactual involves the short term outcomes which could have been envisioned at the time. As Scheidel himself points out, the subjunctive crystal ball clouds up fairly quickly, because the law of unintended consequences and proliferation of breaching outcomes work their confusions. An example of this is Scheidel's own guess that if Rome hadn't fallen modern European progress would never have taken place. To this one is tempted to and "Duh" because there would no modern Europe. But the deeper answer is "How in the world does he know?". Even Scheidel admits that the Song dynasty China was very near " takeoff" when It was crushed by the Mongols. Why not 15th century Rome? Finally, there are some counterfactuals which are pure speculation. Would Alexander have attempted to invade Italy? It is hard enough to divine his intentions while he was alive. How can we guess at his intentions of he had lived? And the last sort of illegitimate counterfactual involves an unlikely scenario. What if the Incas had invaded Europe on their war llama? Who cares, because it was not about to happen.

It is fair to say that some structures and some long-term trends are so resistant to change that bucking them is like beating one's head against the wall. One such robust entity, Scheidel says, is European polycentricity. In this, he is almost sure right. And, he contends, the "robust-contingent" contrast is related to the plausibility of counterfactuals: a historical structure which would have remained basically unchanged under various counterfactual possibilities is robust. But where a major change would have been worked "for want of a ten-penny nail," the structure or historical result is contingent. Even here, however, there are problems. The robustness of a structure is contextual. The pre-Columbian Andean civilization showed every sign of being robust until Europeans invaded its territory with horses and guns. All this said, though, one advantage of attempts at a unified theory of world history is that the writer, if he or she is as learned as Scheidel, will display large amounts of interesting, often obscure, facts and insights along the way. For example, Scheidel relates a goodly amount of information about the Arab, Chinese, and Indian civilizations of which the reader is likely to be totally ignorant. And Scheidel's more localized claims -- like the need for pasture if a nomadic culture is likely to pose a threat to settled ones impresses me as a real insight. It is, for example, a great explanation as to why the Mongols made no real attempt to conquer Western Europe and would have failed if they had tried. So all in all, even if it is very difficult to "buy" the larger claims Scheidel advances, it is a fine read. On top of that, despite (or perhaps because of) Schedel's Gothic heaven-storming, "Escape from Rome" is loads of fun.

[Skarner · Rating 5 out of 5]

融合了許多書的觀點像是帖木兒之後、大分流、多中心主義等等...
前半本試圖解釋羅馬有多難重現
比較了一堆偉人們的霸業、地形、海岸、人口、草原、文化等各家思想論點
後半本比較了大一統霸權帝國VS多中心列國體
令人驚訝羅馬和霸權帝國的相似性和拜占庭簡潔扼要的結論，來解釋為何羅馬毀了反倒比較好XD
書中也用了不少歷史IF的假設推論，不少還蠻有趣的
總結就是像我一樣看得不多又愛歷史幻想推論，能從這本書吸收不少有趣看法。

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's wide ranging exploration of the question of why what most deem the "great divergence," and what he deems the "second great divergence" happened - why is it that the industrial revolution took place in northwestern Europe rather than elsewhere?

The author sets forth his thesis that it was primarily the polycentric nature of Western Europe that can explain it best historically.

The author begins with the Roman Empire. He points out how odd the Roman Empire was in the grand scheme of things - not just in the number of people over which it ruled, and for how long it ruled, but also the area over which it ruled. He does well at showing how well Rome was able to rule and the kind of quality of life enjoyed under the Empire, which in many respects would not be seen again until the modern era.

He explains how Rome was able to build itself up as a power and why that power was able to spread as it did: the militaristic culture, the high percentage of soldiers available, the size of armies, and the constant economic pressure to conquer more and more people until the development of the Empire itself. He then explored counterfactuals: under what situations would Rome not become what it was? The strongest counterfactuals stem from Roman origins and then the prospect of invasion from Alexander the Great. The rest stretched credulity; thus the strength of Rome in its moment is explained well.

Then the author tackles the question why no other empire was able to coalesce in Western Europe. He goes through a series of counterfactuals regarding every major power from Justinian to Napoleon and wondering what it would have taken for them to develop an empire like Rome. He is very persuasive at showing how no such power could have really built an empire once the fracture took place and Justinian's designs were frustrated by plague and collapse.

