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

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THIS BOOK has been long in the making. The Stanford Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project, which I launched in 2005 to promote the comparative study of early empires in western and eastern Eurasia, steered me toward the distant roots of modernity. In 20072008, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored a Mellon-Sawyer seminar on The First Great Divergence: Europe and China, 300800 CE that I ran jointly with my Stanford colleagues Ian Morris and Mark Lewis. But this was only a beginning: my engagement with more recent economic and institutional history, which expanded over the years as my research interests increasingly outgrew the confines of the ancient world, encouraged me to explore the full length of the meandering path toward contemporary levels of prosperity, knowledge, and human flourishing.

After all, there is no bigger question for the historian than that of why the world has turned out the way it has done so far, transformed beyond the wildest imagination of our ancestors just a few generations ago. In offering my answer to this question, I hope to advance what I have found to be an unfailingly exhilarating debate. My books main title is not just a nod to my own personal transition to global comparative history but above all seeks to capture the essence of our collective progressour escape from traditional strictures and structures that once weighed down so heavily on humankind that they proved almost impossible to overcome. Traditional forms of imperial rule had failed to make the world a better place and needed to fail altogether in order to set us free. There was no way of getting to Denmark without escaping from Rome first.

It is a joyous duty to acknowledge the support I have received along the way. Between 2007 and 2019, I spoke about various aspects of my project and received valuable feedback at Arizona State University, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Brooklyn College, Brown University, Claremont McKenna College, Columbia University, Cornell University, the Danish Academy in Rome, Dickinson College, McGill University, the Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica, the National University of Singapore, New York University, Northwestern University, the Open Society Forum in Ulaanbaatar, Radboud University, Renmin University of China, the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford University, Texas Tech University, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, the Universities of Cambridge, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Georgia, Leiden, Melbourne, Oxford, Texas, Tulsa, Utrecht, Warsaw and Zurich, and Yale University.

I wrote up most of this book during a sabbatical year in 20172018 when I was a visitor at New York Universitys Institute for Public Knowledge. I am grateful to Eric Klinenberg for his kind invitation, and much indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Stanford University for the financial support that allowed me to focus on the completion of my project.

I owe thanks of gratitude to John Hall and Philip Hoffman for reviewing an earlier version of my manuscript for the publisher; to Joy Connolly and Peer Vries for their detailed comments; and to Anna Grzymala-Busse, John Haldon, Kyle Harper, Reviel Netz, Sheilagh Ogilvie, and Richard Saller for further helpful observations. Daron Acemoglu, James Bennett, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Reviel Netz, evket Pamuk, James Robinson, David Stasavage, Michael Taylor, Paolo Tedesco, Peer Vries, Kaveh Yazdani, and Dingxin Zhao shared unpublished or otherwise inaccessible work with me.

In 2015, when I finally resigned myself to the fact that my argument could not readily be accommodated within a single (long) article as I had originally intended, I proposed a (short) book to Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press. I am glad that he did not blink when the final product came in at twice the agreed length. My thanks go to Rob for his customary support and light touch, to Joel Mokyr, to Jonathan Weiland for expertly preparing the maps, and to Natalie Baan, Bob Bettendorf, John Donohue, Sandra Friesen, Therese Malhame, Matt Rohal, and Stephanie Rojas for ensuring a smooth production process.

ESCAPE FROM ROME

Introduction

The Great Escape

WHAT?

WHAT WAS the Great Escape? It made it possible for me to write this book, and for you to read itwhich we could not do if we were busy farming the land, or were illiterate, or had died in childhood. It transformed the human condition by making so many of us so much richer, healthier, and better educated than our ancestors used to be.

This escape from sickness, ignorance, oppression, and want, which remains very much a work in progress in large parts of the world, was not made up of slow, gradual, and linear improvements. For the most part, it represented a radical break from the practices and life experiences of the past, a break that changed the world in the course of just a few generations.

Before the nineteenth century, a certain amount of intensiveper capitagrowth in economic output had taken place over the long run, but on a scale so modest that this cumulative increase becomes almost invisible when it is set against the breakthroughs of the past two centuries. Much the same is true of growth in the stock of knowledge and our ability to fight disease. This discontinuity accounts for the fact that any graph that tracks economic performance, or human welfare in general, in those parts of the world where modern economic development took off firstin Britain and then in other parts of

FIGURE I.1Per capita GDP in the United Kingdom, , and India, 10002000 CE (in 2011 US$). Source: Maddison Project Database 2018.

Thanks to this divergence, population number ceased to be the principal determinant of aggregate regional output. Global production and consumption shifted from what had long been the most populous parts of the worldEast and South Asiaand came to be heavily concentrated where this novel type of transformative development occurred: in Europe and North America, and later also in Japan (