Reading Stanford classicist Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome, one is struck by how human history is in large part a history of violence, war, looting, and atrocities. The Roman empire, which lasted from about 200 BCE to the 5th century CE, committed its share of the standard atrocities against vanquished people, including enslaving and killing civilians. It did, however, provide security to both Roman citizens and allied populations, which together comprised about three-quarters of Europe’s inhabitants. The book is mainly concerned with the western, or European, part of the empire; the eastern part, under its capital Constantinople, survived until the 15th century.

With its 670 pages, including 65 pages of instructive endnotes, this scholarly and remarkable book also shows the incredible diversity and richness of human history since antiquity.

Scheidel explains how the Roman empire established its dominion and how its fall affected the rest of Western history and especially the crucial event that was the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Europe. What distinguishes Western Europe from other parts of the world is that it was wholly dominated by an imperial government only once. Using counterfactuals or “rewrites of history” (what would have happened if, say, Rome had not, early on, conquered most of the Italian peninsula?), Scheidel argues that only unusual or accidental conditions allowed the empire to dominate Europe.

Polycentrism vs. empire / To review this book, it is useful to first discuss what happened after Rome fell, and then look back on how those events were rooted in the empire.

After Rome fell to barbarians in the 5th century CE, Europe splintered into numerous local polities such as small kingdoms, aristocratic domains, urban communes, and city-states. It never again fell under imperial government, except partly and briefly under Charlemagne in the 9th century and Napoléon in the early 19th. What happened in Europe after the 5th century is what Scheidel calls the “First Great Divergence,” as other parts of the world — China prominently — continued to be dominated by empires. According to medievalist Joseph Strayer, “By the year 1000 it would have been difficult to find anything like a state anywhere on the continent in Europe.”

Decentralized Europe proved very resilient, even at an early stage. In the 13th century, for example, Mongol forces attacked Russia and the east of Europe, “sacking most of the principal cities … and killing their ruling families.” They proceeded to Poland, Hungary, and Austria, and then retreated back. Why? Combined with the difficulty of finding grassland for their hundreds of thousands of horses, the 100,000 or so mounted warriors confronted a major hurdle: Europe’s “intense armed fragmentation” meant that a multitude of stone castles and fortified cities had to be conquered one at a time, if that was even possible. Moreover, given Europe’s fragmentation, “there was no central governments to offer surrender.”

By the 16th and 17th centuries, some European states had become quite large and their ruling families tried to form empires. Yet, Europe remained relatively fragmented and none of its states ever had a serious chance of forming a continental empire. Contrary to the Chinese imperial state, the “extractive capacity” of European states was constantly hampered. Polycentrism was visible not only in the competition between European states but also in their domestic institutions. European kings had to bargain with independent aristocrats and other intermediary pow ers, often even with parliaments of sorts. Europe had become a system of fractured and competitive states.

The Great Escape / Among the institutions that developed in Europe, in contrast to those of the paradigmatic case of imperial China, Scheidel mentions (but perhaps underestimates) private property rights and contracts. He does put his finger on another important factor: “Latin Europe’s competitive state system offered exit options to minorities, dissidents, and material and human capital.” For example, fragmentation enabled traders to choose among different routes, pushing down tolls.

The Enlightenment’s “culture of knowledge” that was necessary for the Industrial Revolution was itself a product of European polycentrism. The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the “Second Great Divergence,” which unleashed unprecedented economic growth and continued to separate freer countries from sclerotic empires. (See “From the Republic of Letters to the Great Enrichment,” Summer 2018.) The Industrial Revolution led to the “Great Escape” from economic stagnation and poverty.

Scheidel fumbles a bit when he tries to answer the question of whether the Industrial Revolution could have happened elsewhere in the world. Is he trying to avoid the accusation of Eurocentrism, a serious offense against political correctness? Regardless, he rightly praises the Great Escape:

Humanity paid a staggering price for modernity. … It was ceaseless struggle that ushered in the most dramatic and exhilaratingly open-ended transformation in the history of our species: the “Great Escape.” Long may it last.

The book’s main question is, what was the influence of the Roman empire on the Great Escape? Or, as the author puts it in his epilogue, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Nothing or close to nothing, he answers. In short, “the Roman empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back.” The escape from Rome cleared the way for European polycentrism, a “shackled Leviathan” (an expression attributable to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson), and the Great Escape.

If the Romans did anything for us, it is that “their empire, by turning to Christianity, laid some crucial foundations for much later development.” Those foundations were common religious values and Latin as a common elite language. But “in the end, competitive fracture may well have mattered more — or rather, even more — than residual cultural unity” (Scheidel’s emphasis).

