Good Riddance to the Roman Empire

WALTER SCHEIDEL MAKES a dramatic claim in Escape From Rome: The collapse of the Roman Empire made the modern world possible. The release from imperial governance, he argues, had an outcome in Europe that was not replicated elsewhere. That in turn explains why Europe became the birthplace of modernity.

Scheidel, a Stanford-based historian, argues this thesis with an amazing erudition and a sweeping synthesis of scholarship. There is just one major weakness in his analysis, and it can be addressed without abandoning the main argument. Indeed, addressing it strengthens the already compelling case.

belongs to what is by now a well-established genre of historiography: books that try to explain the nature and origins of the modern world. Works of this kind all have to account for the central feature that distinguishes modernity from previous human history—the enormous and unprecedented increase in wealth