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Gimpei 1 hours ago [-]
To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.
thomassmith65 48 minutes ago [-]
The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.
hyperman1 34 minutes ago [-]
I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
nsavage 14 minutes ago [-]
This is a really interesting idea. I'd never put this together myself, but its really compelling. It really shows the value of the phrase "history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme".
mathgeek 19 minutes ago [-]
> Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
derbOac 2 hours ago [-]
This makes an important point, and is important to think about, but I'm also interested in how societies go to that brink and come back.
I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization.
The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
jcranmer 3 minutes ago [-]
The best answer may well be some time in the 1500s. Recall that as the era shifts from the late Classical to early Medieval, all of these people are still speaking the Roman language (Vulgar Latin, which evolves into the various Romance languages), following the Roman religion (Christianity), obeying Roman legal codes, and in many aspects, still following Roman customs and experience the same Roman economic and administrative system. In the case of the Byzantines, there is continuous institutional survival until the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Now, what that Roman society looks like in the 500s is very much not the same Roman society we conceptualize of in the 100s, but there is largely no clean break [1]. There is political disunity, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a recognized commonality of culture (cf. China, where similar major periods of disunity are still categorized as all being part of China).
The major rupture is the Protestant Reformation, where the split between Protestant and Catholic Christianity proves irreconcilable, and results in the end of the notional idea of a unified Christendom. This is also when you start to see an end towards the practice of writing in the literate language of Christendom (i.e., Latin) and instead move towards working in the vernacular, especially in endeavors like scientific research.
[1] The major exception is Britain, where the end of Roman rule is very abruptly realized, and there is a distinct clear horizon between sub-Roman Britannia and Anglo-Saxon Britain. But the British experience is largely the exception, not the rule.
unsnap_biceps 2 hours ago [-]
Can you give any examples of societies that went to the brink and reversed course? I can't think of any, but I'd be fascinated to learn more about examples who have.
topkai22 2 hours ago [-]
Rome, multiple times before the western empire actually fell. I’m not an expert, but roughly there was a major civil war about once a century (or more), a transition from a republic to an empire, the experiment with the tetrarchy, and a major change in state religion.
They didn’t entirely “reverse course”, the society changed and evolved at each point, but it remained recognizably Roman. And that’s just the western empire.
cadamsdotcom 2 hours ago [-]
You’d really enjoy the book “The Democratic Coup D’Etat.” It looks at societies that had revolutions then installed democracy, starting with Portugal and moving to the US and several others, and tries to draw a through-line and find the common elements.
Focused on democratic turnarounds so its adjacent to your curiosity - but a great, enlightening read.
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
In China, after the collapse of a dynasty, there eventually was another dynasty. It wasn’t the same rulers, but a similar pattern recurred.
Also, the Roman Empire had terrible civil wars and recovered. Until it didn’t.
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
Europe in general, after the World Wars. Ditto Japan.
The thing is, though, they had help recovering, and help stepping back from the brink. Help won't be coming this time. Just as there are no George Marshalls in today's Republican party, and no room for any, there is no one outside the US who will come to our own rescue.
userulluipeste 20 minutes ago [-]
The Marshall Plan merely accelerated the recovery, serving as seed money for a lot of investment (among other goals). Even without such help, the conditions for recovery were there. (I also like to think that the same conditions are still present nowadays, and the help you mention won't not play an essential role for anything. But, in case I'm wrong, i.e. if the conditions may not be there any more, then I very much doubt that financial help will count for anything.)
pavlov 2 hours ago [-]
English Civil War in the 1640s.
ricree 2 hours ago [-]
Arguably, Rome itself is such an example. Over the course of its long history it was repeatedly pushed to the brink of ruin only to slowly build back up without ever quite reaching its old heights.
The crisis of the third century could easily have been the doom of Rome, with its crumbling splinter states infighting until they broke apart completely. Instead, the succession of Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine were able to build it back into a single unified state, if not so prosperous or dominant as the previous version had been.
The same chaos that took the west might well have claimed the east as well under different circumstances, but over time they were able to restabilize, recover, and start to grow again. If not for the Justinian Plague, the reconquest of Italy might have been an actual success instead of the phyrric one it turned into. If nothing else, they at least managed to hold onto fully half the empire until centuries later when the Arabic conquests began.
