Why Do Empires Fall?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

For centuries, the Roman Empire commanded unparalleled control over the world around it. It expanded its borders through trade and conquest, sucking resources from the periphery into its thriving centre - Rome. And then, suddenly, everything changed. The Empire entered a state of crisis and rapidly disintegrated. The West has experienced a similarly dramatic rise and fall over the last 3 centuries, moving from an era of global dominance to one of economic stagnation and political division. But is the decline and fall of empires inevitable? And what can be done to avoid the fate of Rome? In this episode, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley join Dan to compare the West's current crisis with that of Rome and discuss what comes next.

Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit.
0:04.2	Shakespeare said, there is a tide in the affairs of man.
0:09.7	And I think that's true, of course.
0:11.3	I think it's particularly true when you look at the rise and fall of the great powers,
0:15.8	how they've come and gone, the ebbs and the flows, like the tide, Assyria, Persia, Mali, the Inca, Mongol, British.
0:25.3	Some of those hegemonic powers, those mighty empires, have left a husk behind, an imprint.
0:32.3	Others have left hardly any modern trace.
0:36.7	No current incarnation in the UN General Assembly.
0:41.7	And on this podcast day, we're going to think about that inevitable process, the rise and fall,
0:46.1	but we're going to particularly think about, well, a couple of mighty power. We're going to do some
0:48.8	comparing and contrasting. One mighty power, which rose came to dominate much than known world,
0:53.7	experienced rapid economic growth,
0:55.9	built sophisticated institutions, a dominant military, but then declined. Great power was concentrated
1:02.8	in the hands of incompetent fools, was contested politics in its centre. On its peripheries,
1:10.5	rivals copied, they adapted. They learned.
1:14.2	The empire was hit by migration and disease, which gnawed away as its vitals. I'm talking
1:19.8	obviously about the Roman Empire. But if you're hearing any echoes, or then you're not alone.
1:24.6	Because this was a special podcast I recorded a couple of years ago,
1:27.7	and it was with the chair of medieval history at King's College London, the legend that is Peter Heather,
1:32.6	and the equally brilliant Cambridge political economist John Rapley. They had just written a book
1:37.3	called Why Empires Fall, Rome, America and the Future of the West. And they went there. They
1:42.3	made that explicit comparison. They tried to find things that were interestingly similar about Rome and the future of the West. And they went there. They made that explicit comparison. They tried to find
	...

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