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?
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.
"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."
The Church of the East split in the early 5th century, followed later that century by the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Altogether they may have been larger than the Roman (Latin and Greek/Byzantine) Church.
Armenia became a Christian state before the Roman Empire did, and Ethiopia not long after Rome did. (Both churches now part of Oriental Orthodoxy. Another state church around the area of Sudan emerged, too, the last of whom disappeared only in the 1600-1700s.)
The growth of Christianity in the Persian Empire created a major source of friction between the Roman and Persian Empires (the latter was nominally Zoroastrian, at that time also a proselytizing religion), creating space for the emergence of Islam, which would later lead to the end of both empires and the conversion of millions of Christians and Zoroastrians.
Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman Empire. It just seemed that way from the perspective of European history and culture. European Christianity eventually forgot about those other Christians (I'm not sure if the reverse was true, though). Relative to modern Protestantism, all of these churches have near identical theology, Roman Catholicism included. Which perhaps bolsters the point about Protestantism representing a significant break in the European historical narrative.
Yes, there's a rupture between Eastern and Western Christianity, but Western Christianity still accepts the authority of the pope to speak on behalf of Christianity, and there's still a sense that they're still part of the same Christendom, just disputing who is going to come out on top. You might compare it to the modern "One China Policy" in that both Taiwan and China see themselves as the legitimate government representing all of China. Note that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine Emperor both titled themselves as Emperor of the Romans--they're still claiming heir to the same unified Christendom.
(And also note that the latest Byzantine Emperors repeatedly tried to mend the schism to secure Western aid in stabilizing their empire.)
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.
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.
But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.
And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.
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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.
It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.
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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.
But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.
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.
There are many examples in anquity. Greek had a flowering in the Bronze age, then a dark age, before classical Greek took over. The Hittites had a major disaster including the destruction of their capital before they recovered in a great way (until their final demise at the end of the Bronze age). Egypt had several dark periods where they recovered from, until they fell prey to Greek and Roman imperialism.
Other people answered better than I could, although some of their examples were what I had in mind (China, much of Europe over the last 150 years or so, maybe the US during the 19th century).
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.
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.
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.)
yeah the seeds were there for sure -- they countries that were rebuilt were already the major empires.
you're not creating a new society from whole cloth, you're taking already battered Big Dogs and getting them back to being Big again (minus the, you know, Nazis and bad actors).
but they were already societies that had cutting edge tech and made serious end-runs at taking over the world.
South Korea would be the only real example of where you took the poor agrarian area and eventually grew it into an asian tiger.
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.
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[1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
that's a stretch. it's hard to argue it's a continuity when there were two (2) direct wars where the US aggressively rejected British domination -- and then set about creating a entirely separate form of government.
in concert there was the Great Revival and a whole new emergence of new world evangelicalism, a far cry from the Church of England.
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".
> 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.
Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.
Isn't that just because a large portion of the early English colonialists moved to the USA precisely because they weren't Anglicans?
See for example the Mayflower: they left England due to prosecution, moved to The Netherlands, then left for the USA because there was too much freedom for them and they wanted to impose stricter rules.
There's of course the obvious heritage in the sense that the Reformation started in Germany, but movements like the Mennonites have never really caught on there or in The Netherlands.
They only took off once they landed in the USA, so I wouldn't call that a change of seat.
Well, considering that Puritans actually managed to push through the prohibition on Christmas (and Easter) celebrations, it's no wonder they got so wildly unpopular that they had to emigrate.
> 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.
This underestimates how Germanic, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic America is.
For example - Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc are all German.
And having stayed in the UK for extended periods for work, it is significantly different culturally speaking than much of the US.
> Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This question depends as much on you as it does on history, because it's about identity: what made Rome Rome?
To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
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".
The standard of living in Rome was not surpassed for more than a millennium. Large parts of the empire were at peace for centuries, allowing economy and trade to thrive. Many provinces that were peaceful and prosperous were ravaged by wars, ethnic conflicts, and plagues for many centuries after the fall.
> I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption.
For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable.
Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.
Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.
I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so.
Good ones by csallen which makes sense as he runs Indie Hackers and literally sees people daily getting rich or at least making enough money to support themselves, all from online businesses.
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.
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.
Oddly, for some companies, the money comes from advertisers. When this started becoming a thing, I figured it would be a bubble and eventually businesses would wise up, but they've kept on paying for decades now.
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?
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.
"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."
The Christendom ceased to be unified a whole lot earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
The Church of the East split in the early 5th century, followed later that century by the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Altogether they may have been larger than the Roman (Latin and Greek/Byzantine) Church.
Armenia became a Christian state before the Roman Empire did, and Ethiopia not long after Rome did. (Both churches now part of Oriental Orthodoxy. Another state church around the area of Sudan emerged, too, the last of whom disappeared only in the 1600-1700s.)