And speaking of those early conquests, there was absolutely no guarantee that those wars were something they would survive. The Empire was still recovering from a brutal, generations long war against Persia, which itself did not survive as an independent state. The sieges of Constantinople were harsh and brutal, and could have gone differently, but they held on and slowly regained control of what they could, until the Macedonian dynasty was at least the foremost power in the region once again.
But then they screwed it up, spent some years in decline from a succession of bad rulers culminating in a few key defeats to the Turkish invaders caused in large part by infighting from wealthy elites. After this, they spent most of a generation with various elites selling off bits of the remaining empire to secure a throne whose value continued dropping with each betrayal. This too could easily have been the end, but eventually things stabilized. One of these grasping leaders actually managed to hold onto power and slowly rebuild. Then one lucky crusade later, they actually have much of their pre-Turkish territory back.
Except oops, a grasping member of the imperial family seizes control and drives it into the ground. After that we get a succession of weak emperors unable to deal with the harsh realities of their situation, followed by a series of coups that results in one of the displaced heirs inviting the fourth crusade into empire, which eventually results in the capital being sacked and the empire shattering into tiny city states.
That really ought to have been the end. Except that one of these states managed to regain control, rebuild to a fraction of their old strength, and at least hold most of Greece and Western Anatolia. It was a tiny, tiny fraction of the pre-crusade empire, much less Rome at its height, but they were still able to carve another century or two of stability when all hope had seemed lost.
vkou 2 hours ago [-]
In contemporary societies, you can view any peaceful transition from a strong-monarch to a parliamentary democracy as such an example. None of that happened out of the largess of the monarch, it happened because pressure and unrest has been building up, and he sees the writing on the wall, and would rather cede power peacefully rather than go the way of the Bourbons[1].
There are many situations in history when people on one side back down right before shit hits the fan. Another good example of that was British subjugation of India. Doesn't matter how much hot gas Churchill would emit about keeping India forever British, when push came to shove, Clement was sympathetic to India's desire for freedom, and did not choose to plunge the empire into colonial war.
--
[1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
mejutoco 2 hours ago [-]
Funny enough, in Spain the bourbons went in the other direction in recent history (1975): republic -> civil war and dictatorship and then the bourbon monarch that was the dictator successor had a role in transitioning to parliamentary monarchy.
comrade1234 2 hours ago [-]
I've always liked stories about the post-Roman empire when you still had evidence of a richer and more civilized time that your ancestors lived in but you were stuck in your time. I know it's probably fiction, but I always got that fix from King Arthur stories.
It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
recursivecaveat 2 hours ago [-]
I think it was a pretty common pre-modern (not by any means extinct today) academic view that the arc of history was generally towards the decline of civilizations. Like our ancestors were great and amazing and we're just kindof pale imitations of them. It probably doesn't hurt that when the two most important sources of authority in your society are noble title/blood and religion, your ancestors are much closer connected to the source of those.
Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.
Planktonne 2 hours ago [-]
If you haven't yet read The Eagle of the Ninth and its sequels, you might really like them. They're set in Britain that is slowly going post-Roman, and the change in culture is a significant theme.
dotancohen 58 minutes ago [-]
Was that the book that opens with a child running barefoot, and later playing an instrument to entertain guests against his desires? I began reading that book four decades ago and have been unable to find it since.
joshcsimmons 1 hours ago [-]
Yes! Partially this was due to various people complaining about the decline of Rome for centuries (sky is falling).
Ironically enough, the thing that really did Roman Italy it was Justinian’s reconquest. The Gothic War was absolutely devastating. Yersinia pestis didn’t help either, of course.
2 hours ago [-]
theoeirjfb 2 hours ago [-]
I do not get the obsession with fall of Rome being a bad thing. Look at taxation, look at big part of population being in slavery. Their military machine, roads and civilisation was basically just to crash rebelions!
Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
CoastalCoder 1 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting point and worth discussing.