He then explains what he calls the first great divergence: the path Western Europe took toward polycentrism after the collapse of the Roman Empire whereas empires remained prevalent in eastern Europe and Asia. He shows powerfully the effect of geography and persuasively argues for a steppe effect: any agricultural-based power near the Eurasian/African steppe would likely develop into an empire since they have horses and a strong enemy at the ready. Southeast Asia and Western Europe are the only regions fully cut off from the steppe, and those are the places you find polycentrism. The author also looks at cultural reasons - religion, philosophy, etc. He shows how Catholicism maintains a common identity in Western Europe while in many respects fostering the fractured political entities of the day; nevertheless, he shows well that the cultures that developed in China vs. Western Europe were very much creatures of their particular context and are as much explained by the other factors as being an explaining factor in and of itself.

The author then explores the medieval and early modern era, primarily comparing and contrasting Western Europe and China. He shows why the way the Westerners fought each other led to developments in technology, and how the multiple states and their competition allowed for freer thought, discovering other lands, the sheltering of others' dissenters, the effect of the Reformation, etc., and ultimately the development of the mercantilist economies of the Netherlands and Britain that fostered the second great divergence. He persuasively explains why empires like the Ottomans and the Chinese proved less interested in investments technological development or journeys of discovery, focusing instead on their own survival and aggrandizement. He also shows how that was true of the late Roman Empire.

In the Epilogue he asks what Rome did for us, and his answer seems to be primarily that it went away and never returned. He's willing to consider Christianity and Latin as unifying premises fostering a kind of common identity despite polycentrism, but isn't convinced that the second great divergence would not follow the first had Rome ended while fully pagan.

This is a great historical analysis: the author is able to explain why certain developments and changes took place in northwestern Europe without relying at all on any kind of supremacist trope. This is a great work of post-white supremacy historical analysis: it is not a triumphalist tale, but a reminder that one group of people developed in a way they did because of their particular context, and if they had lived somewhere else, and another group lived where they lived, their circumstances would likely have followed their placement. There's still some room for historical accident - Alexander's death in particular stands out - but you walk away from this book with a much better handle as to why world history has played out like it has.

Long and involved but worthwhile.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

250217 Escape from Rome by Walter Scheidel

The irreplaceable, irrepressible Europeans.

Walter Scheidel starts with the immortal question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” His answer is that they went away and never came back.

Multiculturalists may oppose this statement but it is clear that we owe a lot to early modern Europe. Somehow, Europe escaped from thousands of years of human tradition to institute a radical culture that found new ways to grow food, deliver products, improve health, and make everyone’s life quantitatively better than it had been at any time in history. The key was a culture of competition where power was divided between church and state and between guilds and aristocrats and there were a lot of margins where people could do different things. Europe was a place of competitive fairly small states where power within the states was broken up among various parts of European society.

Scheidel looks at European history and sees the dog that didn’t bark. While there had been an empire, it went away, and unlike most of the world where one empire was succeeded by another, the Roman empire never returned.

Scheidel explains the “Great Escape” from poverty by two “Great Divergences.”

The first great divergence involved the Roman empire going away and not returning. Scheidel compares Europe with other parts of the world, particularly China, India, and the Islamic world. In these parts of the world, Empires fell but were replaced by other empires. Even when empires fell in these areas, their fall did not lead to the level of local anarchy with the hundreds of local powers that appeared in Europe.

Scheidel canvasses the various counter-factuals that might have led to the re-imposition of empire on Europe. He finds these counter-factuals wanting. Even if the Muslims had won at Tours, they would not have been able to expand much further, or hold what they conquered. The Carolingian Empire was short-lived and internally inconsistent with its lack of primogeniture. The Mongols would not have been able to expand much further into castle rich Germany since they were not able to handle castles in Eastern Europe when they encountered such obstacles.

Scheidel explains the fissiparous nature of European polity on geography, climate, and the absence of a “steppe effect.” Great empires have often been found adjacent to Steppe lands where there is a dynamic of nomadic empires and sedentary empires cooperating, competing, and pushing it other to organize. Europe is at the tail end of a peninsula, largely removed from the great steppes of Asia.

Rome’s rise was highly contingent. It was on the edge of greater empires. When it organized, it was able to exploit far less organized and undeveloped regions of Europe. Rome also developed political institutions that allowed it to federate and exploit the manpower of those it conquered. Rome was organized for war. Its wars allowed it to finance its expansions The confluence of factors that allowed Rome to overpower Europe and ultimately the East were not likely to happen a second time.

Europe therefore remained separated, polycentric, and fractionated.

The second “Great Divergence” grew from the former. The polycentrism of European powers led to war and competition. War and competition put a premium on innovative success. Scheidel argues that this was not pure “invisible hand” libertarianism. England and Holland took the lead in the key areas of shipping, industry, and finance because of their mercantilist policies. These policies seem to be most effective for smaller states than for larger states. It may be that the innovative classes can play a larger role when the states are smaller.

One difference between empires and Europe involves exploration and exploitation. Empires – Rome and China – were uninterested in exploration. They had the capability to explore. Sometimes they did explore, but when they did these were more performative than – a way of showing imperial power – than entrepreneurial. Imperial economies were internal; empires had everything they needed. Europe didn’t. Europe had to go out into the world. Small countries, such as England, were able to expand their small size by huge foreign colonies that grew things for them. These “ghost acres” made England a much larger power than the islands of Great Britain.

Empires therefore became places of stagnation. Europe came to them and eventually overtook them in their homelands.

This is a long – 400 page – book. It is well-written. There are maps and charts and Scheidel makes a compelling argument that can be a useful source of thinking about history.

[Robert Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I'm not sure I completely buy it, but on my second reading of this book I still find the ambition and the execution absolutely staggering. I'm not sure what they're putting in the water in the classics department at Stanford University, but both Scheidel and his colleague Ian Morris have a compulsion to use their knowledge of the ancient world to try to explain absolutely everything.

This is definitely a book about the rise and fall of Rome, which Scheidel seems to know as well as anybody living, but it's also an attempt to reckon with one of history's biggest questions. Why did Europe and the rest of the world experience a "Great Divergence" in economic achievement, leading to a worldwide "Great Escape" from the subsistence peasant lifestyles most humans have been subjected to since the industrial revolution? Perhaps unsurprisingly, this classicist thinks it's got a ton to do with the fall of Rome. What's surprising is what a compelling case he makes.

In Scheidel's telling, the "Great Divergence" in the 1500s is actually the "2nd Great Divergence", which was made possible by the "1st Great Divergence" 1,000 years earlier. He sees the end of Rome, and the fact that no new empire was ever able to take its place in Europe as a necessary precondition for the later divergence. Without the extreme fragmentation of the European continent, and the competition it produced, economic escape velocity would never have been attained. That's the thesis, and he defends it over the course of over 600 gloriously learned pages, that seem to incorporate nearly everything.

Scheidel pays lip service to other empires and geographic regions, but his main concerns are Europe and China. It's a good thing, too, if he was more comprehensive in his coverage, the book would be 1,000 pages longer. This book isn't just a history of Rome and Europe ever since, he also manages to give surprisingly detailed coverage to 2,000 years of Chinese history, economics, and social development. It's fascinating work, and the comparative aspect may have consolidated a few more dynasties in my memory.

Along the way, Scheidel picks up and looks at what feels like a dozen other theories of development. Discarding some, endorsing others, and giving interesting appraisals of all of them. There are some passages I could have done without. He's very interested in counterfactuals, thought experiments that wonder what would have happened if certain conditions were different. This is illuminating in his hundred pages or so illustrating what would have had to have been different to allow everyone from Charlemagne to the Mongols to set up a durable successor to Rome. There were also many more pages than I enjoyed speculating about how spinning continents around might have had different historical effects. But that's a minor quibble.

A larger quibble would be the comprehensiveness of the theory. I don't want to be a stick in the mud, but the confidence with which the book makes its argument is more disconcerting the older I get, and the more I read. It's still an intoxicating book, but as I get older I get more and more suspicious of narratives that attempt to explain everything. I'm glad Scheidel is out there spinning these theories, I just don't want people to take them too seriously.