On his book Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
Cover Interview of March 04, 2020
The wide angle
If historians don’t try to explain why the world has turned
out the way it has, they are falling down on the job. Yet academic historians
often have trouble seeing the forest for the many trees of highly specialized
research. Even more worryingly, many of them have increasingly retreated from
questions of causation, at the same time as their colleagues in the social
sciences have been devising ever more sophisticated techniques for addressing precisely
such questions.
My project runs counter to these trends. I am convinced that
big questions are very much worth asking and that we need to employ a wide
variety of methods and approaches to tackle them. Throughout my book, I draw on
a rich body of scholarship produced by economists, political scientists, and sociologists
who have been interested in the origins of what is known as the “Great
Divergence,” Europe’s (or the “West’s”) pulling ahead of other parts of the
world during the last few centuries. Transdisciplinary connections are
essential in addressing big questions such as this one, and I seek to
demonstrate how much historians stand to profit from this openness.
My book takes the globalization of history seriously: we
simply cannot hope to make sense of one particular case without looking at many
others as well. My perspective is resolutely comparative. If we want to
understand why large-scale empires never returned to much of Europe, we need to
understand which factors were responsible for their resilience elsewhere. In
arguing that the absence of such empires was beneficial to certain kinds of
human flourishing, I have to show how and why their presence thwarted progress.
I also keep asking how robust these outcomes were. How
readily might history have turned out very differently? This question requires
me to turn to counterfactuals, to ask how much would have had to be different
for broad trajectories of development to change. Historians are sadly resistant
to this way of thinking. In my book, I hope to show that counterfactual
reasoning not only makes sense but that it can be of great value in
illuminating the overall contours of historical change. I find that Europe
never again came close to being ruled by a single empire.
Finally, I make sure to relate historical processes to the
physical environment. Geography and ecology have long shaped historical trends
and need to be incorporated into our analyses. In my book, I identify a number
of environmental features that facilitated the formation of large imperial
states in some parts of the world but made it harder in others, above all in
Western Europe: the intersection of land and sea, the distribution of mountain
ranges and large flood plains, and the role of the steppe in supporting mobile
challengers to sedentary societies.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
If historians don’t try to explain why the world has turned out the way it has, they are falling down on the job. Yet academic historians often have trouble seeing the forest for the many trees of highly specialized research. Even more worryingly, many of them have increasingly retreated from questions of causation, at the same time as their colleagues in the social sciences have been devising ever more sophisticated techniques for addressing precisely such questions.
My project runs counter to these trends. I am convinced that big questions are very much worth asking and that we need to employ a wide variety of methods and approaches to tackle them. Throughout my book, I draw on a rich body of scholarship produced by economists, political scientists, and sociologists who have been interested in the origins of what is known as the “Great Divergence,” Europe’s (or the “West’s”) pulling ahead of other parts of the world during the last few centuries. Transdisciplinary connections are essential in addressing big questions such as this one, and I seek to demonstrate how much historians stand to profit from this openness.
My book takes the globalization of history seriously: we simply cannot hope to make sense of one particular case without looking at many others as well. My perspective is resolutely comparative. If we want to understand why large-scale empires never returned to much of Europe, we need to understand which factors were responsible for their resilience elsewhere. In arguing that the absence of such empires was beneficial to certain kinds of human flourishing, I have to show how and why their presence thwarted progress.
I also keep asking how robust these outcomes were. How readily might history have turned out very differently? This question requires me to turn to counterfactuals, to ask how much would have had to be different for broad trajectories of development to change. Historians are sadly resistant to this way of thinking. In my book, I hope to show that counterfactual reasoning not only makes sense but that it can be of great value in illuminating the overall contours of historical change. I find that Europe never again came close to being ruled by a single empire.
Finally, I make sure to relate historical processes to the physical environment. Geography and ecology have long shaped historical trends and need to be incorporated into our analyses. In my book, I identify a number of environmental features that facilitated the formation of large imperial states in some parts of the world but made it harder in others, above all in Western Europe: the intersection of land and sea, the distribution of mountain ranges and large flood plains, and the role of the steppe in supporting mobile challengers to sedentary societies.