I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
riffraff 40 minutes ago [-]
taxes were very low for the majority of civilization and war was way more prevalent than it is today.
mentalgear 3 hours ago [-]
One of the engines of collapse of Rome was the corrupt financial elite extending to the government that designed rules to extract maximum wealth for the elites, ignoring the long-term health of the economy. By the end, the government was essentially squeezing a dry sponge. Seems like civilisation has learned nothing.
diordiderot 8 minutes ago [-]
You'd think that an army full of oppressed Roman citizens would've overthrown them right.
bamboozled 3 hours ago [-]
The elites have, and that’s what they’re doing in the USA. As for the plebs. It’s expensive bread and UFC on the Whitehouse lawn.
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
In ancient times, wealth was based on controlling farmland and extracting food from peasants. Modern economies don’t work like that, so what you can learn from historical analogies is limited.
chadgpt3 1 hours ago [-]
They're still based on controlling shares and extracting profits from workers. Very similar.
Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization.
The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
The major rupture is the Protestant Reformation, where the split between Protestant and Catholic Christianity proves irreconcilable, and results in the end of the notional idea of a unified Christendom. This is also when you start to see an end towards the practice of writing in the literate language of Christendom (i.e., Latin) and instead move towards working in the vernacular, especially in endeavors like scientific research.
[1] The major exception is Britain, where the end of Roman rule is very abruptly realized, and there is a distinct clear horizon between sub-Roman Britannia and Anglo-Saxon Britain. But the British experience is largely the exception, not the rule.
They didn’t entirely “reverse course”, the society changed and evolved at each point, but it remained recognizably Roman. And that’s just the western empire.
Focused on democratic turnarounds so its adjacent to your curiosity - but a great, enlightening read.
Also, the Roman Empire had terrible civil wars and recovered. Until it didn’t.
The thing is, though, they had help recovering, and help stepping back from the brink. Help won't be coming this time. Just as there are no George Marshalls in today's Republican party, and no room for any, there is no one outside the US who will come to our own rescue.
The crisis of the third century could easily have been the doom of Rome, with its crumbling splinter states infighting until they broke apart completely. Instead, the succession of Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine were able to build it back into a single unified state, if not so prosperous or dominant as the previous version had been.
The same chaos that took the west might well have claimed the east as well under different circumstances, but over time they were able to restabilize, recover, and start to grow again. If not for the Justinian Plague, the reconquest of Italy might have been an actual success instead of the phyrric one it turned into. If nothing else, they at least managed to hold onto fully half the empire until centuries later when the Arabic conquests began.
And speaking of those early conquests, there was absolutely no guarantee that those wars were something they would survive. The Empire was still recovering from a brutal, generations long war against Persia, which itself did not survive as an independent state. The sieges of Constantinople were harsh and brutal, and could have gone differently, but they held on and slowly regained control of what they could, until the Macedonian dynasty was at least the foremost power in the region once again.
But then they screwed it up, spent some years in decline from a succession of bad rulers culminating in a few key defeats to the Turkish invaders caused in large part by infighting from wealthy elites. After this, they spent most of a generation with various elites selling off bits of the remaining empire to secure a throne whose value continued dropping with each betrayal. This too could easily have been the end, but eventually things stabilized. One of these grasping leaders actually managed to hold onto power and slowly rebuild. Then one lucky crusade later, they actually have much of their pre-Turkish territory back.
Except oops, a grasping member of the imperial family seizes control and drives it into the ground. After that we get a succession of weak emperors unable to deal with the harsh realities of their situation, followed by a series of coups that results in one of the displaced heirs inviting the fourth crusade into empire, which eventually results in the capital being sacked and the empire shattering into tiny city states.
That really ought to have been the end. Except that one of these states managed to regain control, rebuild to a fraction of their old strength, and at least hold most of Greece and Western Anatolia. It was a tiny, tiny fraction of the pre-crusade empire, much less Rome at its height, but they were still able to carve another century or two of stability when all hope had seemed lost.
There are many situations in history when people on one side back down right before shit hits the fan. Another good example of that was British subjugation of India. Doesn't matter how much hot gas Churchill would emit about keeping India forever British, when push came to shove, Clement was sympathetic to India's desire for freedom, and did not choose to plunge the empire into colonial war.
--
[1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.
The parallels are unmistakeable.
Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k
Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.