Getting Rome Right and America Wrong

In Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, Peter Heather and John Rapley set themselves to an all-too-familiar task, drawing lessons from the fall of the Roman Empire to apply to the ever-imminent and somehow never-yet-arriving collapse of the U.S.-led global order. Indeed, comparison between the United States and Rome, particularly its decline, is a well-worn and time-tested genre.

Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, Peter Heather and John Rapley, Yale University Press, 200 pp., $27, September 2023

Yet the book has a distinctly British perspective. That’s unsurprising given that the authors write from King’s College London and the University of Cambridge, respectively, but it is an uncomfortable fit for a Western global order in which the Pacific is every bit as important at the Atlantic. As a result, while Heather and Rapley provide a masterful vision of the whole of the late Roman Empire, they write on the apparent decline of the modern Western “empire” from a perspective on its periphery.

Much of the United States’ global world is missing from the narrative. While the European Union, Brexit, and NATO come up frequently, much of the Pacific economic and diplomatic infrastructure barely appears: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations are all absent from the volume. The U.K. National Health Service has an index entry, but the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, née NAFTA, does not. It is the fall of Rome but as it might have been written from Roman Greece or, indeed, Roman Britain, shaped more by British declinism than U.S. realities. This, too, is a well-worn comparison; worries that the British Empire might overextend and then decline like the Roman Empire had go back at least to the late 1800s, to British Prime Minister William Gladstone and Rudyard Kipling. As a history of Rome, the book is fascinating, but as a lesson for our times, it is shaky.

“The Course of Empire: Destruction,” painted by Thomas Cole in 1836.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Heather and Rapley’s fundamental insight is a deceptively simple one: that empires by their very nature alter the structures of wealth and power that enabled their emergence in the first place. Rome’s Mediterranean empire created new economic and political power centers both in the provinces and across the frontier. In the same way, they argue that the empire of “the West” has transformed the global landscape. The globalized economy created by the West, initially for the purpose of extraction, nevertheless created fertile soil for the creation of new centers of wealth and production in the developing world. As the centers of economic production shifted along the trade lanes the Western powers had themselves created, their own economies deindustrialized, and the share of global GDP produced in the West began to decline.

At the same time, these new elites’ interests did not perfectly match those of the old imperial center, leading to strain. Heather and Rapley trace in particular the story of the Tatas, one of Bombay’s most successful business families, both in their newly developed wealth but also in their political shift away from Britain and toward Indian nationalism in the 1890s; it is but one example of a story that recurred throughout Europe’s old empires and is no doubt replaying today across the developing world.

The West must, Heather and Rapley maintain, resist the temptation to try to turn back the clock to “‘make America great again’ (or the UK, or the EU).” Instead, it should adapt to this new world of its own creation by banding together into a larger bloc that includes not merely the imperial powers but developing ones that “share important cultural and institutional legacies with the old Western powers” while engaging in reform at home to reduce socially corrosive economic inequality.

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Heather and Rapley open with an overly neat narrative of how the understanding of the late Roman world has changed. Their potted historiography suggests that the gloomy vision of economic decline advanced by Edward Gibbon was decisively replaced decades ago by archaeology that showed thriving provincial economies in the late imperial period. But the debates about the nature of the late Roman economy and its decline—debates in which Heather is one of the key competing voices—are complex and ongoing. Yet quite a few indicators still point to serious economic decline in the fourth and fifth centuries. Wolfgang Liebeschuetz’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman City compiles evidence that urban decay was well underway in many parts of the Roman Empire well before the final fifth-century collapse, while work by Andrew Wilson and Justin Leidwanger suggests that the decline in maritime trade, beginning in the 300s, was real and significant, if geographically uneven. Willem Jongman, meanwhile, has put together a diverse array of prosperity indicators to suggest that living standards were already declining in this period, in an article provocatively titled “Gibbon Was Right.” The reader is given little sense of this debate, merely one broad consensus being transformed into another apparently secure consensus.

Yet the vision of the late Roman world that Heather and Rapley go on to present is a compelling one and splendidly delivered. Rome’s economic integration, initially established so that the imperial center could more efficiently exploit its conquered provinces, led to the emergence of new wealth and new elites in the provinces, which in turn shifted the centers of power. This is delightfully illustrated by the contrast between the provincial poet-turned-politician Decimus Magnus Ausonius hailing from fourth-century Gaul and his contemporary, the snobbish blue-blooded Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus.