The growth of Christianity in the Persian Empire created a major source of friction between the Roman and Persian Empires (the latter was nominally Zoroastrian, at that time also a proselytizing religion), creating space for the emergence of Islam, which would later lead to the end of both empires and the conversion of millions of Christians and Zoroastrians.
Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman Empire. It just seemed that way from the perspective of European history and culture. European Christianity eventually forgot about those other Christians (I'm not sure if the reverse was true, though). Relative to modern Protestantism, all of these churches have near identical theology, Roman Catholicism included. Which perhaps bolsters the point about Protestantism representing a significant break in the European historical narrative.
Yes, there's a rupture between Eastern and Western Christianity, but Western Christianity still accepts the authority of the pope to speak on behalf of Christianity, and there's still a sense that they're still part of the same Christendom, just disputing who is going to come out on top. You might compare it to the modern "One China Policy" in that both Taiwan and China see themselves as the legitimate government representing all of China. Note that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine Emperor both titled themselves as Emperor of the Romans--they're still claiming heir to the same unified Christendom.
(And also note that the latest Byzantine Emperors repeatedly tried to mend the schism to secure Western aid in stabilizing their empire.)
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.
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.
Yep. The Crisis of the Third Century, especially.
But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.
And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.
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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.
It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.
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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.
But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.
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.
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.
There are many examples in anquity. Greek had a flowering in the Bronze age, then a dark age, before classical Greek took over. The Hittites had a major disaster including the destruction of their capital before they recovered in a great way (until their final demise at the end of the Bronze age). Egypt had several dark periods where they recovered from, until they fell prey to Greek and Roman imperialism.
Other people answered better than I could, although some of their examples were what I had in mind (China, much of Europe over the last 150 years or so, maybe the US during the 19th century).
English Civil War in the 1640s.
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.
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.
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.)
yeah the seeds were there for sure -- they countries that were rebuilt were already the major empires.
you're not creating a new society from whole cloth, you're taking already battered Big Dogs and getting them back to being Big again (minus the, you know, Nazis and bad actors).
but they were already societies that had cutting edge tech and made serious end-runs at taking over the world.
South Korea would be the only real example of where you took the poor agrarian area and eventually grew it into an asian tiger.
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.
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[1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
that's a stretch. it's hard to argue it's a continuity when there were two (2) direct wars where the US aggressively rejected British domination -- and then set about creating a entirely separate form of government.
in concert there was the Great Revival and a whole new emergence of new world evangelicalism, a far cry from the Church of England.
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".
> 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.
Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.
Isn't that just because a large portion of the early English colonialists moved to the USA precisely because they weren't Anglicans?
See for example the Mayflower: they left England due to prosecution, moved to The Netherlands, then left for the USA because there was too much freedom for them and they wanted to impose stricter rules.
There's of course the obvious heritage in the sense that the Reformation started in Germany, but movements like the Mennonites have never really caught on there or in The Netherlands.
They only took off once they landed in the USA, so I wouldn't call that a change of seat.
Well, considering that Puritans actually managed to push through the prohibition on Christmas (and Easter) celebrations, it's no wonder they got so wildly unpopular that they had to emigrate.
The Puritans fundamentally shaped American society and culture. They were English.
> 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.
This underestimates how Germanic, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic America is.
For example - Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc are all German.
And having stayed in the UK for extended periods for work, it is significantly different culturally speaking than much of the US.
Disney?
> Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And similarly, the cruzader conquest of the East
Yes! Partially this was due to various people complaining about the decline of Rome for centuries (sky is falling).
The parallels are unmistakeable.
Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k
This question depends as much on you as it does on history, because it's about identity: what made Rome Rome?
To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
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".
The standard of living in Rome was not surpassed for more than a millennium. Large parts of the empire were at peace for centuries, allowing economy and trade to thrive. Many provinces that were peaceful and prosperous were ravaged by wars, ethnic conflicts, and plagues for many centuries after the fall.
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.
> I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption.
For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable.
Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.
>I'm not sure why you got down voted
Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.
I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840
I bookmarked that thread for future reference. There's a lot of gems in there.
Good ones by csallen which makes sense as he runs Indie Hackers and literally sees people daily getting rich or at least making enough money to support themselves, all from online businesses.
taxes were very low for the majority of civilization and war was way more prevalent than it is today.
The fall of empire merely affects a nations ability to handle chaotic unexpected events.
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.
You'd think that an army full of oppressed Roman citizens would've overthrown them right.
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.
They're still based on controlling shares and extracting profits from workers. Very similar.
Oddly, for some companies, the money comes from advertisers. When this started becoming a thing, I figured it would be a bubble and eventually businesses would wise up, but they've kept on paying for decades now.
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.