The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas Cole

There’s a great article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson, the British economic and colonial historian. It’s called Complexity and Collapse, and it deals with the idea that civilisations face a “life cycle” – that they must, inevitably, began, expand, reach an apex then decline and collapse. You can’t read it unless you’re a member, sadly, but it argues quite successfully that the cyclical view of empirical supremacy may be misguided.

The crux of the argument is that, while trends can build up over time that make an empire susceptible to collapse, the collapse itself is virtually always sudden, swift and decisive. Therefore, the long-standing trends that contributed to the collapse event in question cannot be usefully thought of as being factors of causation in the collapse; they are, in fact, common features in a complex system – which an empire will successfully encounter, navigate and expurgate plenty of over the course of a multi-century lifespan, potentially indefinitely. Thus, long-term trends of weakness that, in retrospect, appear to have presaged a collapse are in fact not signifiers of a structural weakness in systemic power nor proof that empire decline is cyclical or inevitable.

These seems to fly in the face of established reason and observed experience, but Ferguson shows that destabilising trends are only really noticeable when they successfully destabilise. Even then, their effects can be over-interpreted. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes takes a long view, ascribing said fall to factors ranging from the personality disorders of individual rulers to the rise of monotheism. Certainly, one factor that he highlights did play a significant role: the trend towards civil war, following the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD, never really went away. But to say that Rome’s decline stuttered along for 200 hears seems to misunderstand the nature of complex human society. By the time Rome got to the 4th Century it was no more collapsed than it had been in 180; it was simply changed, as a complex adaptive system should, from a normally functioning society dealing with one set of circumstances to a normally functioning society with another. Political intrigue, barbarian migration and Sassanid ambition were features of the times, but even at this stage the collapse of Rome was not a fait accompli.

The actual collapse of Rome can, according to Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, be measured more or less exactly from 406, when Germanic invaders crossed the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Within 5 decades, the Western Roman Empire was dispossessed of most of its most valuable properties – including Carthage, Britain and most of Spain – and the population of Rome had collapsed by almost 75%.

This may seem like a slightly deterministic attitude. The drive to narrativise history compels us to question: can we really accept Sassanid expansion and civil war as simple influencers? Should we not also examine which Roman policies may have led to those trends achieving the prominence that they did? A fair question, as in its development Rome certainly provided space and encouragement for these trends to develop. The distinction is not to simply allow that “things happen”, however, but to differentiate between events that are the product of a complex system behaving normally (even if they produce outcomes that may appear to be desirable) and events that are the cause or product of a period of systemic collapse.

However fuzzy and ephemeral that distinction may appear, it’s important. States do not drift serenely from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon. The complex system that we call “Rome” encountered and subsumed many problematic factors in the course of its development – the threat posed by Hannibal of Carthage, or the transition from Republic to Empire. It survived those, but eventually succumbed to a sudden and catastrophic malfunction. From the perspective of learning from history, then, we can look to the civilisations of our own times – particularly the US – and think more broadly about the signs of impending collapse. There have been occasions when kingdoms have risen, dwindled, and then risen again; but final collapse tends towards the swift and definite.