Across the frontier, exposure to the Roman economy created new centers of population and wealth outside Rome’s borders. That wealth, combined with the military pressure of living next door to the fearsome Roman military machine, in turn empowered leaders across the Rhine and Danube to form ever larger, more durable, and more formidable polities. At the same time, renewed Roman aggression in the East in the second century C.E. led to the emergence of a stronger peer competitor, the Sassanid Empire, locking Rome into a series of expensive conflicts it could ill afford. Rome shaped its own enemies—and as a demonstration of the thesis that empires decline in part because they transform their own foundations and then fail to adapt to those changes, the treatment of the late Roman Empire is both capable and useful.

People gather to watch rehearsals for the Fourth of July celebrations at the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington on July 3, 2002. Manny Ceneta/AFP via Getty Images

The narrative of the late empire is in turn interwoven with analogies to the West. While the book is titled Why Empires Fall, it does not compare two empires but rather one empire, the Roman one, with a rather loose grouping of states and cultures, the West. Many of these Western states had actual empires—and saw other Western imperial powers as their main competitors. The alchemy by which the authors transformed the sweep of European and Euro-American power from 1800 to the present into a singular empire of “the West” can be a deceptive one. For one, this lumps together three rather distinct eras: a period of multipolarity defined primarily by Western European empires before the World Wars; a period of bipolarity defined by the United States and the Soviet Union from World War II to 1991; and finally an era of U.S. preeminence from 1991 to, arguably, the present.

The conflation of these eras into a single “West” serves to obscure real differences in these three different periods. The great movement of the West’s Asian and African “periphery” out of extreme poverty belongs not to the colonial era before the World Wars but to the postwar era and indeed primarily to the post-Cold War era. Likewise, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and concomitant rising influence of the People’s Republic of China have been largely a post-Cold War phenomenon.

This need not be fatal to the book’s underlying argument about empires and transformation, but it implies not one monolithic Western imperial order so much as a succession of imperial orders, each undermining its own foundations in turn. Treating the colonial European empires as of one piece with today’s international order obscures as much as it clarifies, not because the United States is destined for imperium sine fine but simply because the U.S.-led world order is not a direct continuation of the British one, nor is the experience of the shifting centers of wealth and power in the world the same in the United States as in the United Kingdom.

Yet, as a description of the state of U.S. hegemony, the book feels oddly dated, with many of the signs of decline cited in its closing chapters having recently been halted or even reversed. It’s a reminder of how uncertain geopolitical narratives actually are—the view from 2023 looks very different from the view from 2019. China, far from inevitably rising, has stumbled, and the question being asked is no longer when the Chinese economy will exceed the United States but if it will ever reach nominal economic parity in the first place.

China’s penchant for directing a very high share of its national income into investment, hailed as an advantage by Heather and Rapley, increasingly looks like a trap as Chinese growth slows and debt levels soar above even those in the United States, while the government struggles to boost private consumption. Meanwhile, as the authors mention briefly, Western alliances have shown renewed strength in their response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, leaving the position of the United States as the leader of a large coalition of mostly wealthy, mostly democratic states looking quite a bit stronger. And income inequality, cited by the authors as a rising sign of social rot, has been declining in the United States since 2022, while the U.S. economy strengthens and shows limited but significant growth in real wages.

A pedestrian walks past a shuttered store with a going-out-of-business poster in the window in Chester, England, on Aug. 12, 2020. Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images

Except, of course, that none of this applies in the United Kingdom, where income inequality rose last year and the economy continues to flirt with recession and the country’s role as a major power continues to slip into the past. The authors describe outreach to countries such as India and South Africa as “engagement with the old periphery,” yet for the United States these are not old colonies but potential new friends. Indeed, as an analogy for the collapse of the British Empire, the book’s approach is altogether apt.

The British Empire created new classes of provincial elites whose interests aligned only imperfectly with the old imperial center, much like late Roman elites and their cross-frontier “barbarian” peers. Then, when great-power competition in the form of two World Wars sapped the strength and wealth of the imperial center, much as Roman warfare with the Sassanids did, the whole thing began to fragment. And just as the Roman response to weakness was often intensified insularity that rendered what remained of the empire still weaker, the U.K. has itself turned inward, increasingly shunning needed engagement with both the European community and new immigrants, a parallel the authors themselves note.

The insight of Why Empires Fall remains valid: If the world that the Roman and British empires created passed them by to their ruin, so, too, might the world that the United States and its allies created from the ashes of World War II pass them by, if they do not adapt to the changes they created.