Leviathan and general welfare / Despite Scheidel’s vast historical and economic knowledge, his understanding of Leviathan and of the requirements of general welfare could be improved. He notes that European states, especially in the North Sea region (mainly the Netherlands and Britain), came to be dominated by the commercial class. He claims that those states were useful in actively promoting development and mercantilism with the help of institutions like banks, public debt, and central banking. Missing is an explanation of why interventionism can be bad under an empire but good under an ordinary state, which after all is only a smaller empire.

Scheidel writes of “the Roman laissez-faire style of provincial governance.” He sometimes seems to believe that “laissez-faire” only means low rates of formal taxes. But laissez-faire as usually understood means low real taxes, and those include military conscription and other forms of government extraction that were common in the Roman empire. Laissez-faire means little or no government. Roman citizens and allied populations did face low nominal tax rates, but the empire was a very militarized society, a “war machine” in which 10%–15% of Roman citizens and members of dominated societies were conscripted for at least six or seven years. The system survived because continuous foreign wars were enriching the elite.

At other times, Scheidel grants that imperial laissez-faire even under Rome was not really laissez-faire: “However benevolent, restrained, or feeble the state, the specter of asset requisition never went away, and both endemic corruption and maintenance-oriented traditionalism were the norm.”

A related aspect of Scheidel’s questionable understanding of laissez-faire concerns his claim that protectionism helped European states prepare for the Great Escape. He admits that European elites “prized war and state interests over citizen welfare.” But how could policies focused on producers’ interests result in general prosperity? Economic growth not directed by consumers is not economic growth. Does he mean that, in the logic of institutions, one had to come before the other?

Moreover, if protectionism was good for Europe’s polycentric states, why was it bad for China, as he suggests? Chinese emperors forbade international trade in many ways over the centuries, from banning private international trade to forbidding the construction and operation of large oceangoing ships. Is it that a little protectionism is good and more protectionism is bad? This is not consistent with economic analysis.

Scheidel may exaggerate the benefits of colonial trade for Europe compared to what the benefits of free trade (which basically means freedom to import) would have been. Adam Smith’s evaluation of colonialism was very negative. Scheidel sometimes seems to harbor an implicit theory of economic growth that favors businessmen over consumers and taxpayers: “Whether empire paid overall is a moot point as long as it benefited the entrepreneurial class.” But perhaps he argues that the actions of the entrepreneurial class were necessary to sidestep the collective-action problem of dispersed consumers and taxpayers and start prosperity rolling.

Scheidel understands the danger of rivalry between ordinary states. In a footnote, he points out that interstate competition is “a euphemism for pointless warfare and consumer-unfriendly protectionism.” There were “443 wars in Europe between 1500 and 1800.” But he suggests that war promoted economic growth — a thesis that is difficult to defend from an economic (that is, consumer-friendly) viewpoint. It is useful to reflect on what Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

Given the centrality of Britain in the Industrial Revolution (and the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment), Scheidel notes that it matters that, by then, the country was independent. British entrepreneurs would otherwise have been (more) restrained by an empire’s natural conservatism. This is indeed the main argument for a system of independent states as opposed to a large empire: it preserves the possibility of liberty.

Extensions / Let’s not idealize the state. Its main, and perhaps only, benefit is to prevent a worse state, even a domestic one, from taking over — like a castle during a Mongolian invasion. Anthony de Jasay advanced this idea in his 1985 book The State. But the state is still dangerous. Scheidel observes that, in Europe, “smaller states with functioning representative institutions were able to impose higher tax rates than larger absolutist states.” This in turn reminds us of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s argument in his 1945 book On Power that therein lies the danger of democratic institutions: democracy can increase state power. When the state is perceived as “we the people,” the rulers can argue that “we” can do to ourselves what “we” want, while in fact the two “we” don’t refer to the same group.

Scheidel does not draw implications from European history for current world affairs. The reader may draw his own. One implication might be that Brexit is good because it allows an escape from an empire, although it must be admitted that the European Union is a loose empire: the proof is that it allows secession. If one denies this characterization of the EU, wouldn’t one have to think of the United States as an empire? Yet, the idea in the EU that it is a “civilization-state” looks dangerously imperial. The Economist recently wrote that this term is in vogue in China and Russia, but also implicitly in European political speech (“Huntington’s Disease and the Clash of Civilisation States,” January 2, 2020).

Another implication of the weaknesses of empires compared to decentralization: there is no reason to fear that the Chinese empire presents any economic challenge to freer economies so long as those societies remain freer.

Scheidel paraphrases Dutch historian Jan Luiten van Zanden as saying that the ascent of industrialized and democratic Europe “occurred in a political vacuum” of “weak or non-existent states” resulting from failed imperial projects. Similarly, French sociologist and historian Jean Baechler wrote that “the expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d’être to political anarchy” (Baechler’s emphasis). Do you smell a perfume of anarchy? From the polycentrism that followed the escape from Rome, can’t we hope for an ultimate development different from little Leviathans just replacing a big one? Perhaps we should travel the escape route again.