Why Rome Collapsed: Lessons For the Present

No nation clinging to the current “waste is growth / landfill economy” will survive the emergent global polycrisis.

Identifying why the western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD has been a parlor game for at least two centuries, since Edward Gibbon published his monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged). Gibbon concluded Christianity had a major role in weakening the Empire, a view few today share.

Part of the fun of the parlor game is trying to identify the one thing that pushed it over the cliff: poisoning from lead pipes and wine goblets being a famous example that has been discounted by modern historians.

New research is more holistic, considering factors that were ignored or dismissed in the past, such as climate change and pandemics.

The word polycrisis captures this basic view: there wasn’t just one thing that toppled the empire, it was a confluence of crises that together nudged the empire to the breaking point. The empire was still robust and adaptive enough to handle any one crisis, but the onslaught of multiple, mutually reinforcing crises overwhelmed the resources of the empire.

The book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire does an admirable job of explaining the polycrisis of reduced crop yields and pandemics.

Another approach is that of Peter Turchin and other historians, who look at social and economic cycles. Turchin holds that the overproduction of elites leads to elite conflicts that weaken the leadership and soaring wealth-power inequality undermines the social coherence of the state/empire. Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (2016)

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023)

Historians such as David Hackett Fischer, author of The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History and Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, examine the role of resource depletion, higher costs and diminishing returns for those doing the work of propping up the empire.

Historian Michael Grant makes the case for moral rot unraveling social coherence in his classic The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Having read all these works and many others on the subject, it seems clear that all of these factors were part and parcel of the polycrisis that brought down Rome. Each factor added to the empire’s already immense burdens while reducing its wealth and resources.

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