The global periphery is rising, and it’s not just about Asia. Of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies this year, seven will be in Africa. By contrast, six of the world’s 10 worst-performing economies are in Europe. This is what the decline of an empire looks like, so it should hardly surprise us that the west’s global heft is waning.
We’ve seen similar stories before, many times. If you made a list of all history’s great empires, then noted which of them still exist, you’d get a sense of fate’s inevitability. In fact, decline seems to be embedded in the economics of empire, as Peter Heather and I argue in our new book. By juxtaposing the histories of the Roman empire and the modern west, we argue that you can discern an imperial lifecycle—which we strongly suspect has much wider application than just our two cases. In their ascendancy, empires organise the exploitation of their colonial peripheries to enrich themselves, but in doing so inadvertently develop the economies of those peripheries. Over the long term, that gives the latter the capacity to withstand and eventually roll back imperial domination.
In economic terms, we can trace this lifecycle through the movement of production, capital and labour, as they find one another. In the ascendant phase of an empire, labour moves from its original core to exploit the capital of the new territories brought into the imperial system, such as land, natural resources and slaves. As the empire’s economic centre of gravity moves outwards to these provinces, populations beyond its formal borders begin moving towards the empire, attracted by the growing stock of capital there. When those populations build up around the peripheries of the imperial system, they provide the economic and demographic base for nascent states.
These proto-states initially lack the capacity to operate as anything more than weak clients of the empire. But over time, as they accumulate, adapt and master the technologies of empire, from weapons to administrative processes, the imbalance gradually tips. Eventually, the peripheral states acquire the autonomy and capacity needed to effect the economic convergence that signposts the empire’s waning. That’s where the west finds itself today.
So far, so NatCon. The far right has been screaming for years that the barbarians are at the gates, whether in small boats crossing the Channel or at concert venues targeted by Islamist terrorists. But when Boris Johnson and his ilk say that “uncontrolled migration” brought down the Roman empire, they’re drawing entirely the wrong lesson from history. The population movements that toppled Rome were, in fact, highly controlled—as are today’s, albeit to very different ends.
In antiquity, land was the principal form of capital. Since land is immobile, labour moved, in the form of Roman settlement of the periphery and the importation of slaves from the periphery in the ascendant phase, and in the barbarian invasions in the decline phase. What made those invasions possible was the gradual conversion of the rising prosperity of Rome’s periphery into political power. When the emergent states that controlled these populations felt pressure on their own rear flanks, triggered by Hunnic invasions, they moved onto Roman soil and began to carve up the empire. Whereas earlier attempts to raid the empire had brought punishing responses, by the fifth century the scale and extent of the peripheral resistance was such that it overwhelmed imperial defences.
A similar trajectory can be observed in the modern period. In the initial decades after 1945, when many of Europe’s colonies won their independence, they inherited fairly rudimentary structures, tight finances and limited administrative capacity from the departing regimes. So by engineering the occasional coup or implementing economic sanctions, western governments could usually still bring unruly governments to book. In effect, they’d outsourced the cost of administration while preserving an imperial economic system, organised around a global trading and financial regime that continued to disproportionately benefit western countries. But, over time, many peripheral states matured into more confident regimes with seasoned and capable bureaucracies, gradually acquiring the capacity to withstand or even roll back western domination.
However, the rulers of states in today’s global periphery have no interest in organising, nor any need to organise, incursions into western soil. The biggest migration in human history has been underway for decades, but, pace right-wing western commentators, it has nothing directly to do with the west. While a few million have arrived in the west from the old colonial peripheries to help supplement declining labour forces, many billions who have left the farms of the developing world for better opportunities have gathered in the coastal and riverine cities of the global periphery, where their governments are only too happy to keep them.
Because, unlike in antiquity, capital is today highly mobile, much more so than labour. Changes in manufacturing, transportation and communication technologies, in consumption patterns and in financial markets have all enabled the diversification of supply chains and the move to global outsourcing. Policy changes in both developed and developing countries have then facilitated a massive shift of production to the global south, where the returns on investment can substantially exceed those on offer in the mature economies of the western world.
The modern-day counterpart to Attila, then—who spent his career transferring wealth from the global core to the periphery—is more likely a pension-fund manager, scouring the developing world for the high-yield investments that will keep his clients in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed. And rather than build their militaries, most developing countries have focused their rising capacity on augmenting their diplomatic and political power, using it to secure such things as better deals in trade negotiations.
This will continue. As incomes rise in one developing economy, it too joins the shift of resources to less-developed regions. Chinese manufacturers, for instance, are now avoiding rising domestic labour costs by moving some production to southeast Asia. Convergence will thus extend further around the globe. The west, which at its economic peak at the turn of the millennium accounted for about 80 per cent of global production, has already seen its share drop to 60 per cent.
This, however, brings us to another crucial difference between the Roman empire and the modern west—decline need not end in fall. The economy of the Roman era was pretty much steady-state and overwhelmingly agricultural. The rise of one group, in this case the barbarian successor-kingdoms that began establishing themselves on Roman soil, necessitated the fall of another. Even when luckier Roman nobles negotiated deals whereby they kept some of their power and privileges under new overlords, they still had to hand over some of their estates and suffer a fall in their standard of living, as did any peasants forced to make way for the new farmers arriving on their soil.
Land plays a far less significant role in production today, and technological change means growth could conceivably continue indefinitely, if at a slower rate than we’ve recently grown used to. Even if the west’s hitherto predominant role in world affairs continues to diminish, and even as some other countries continue overtaking countries of the old core, the west need never fall if it makes the right choices.
But with the wrong choices, it could. Historical analogy and current data, we argue, show that the worst possible outcomes involve attempts to restore a status quo ante, to make America—or Britain, or Italy, or Russia, for that matter—great again. Therein lies a path towards absolute decline. The future is still up for grabs, but if we don’t act wisely, we might still end up seizing one for which our descendants will blame us.
John Rapley and Peter Heather’s “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West” is available now (Allen Lane, £20)
