What have the Romans ever done for us? In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the answers included aqueducts, baths and peace. But what if the right answer is: “their empire fell”? In short, western Europe’s transformative role in world history is due to the absence of a Europe-wide empire. That created what the ancient historian Walter Scheidel calls the “competitive fragmentation” of western Europe. Competition drove the commercial, intellectual, technological, legal and political changes that led in the end to the industrial revolution. Thereupon, everything changed.
The benefit of fragmentation is the central idea of Scheidel’s Escape from Rome, published in 2019. The idea was not new. But Scheidel brought it to life, by rooting the progress of western Europe in the inability of any later power to repeat what Rome did. Unlike in China, the Middle East or India, encompassing empire never returned.
For 1,500 years, European states competed with one another. Think of this as “the scorpions in a bottle” theory of European history. The scorpions needed to develop venomous stings to survive and prosper in this ferocious environment. They did so — so much so, in fact, that a small European island conquered much of the world and began the industrial revolution. Some states dropped out of the competition. But innovations and ideas repressed in some places just moved elsewhere.