19: Why Didn't Rome Rise Again? An Interview with Professor Walter Scheidel

The Fall of Rome Podcast

Patrick Wyman / Wondery

Education, Medieval History, Patrick Wyman, Ancient History, Society & Culture, History, Tides Of History, Documentary

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2017

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why didn't Rome rise again? Everywhere else in the world, the appearance of one great empire was marked by their recurrent resurgence, but in Europe it happened only once. Professor Walter Scheidel of Stanford University - the author of numerous outstanding books on Rome and beyond, most recently "The Great Leveler", on the history of economic inequality - argues that this lack of recurring empires is what laid the groundwork for the eventual rise of Europe, the Great Divergence, that underpins the modern world of today. Watch a preview of Genius, the new show on National Geographic about Albert Einstein, starring academy award winner Geoffrey Rush: NatGeoTV.com/Genius Take the survey at wondery.com/survey. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Fall of Rome.
0:03.7	As always, I'm your host Patrick Weiman.
0:06.2	Today I'll be joined for the first time on this show by a special guest.
0:10.0	He's the Dickerson professor in the Humanities, a professor of history and classics at Stanford University.
0:15.2	The author of a great many books, most recently the Great Leveler,
0:18.8	Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st century,
0:22.7	which I highly recommend to any and all.
0:24.8	Professor Walter Scheidel, thank you very much for joining me today.
0:27.7	Well thanks for having me.
0:29.5	So you've been doing really excellent work on a variety of fields of Roman history for a long time now,
0:34.8	on everything from demography to mobility to the economy beyond.
0:38.4	And there's a lot that we could talk about on that front.
0:41.0	I'm really especially struck by your broad reading, wide-ranging interests,
0:46.0	and your comparative methods, all of which I think more historians kind of benefit from.
0:50.0	But today we're going to focus on your next project and it's a doozy that I'm really,
0:54.2	really excited to talk about.
0:55.6	So it's called Escape from Rome, the death of an empire and the birth of the modern west.
1:06.9	I'm Patrick Weiman and this is The Fall of Rome.
1:25.9	So tell me if I have this right, but the basic argument that you're making here is that there
1:32.5	was no comprehensive empire in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire
1:36.7	and that this was a root cause of what historians call the Great Divergence,
1:40.3	the economic and political rise of Northwest Europe to global dominance.
	...

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