The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

What Why Empires Fall is really about, however, is what decisions politicians need to take today in order to avoid a Rome-style collapse in the near future. It does discuss the fall of the Roman Empire, and why some others have ceased to exist – notably Britain’s (which went by the withdrawal of consent, not by invasions of barbarians). And periods of pivotal years come quite often: the last century and a half has been packed with them.īut then the title of this book is somewhat confusing. But alarm bells rang for this reader at the end of their introduction: “Ultimately, as Roman history again emphasises, the future of the West will depend on which political and economic choices its citizens and leaders take in the pivotal years which lie ahead.” It is not merely Roman history that emphasises that – all history does. The book is certainly a useful post-Gibbonian primer in why things went wrong for the Romans – Heather’s scholarship shines through its pages. The West today seemed to achieve a peak of wealth around the turn of the millennium and if we are not careful, the authors say, we could implode as fast as Rome did. This contrasts with Edward Gibbons’s assertions in his Decline and Fall that Rome suffered a long trajectory downwards, perhaps beginning two centuries before the final collapse. One main point they make – and it is well worth bearing in mind, given the world’s apparent inability to recover from the financial meltdown of 2008 – is that, as scholarship and archaeology now show us, the Roman Empire had reached the peak of its wealth but a few years before the barbarians started to take Rome to pieces in 410AD. The authors of Why Empires Fall are Dr John Rapley, a political economist, and Prof Peter Heather, a medieval historian who specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire they have collaborated to draw parallels between the end of that empire in the 5th century AD and the condition in which the world is now. She ended up the shortest-serving prime minister in our history. Last autumn, Liz Truss tried to do something similar, and while she and her colleagues could not see the horrors this would bring, the markets luckily did. In the early 1970s, the Heath government printed and spent money promiscuously, using some of it to fund tax cuts it ended in disaster. There was an example of this in Britain only last year. When one sees political leaders – ours and those of other polities – make the same mistakes over and over again, one also sees how inevitable it appears to be that those charged with ruling us seldom appear to grasp that point. One does not need to be a professional historian to know that history repeats itself.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon