Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Escape from Rome. The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity.

Princeton University Press, Princeton / Oxford, 2019. XV,670p. Gilt titled hard bound with pictorial dust wrappers. Fore edge with some smaller stains. 'Walter Scheidel says in his acknowledgements that he proposed to write a short book on this topic, but he ended up with this long book. He seems to have written two books, as suggested by his subtitle: one about the fall of the Roman Empire and one about the Industrial Revolution. His aim is to connect these two events in a monocausal stream. (.) Scheidel summarizes his 500-page book as follows: 'I wrote this book to establish ? two simple points: that interlocking forms of productive fragmentation were of paramount importance and indeed indispensable in creating the specific set of conditions that gave birth to modernity, and that the divergences that precipitated this outcome in only one part of the world but not in others were highly robust (p. 27).' Alternatively, why did Europe rather than China have an industrial revolution? (.) Escape from Rome is a well-written survey of an enormous literature on the history of the world. If you have time to read 500 pages, it is fun and interesting to read. Economic historians might want to start with Part IV to evaluate Scheidel?s thesis. My summary is that this is an admirable book that would have benefited from an additional edit which included the current Epilogue in Part IV. Whether Rome had to rise and fall before we could have an Industrial Revolution remains speculative and worthy of discussion after reading through Scheidel?s history and counterfactual speculations.' (PETER TEMIN on Economic History Net, March 2020). Nº de ref. del artículo: 64066

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