èצӰ��

Speaker(s): Walter Scheidel (èצӰ��)

"How the Fall of Rome Remade the World"
 
The absence of universal empire on a subcontinental scale in medieval and modern Europe represented a dramatic break not only with earlier conditions in that region but also with a well-established default pattern of serial imperial state formation in many other parts of the world. The fact that nothing like the Roman Empire ever again emerged in Europe was the single most important precondition for modern economic growth, the Industrial Revolution, and worldwide Western dominance much later on. I develop this argument by comparing patterns of state formation across Afroeurasia, by identifying critical junctures at which large-scale empire might arguably have returned to post-Roman Europe, by exploring the geographical, ecological and cultural roots of that region’s enduring polycentrism, and by linking competing types of explanations of the “Great Divergence” to interstate and intra-state fragmentation and its developmental consequences. I do so in the hope of persuading the audience that the pursuit of unfashionably big questions should not be excised from the repertoire of the historical profession.
 
Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at èצӰ��.
 
More information: