Political scientists should get on it! In Scheidel’s reading, Europe and China form something like ideal types along multiple dimensions, with the Middle East and South Asia, the other regions he considers, falling in between. In these works, European societies are usually contrasted with China, ostensibly Europe’s closest peer civilization. Rather than granting their warrior elites a share of tax revenue collected by the state they took over, new Germanic rulers of the Roman successor states chose to allot them land, massively decentralizing political authority in the process. Please correct the marked field(s) below. By the time serious interstate competition resumed in the late Middle Ages, these stakeholders had grown independent and powerful. Scheidel is only the latest in a long line of scholars attempting to explain the so-called Great Divergence- the vast gulf in standards of living between world regions that emerged in the 19th century, and set Europe and its overseas offshoots off on a radically different economic trajectory from the rest of the world. Administrative structures and systems of taxation simply withered away in western Europe. At the same time, Rome was surrounded by mostly weak and small polities, both within Italy and its near abroad in the western Mediterranean. So all right, apart from flexible budgeting, avoiding debt, reducing stress and improving staff retention, what has income streaming ever done for us? How often would Europe even end up polycentric? A rant a day helps you work, rest and play. In Scheidel’s view, all of the proximate causes of that revolution can be traced back to this political order. In his view, interstate competition inevitably generates incentives for increases in state capacity. Because if it hadn’t been for Julius Caesar and Augustus creating two new months, we might have had a mere ten paydays per year. Scheidel might be one of the people best placed to answer this question. A professor of Classics at Stanford University, his academic research has focused on state formation in the ancient world, and is marked by an ambitious, transregional comparative approach. -Escape from Rome makes an excellent companion to Daron Acemoglu’s and James Robinson’s recent The Narrow Corridor. As a result of this bargaining, polities become more politically inclusive at the same time as they became more capable. Its successor regime, the Han dynasty, experienced a trajectory strikingly similar to Imperial Rome. In a related but distinct dynamic, direct competition between the many European states may have catalyzed a virtuous cycle that led rulers to invest in effective administrative and military structures, leading to the modern state. Asking a labourer to wait a month for their money sounds borderline immoral. Around 800 million people around the globe s … Notice what I’ve done there – repeated the keyphrase as the first sentence of the post then gone off on a tangent and referred a question to it to get myself back on course. How is amongst not in the spellchecker??? In particular, Scheidel mentions that Southeast Asia’s history shares with Europe’s long periods of fragmentation, but he does not include that region in his study at all. At Wagestream we encounter this when we explain that we give workers access to their earned money through income streaming. There are a few other points at which I part ways with Scheidel. And it seems ten times more difficult to get round to doing something than it does to simply lie there and wallow in your own misery. One need not buy the argument that this difference in political fragmentation is at the root of modern inequalities, though it certainly seems plausible, to find it an interesting historical question. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before but I’m buggered if I can remember when. The importance of Rome, then, for European ascendance, was to collapse and never come back. Just continuing with the aside for a moment, Googling “Life of Brian” reminded me of a few other classic components of the film (other search engines are available): But for those of you who don’t want to click on the links, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease find the time to do so. The Romans are all bastards, / they have bled us 'till we're white, / they've taken everything we've got / as if it was their right, / and we've got nothing in return / though they Escape From Rome left me with a number of questions that I hope future work by Scheidel and other historians will dig into: Why was post-Roman polycentricity so durable? In this centuries-long power vacuum, other independent sources of power had the time and space to establish and assert themselves, chief among them the Catholic Church, autonomous cities with their merchants, and the warrior elites that had turned into Europe’s nobility. * spellchecker! history, he tries to convince us that rather than prefiguring European prosperity, Rome’s most important contribution to human welfare was to go away, and never return. All that being said, as an organizing framework for understanding why the European state and state system developed so differently from other world regions, it’s extremely valuable- and convincing. Just think how much harder stretching money to “the end of the month” would be if that were still the case. Over the centuries, these increasingly capable and inclusive states began investing in public goods, and carved out sufficient space for their merchants and scientists to develop the institutions and inventions that led to the Industrial Revolution. -Why did state resources get localized and privatized all across the former Western Roman Empire? Everyone else will be thinking wtf??? Or allow myself to get a bit more mileage out of another rambling aside and get the word count up to something more worthwhile. So far, this is old news. See our, He’s not the messiah, he’s just a naughty boy, Making TV in Lockdown? Still, 300+ words in and not got to the point yet. Yeah, yeah. Given its important place in European history, might Europe’s Roman inheritance even be responsible for Europe’s modern prosperity?

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