A review of the ambitious work “Why Empires Fall”
John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at King’s College, London. Together they have written a work which essentially argues that currently the Western Empire faces the kind of challenges that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire around 500 AD. The book seems to have attracted considerable praise, but I confess that I found it a difficult read and the central argument unconvincing.
The book is heavy going because it bounces constantly between the period 1945 to present, when the Western economic and political model has dominated world trade and geo-politics, and the middle centuries of the first millennium AD, when the Roman Empire came crashing down. It is insufficiently clear on why Rome fell and on why the West might do likewise.
The argument fails to convince because there is no consensus on why the Roman Empire collapsed when it did, the West today does not constitute an empire in the same way, and – even if we agreed on why Rome fell and that the West is a comparable empire – empires fall for different reasons.
I do agree with the authors when they assert: “It is not possible make the West great again in the sense of reasserting an unchallenged global domination.” They argue that survival of “the best of Western civilisation” requires an accommodation with a resurgent China, rather that across the board confrontation, and the implementation of “a new fiscal contract” which would include such elements as greater taxes on wealth rather than income, fairer labour laws, a universal basic income, increased home-building, and later retirement ages.