*Escape from Rome*

The author is Walter Scheidel and the subtitle is The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity.  Imagine a whole book on what he calls “the second Great Divergence,” namely that China developed a large, relatively unified hegemonic state early on, while Europe remained (mostly) politically fragmented.

Have you ever wondered why the Roman empire did not, in some manner, re-form in the Western part of Europe?  And how did it matter that China had a tradition of having to defend against the steppe while Europe did not?  Here is one brief excerpt:

…East Asia was characterized by a unipolar or hegemonic political system for 68 percent of the years between 220 BCE and 1875.  This pattern presents a stark contrast to the prevalence of a balanced system in Europe for 98 percent of the years from 1500 to 2000, or indeed at any time after the demise of the mature Roman empire.

And:

Remoteness from the bulk of the Eurasian steppe was a constant, invariant across Europen history.  Just as it did not matter if Latin Europe’s states were weak, it also did not matter if a large empire was in place.  Unlike Chinese dynasties, the Roman empire did not bring forth a nomadic “shadow empire”: there was no ecological potential for it.  The Pontic steppe, where Sarmatian tribes might have coalesced in response to the inducements of Roman wealth, was too detached from the Roman heartlands that lay behind the Carpathians, the Alps, and the Adriatic.  To the west of the plains of Eastern Europe, both components of the “steppe effect” were conspicuous by their absence: and so — at least after Rome — was empire-building on a large scale.

If you wish to read a book to ponder the second Great Divergence, this is the one.  You can pre-order it here.