Review of: Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West
Author: Peter Heather and John Rapley
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2023
President Xi Jinping of China skipped the recent G-20 meeting in New Delhi, and there was much speculation about why. Perhaps he was ill or stayed away to show solidarity with Vladimir Putin on his war in Ukraine. Maybe he was miffed with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the conflict on the Chinese-India border.
There may be another explanation. Xi was showing the world that China had arrived as a major world power, demanding respect from the West and refusing to be treated as a mere member of a club of 20 countries.
Over the past 40 years, the developing world’s per capita productivity rate has been higher than European and American rates. In 2000, the West produced 80 percent of the world’s output; by 2022, it was down to 60 percent, driven mainly by the rise of China. Today, some of the world’s fastest-growing nations are in Africa.
Just as Rome’s rise created an empire that stretched from Scotland to the Euphrates, it inadvertently led to the rise of other powers on its periphery, such as Persia, the Visigoths, and the Vandals.
This is the central theme in a recent book entitled Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, written by King’s College historian Peter Heather and Cambridge political economist John Rapley. They argue that Edward Gibbon’s six-volume 1776 classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire work has profoundly influenced how we think about the fall of Rome. Gibbon stressed Rome’s fall was caused by its inability or unwillingness to control its borders and further weakened by the rapid spread of Christianity, a position popular among neoliberals.
The first part of Why Empires Fall shows how archeological findings over the past few decades have changed our perception of what caused Rome’s eventual collapse. Rome’s fall wasn’t the long, slow decline, as Gibbon claimed. Rome reached its economic apex around 400 AD and fell quickly over the next few decades, ending when Rome’s last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, gave up his rule to Odoacer, king of the Goths, in 476 AD. Rome’s insatiable quest for more land and treasure led it to overreach, stressing its internal political system while strengthening its neighbours. In brief, the Roman Empire’s prosperity sowed the seeds of its demise. The authors believe the West is confronting the same reality and blowback with the growing wealth of former developing countries.
Rome’s fall parallels the modern West’s quest for greater profits beyond its borders by plundering the world’s resources over the past 200 years. The West must accept the reality that its power is waning, they assert. It can either retrench and close its borders or acknowledge the facts of a new world order.
Part two outlines the needed reforms to avoid Rome’s fate. The West can no longer expect to solve its internal political and economic problems by relying on cheap labour and resources from developing countries. To save its economy and status, America needs policies that diminish rising wealth disparities, higher taxes on wealth holders, more support for social programs, a universal basic income, affordable housing, higher minimum wages, and better job security. Regarding immigration, the authors want the West to confront the reality of an aging population. The West and America must also acknowledge and respect countries it once exploited as equals.
But what looked like China’s relentless rise looks bleak today. As international direct investment is drying up, China faces a mountain of debt from massive public infrastructure spending and private housing construction. Even China’s massive trillion-dollar Belt and Road program is in serious trouble. One can easily make the case that China is more likely to collapse, given President Xi’s disastrous handling of the COVID crisis, high youth unemployment, and a failed real estate market that has drained the savings of countless families. And China’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine jeopardizes its trade relations with the West.
China shares a border with fourteen countries, along with others that share the South China Sea, and most are suspicious of China’s new-found power and intentions. In comparison, the West and the U.S. economies look remarkably stable. China has few friends other than a group of failed states, including Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, perhaps South Africa, and now a collapsing Russia. Hardly “peripheral” nations ready to bring down the West.
The main strength of Why Empires Fall is that we now know more about Rome’s decline and the rise of outside powers that contributed to Rome’s demise. But to leap from that insight to pushing for a range of progressive policies to save the West—policies mainly aimed at the U.S.—is stretching the fall of Rome analogy. In Margaret MacMillan’s book The Uses and Abuses of History, American historian John Lewis Gaddis warned if we use history only as a rearview mirror, we risk landing in a ditch.
