Escape from Rome

The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Walter Scheidel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691198835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

PART I

The European Anomaly

CHAPTER 1

Patterns of Empire

MEASURING IMPERIAL DOMINANCE

HOW COMMON was it for empires to dominate large parts of entire continents? How rare was it for imperial hegemony to end in persistent fragmentation? Just how unusual was the European experience of state formation? All these questions call for comparative evaluation. They can only be answered by examining how often empires swept all before them—or at least came close.

This is harder than it might seem. The boundaries of empire are notoriously difficult to define. Imperial rule was sometimes highly indirect in nature, relying on vassal regimes to manage subordinate populations. On occasion, imperial centers lost effective control over areas that nominally remained under their authority to local elites or warlords. We need to simplify: my survey is predicated on the assumption that an empire was formally unified for as long as no overtly independent polities had emerged in its territory.¹

But even if we accept this fairly generous definition of imperial rule, we still the face the problem of how to measure the degree of imperial dominance in a particular region in a way that allows for systematic comparison across several continents and millennia. Existing scholarship on the scale of empire focuses on the territorial size of polities, on the amount of land they controlled and how this changed over time.²

And not without reason: space is undoubtedly a critical variable. Fernand Braudel famously labeled distance the “number one enemy” of civilization. Far-flung empires continuously struggled to maintain communication and to exercise power over diverse terrains: their very survival depended on this.³

Even so, territorial reach may not be the single most important factor in assessing the relative weight of particular imperial formations. If we want to understand the role of hegemonic empire in shaping social, economic, and intellectual development, it is people who matter most. Geographical reach was not always matched by demographic heft: whereas very populous empires generally tended to be fairly large, not all large empires were necessarily endowed with sizable populations.

Steppe empires in particular sometimes extended over thousands of kilometers and multiple modern time zones without holding sway over more than a small fraction of the subjects of smaller agrarian polities, and acquired demographic weight only if they expanded into more densely settled areas of sedentary civilization. This phenomenon was not limited to nomads: in 1815 the Russian empire ruled half of the terrestrial surface of Europe but only a quarter of all Europeans; and a hundred years later it claimed more than a third of Asia’s landmass but fewer than 3 percent of its people.⁴

I thus focus on population as the most meaningful measure of imperial success. The most basic approach is to measure (or rather estimate) the proportion of the total population of a particular macro-region that was ruled by the most populous polity in that region. The larger its share in the overall regional population, the closer the leading polity came to enjoying effectively monopolistic power, and the more often or the longer this was the case, the more dominant was the role of hegemonic empire in the history of that region.⁵

Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with historical demography will appreciate that this seemingly straightforward exercise is something much easier said than done. The population size of early societies is not normally reliably recorded or otherwise empirically known. Census counts such as those that have survived from early China are rare and not without problems. For the most part, all we have are estimates—which are often little more than guesses—by modern scholars who have not followed consistent standards. I explain my own method and the steps I have taken in order to ensure a measure of consistency across space and time in the technical note at the end of this volume.⁶

I must stress that the following calculations are to be understood as a very rough guide to demographic conditions in the past—and the farther we move back in time, the rougher. Values that differ by a few percentage points are just as plausible as the ones in my charts. Even so, they are useful as long as it would seem impossible to envision significantly different levels of imperial dominance (of, say, over half instead of a third of a given regional population): my estimates are generally unlikely to be wrong to an extent that would affect the overall shape of the pattern. It is in this narrowly circumscribed manner that they provide a reasonably solid foundation for global comparison.

I have identified four macro-regions: Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South Asia, and East Asia. A fifth one is a hybrid that overlaps with the first two, namely the area once claimed by the Roman empire at its peak, which I refer to as the “Roman empire region” (figure 1.1).⁷

Taken together, these areas had long been the core zone of human macro-social evolution. They cover more than a quarter of the earth’s land surface but house a much larger share of global population, around 60 percent today. Their demographic predominance was even more pronounced in the past: 2,000 years ago, these four regions housed at least nine out of every ten human beings alive at the time, and about four in five both 1,000 and 500 years ago.⁸

They differ in size, albeit only to a moderate degree. At 10.18 million and 11.84 million square kilometers, Europe and East Asia form spatially equivalent units. Due to the presence of substantial arid areas that did not play a major role in historical state formation, the MENA region is more difficult to define: its nominal size of 12.59 million square kilometers could easily be reduced by about one-third by bracketing out the Algerian, Libyan, and Egyptian deserts and the Arabian Rub’ al Khali. (While other regions also feature marginal terrain, such as the Gobi Desert or subarctic Europe, they do so on a comparatively smaller scale.) South Asia covers 4.53 million square kilometers, similar to the Roman empire that claimed between 4 million and well over 5 million square kilometers depending on how much desert area is taken into account. In terms of size, the five regions under review thus vary by a factor of between two and three.⁹

FIGURE 1.1 Macro-regions of state formation.

Much the same used to be true with respect to population: figure 1.2 shows that although East Asia was generally more populous than any of the other four regions, it was only rarely more than twice as populous. The MENA region of the past 1,000 years has been the only exception.¹⁰

This broad similarity in orders of magnitude ensures that we do not end up comparing apples and oranges by lumping together regions of greatly different size or population. For this reason, substantially smaller regions such as Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and western South America have not been included here; I briefly consider them later on.

FIGURE 1.2 The population of South Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the “Roman empire region” as a proportion of the population of East Asia, 200 BCE–2000 CE, at centennial intervals (East Asia = 1). Source: Based on McEvedy and Jones 1978.

PATTERNS OF EMPIRE

The Mediterranean and Europe

Over the long run of history, the position of the Roman empire within the area it had come to claim at the height of its power in the first few centuries CE remained unique. It had been without precedent: in the fifth century BCE, the Achaemenid Persian empire had ruled no more than 30 percent of the population of the same region. Having thoroughly dominated the scene from the first century BCE to the end of the fourth century CE, Roman preeminence ceased only after an abortive attempt at restoration in the sixth century.

Subsequent efforts to rebuild a “Roman” empire proved unsuccessful: Charlemagne managed a modest resurgence around 800 while Ottonian rule produced merely a minute uptick two centuries later. Ottoman expansion in the early modern period likewise failed to improve on the Achaemenid population share of 2,000 years earlier, and later blips under Napoleon and Hitler remained both relatively modest and utterly ephemeral (figure 1.3).¹¹

FIGURE 1.3 The proportion of the population residing in the area covered by the Roman empire at its peak that was claimed by the largest polity in that area, 450 BCE–2000 CE (in percent).

KEY: Achaemenid empire: 450, 400, 350 BCE; Ptolemaic empire: 300, 250 BCE; Roman empire (Seleucid empire): 200 BCE; Roman empire: 150, 100, 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400 CE; Byzantine empire (Western Roman empire): 450; Byzantine empire: 500, 550, 600, 650; Umayyad empire: 700, 750; Frankish empire: 800, 850, 900, 950; Fatimid empire: 1000, 1050; Holy Roman Empire (France): 1100, 1150, 1200, 1250; France: 1300, 1350, 1400, 1450, 1500; Ottoman empire: 1550, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1750; France: 1800, 1812, 1815, 1850, 1900, 1933; Germany: 1943; United Kingdom: 1945,...