Escape from Rome
by Walter Scheidel · first published 2019
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4HN commenters
2020–2024first – last mentioned
25% recommend75% neutral
"In this book, Walter Scheidel provides a unique take on the perennial debates about the rise of the west. His main argument is straightforward and provocative: the fact that nothing like the Roman Empire ever again emerged in Europe was a crucial precondition for modern economic growth, the Industrial Revolution and worldwide conquest much later on. Contra Ken Pomeranz's classic thesis about the "Great Divergence" of the 18th/19th centuries when northwestern Europe pulled away from China and the rest of world in terms of economic performance and overall power, Scheidel argues there was a much
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…the Roman Empire's unique role in European history and why no other power in the region could matching it after "the fall" was, eventually, something that worked out in Europe's favour. It's called: "Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity" https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/es...
on “A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history” ↗…put a book on the author's resume.) Some arguments are intrinsically long. Building up an understanding of thermodynamics (not just a summary of its formulation) is certainly book length. Scheidel's 'Escape from Rome' is not going to fit into an article. So I don't really balance. Sometimes I have a big book in flight and that's going to take a lot of my attention. Sometimes I don't, but I have a number of interesting…
on “Ask HN: How do you balance reading books vs. articles” ↗The Roman historian Walter Scheidel has a whole book (Escape from Rome) on this question -- basically, exploring the idea that Europe never really reformed a large-scale empire after the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 5th C, whereas other parts of Eurasia (esp.…
on “Tocharian Languages” ↗…completely real but also unbelievable. The songs he had written by 1965. Hitler: A Biography, by Ian Kershaw. Completely real, also unbelievable. The German people voting against democracy. Unbelievable. Escape From Rome, Walter Scheidel, "The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world". I think about the Roman Empire a lot, so basically it was a military slave state and it…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024” ↗