‘Escape From Rome’
A review published in the WSJ on 23 Oct 2019.
The pitiless tone is probably triggered more by W.Scheidel's blunt style than by the contents quality. The book indeed is of high quality.

Historian Walter Scheidel credits Western Europe and its offshoots for creating the conditions that “gave birth to modernity.”

By Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Oct. 23, 2019 7:07 pm ET


The robots are coming. They have displaced workers from factories, shops from malls, books from libraries, chess masters from esteem. Art and academia are among current targets, but we don’t have to await developments in artificial intelligence to find out what machine-generated scholarship will be like. Walter Scheidel is here already.

He works with robotic efficiency. In commanding data he rivals an iPhone. He crunches numbers with all the mordancy of which gears and cogs are capable. He will zoom you to high levels of analysis as smoothly as an electric elevator, or cook up an intellectual confection faster than a microwave. You want solutions to historical problems of baffling complexity? He has an app for that. The convictions of this professor of classics and history at Stanford—that progress is ineluctable and science indefeasible—seem perfectly fashioned for the computer age. He is as ruthless as a robot in cutting through the chaos of real life and dismissing its messiness. Nothing is wanting in his well-tooled circuitry, except intellectual humility and that unprogrammable virtue: hesitation in judgment.

In “Escape From Rome,” Mr. Scheidel’s purpose is to urge one of many existing theories of the West’s historical precocity—Westerners industrialized ahead of the rest. In his search for the “conditions that gave birth to modernity . . . only Western Europe and its offshoots fit the bill,” he writes, though at times he rocks his “cradle of modernity” toward “the North Sea” or “northern Britain.”

His argument, meanwhile, oscillates between mutually exclusive formulations. Sometimes he exalts the state system as the “single condition” that made “initial breakthroughs possible.” At others he proposes “fragmentation of social power,” with regions or communities in major roles—though he never says anything about these fragmentary communities: Empires and states are his only units of study. In any case, he asserts, industrialization was the eventual result of “the absence of Roman-scale empire” from the fifth century onward, which allowed smaller power centers to flourish. The time lag, of a millennium and more, does not bother him.

Mr. Scheidel seems indifferent to the role of empires as arenas for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, people and commodities. His values come from a 19th-century repertoire of dreariness: materialist, Social-Darwinian, utilitarian. He can track “human welfare” in a graph. He links “happiness” to gross domestic product. He talks of “evolution” when he means “change” and represents influences or conditions as “factors.” He proclaims the “applicability of Darwinian theory to the past and the long-term evolution of human inequality.” He tabulates the “matrix of critical preconditions of military success”—which he defines, in language that seems to come clicking out of a slot, as the “product of intensity times scale.”

People—other than fellow theorists—hardly appear among Mr. Scheidel’s generalizations, abstractions, tables, graphs and “macro-social scaling-up.” Occasional rulers and warlords make cameo appearances, but the evidence of ordinary individuals, whom the march of improvement trod underfoot, is beneath the author’s gaze. The reader endures until page 254 for the only vivid anecdote (of St. Eugippius advising Odoacer the Goth to go to Italy). Emphasis on “polycentrism” keeps the reader hoping for a minute examination of some real places—Birmingham or Barcelona, perhaps, or Milan or Manchester, or Leipzig, Lille or Liège—and the people who did the work of industrialization. The hopes are vain.

Vast stretches of this book house elaborate “counterfactual scenarios”—useful for spotting moments when decision-makers foreclose on alternative futures, but pointless when making analyses on Mr. Scheidel’s time scale. He speculates, for instance, on what might have happened if there had been no Roman Empire, or if Asians had conquered the Canary Islands in, “say, 1400,” or if continental drift had borne Africa to China’s coastline. There is no virtue in asking what would have occurred until one is reasonably sure of what did occur. Yet Mr. Scheidel cuts beguiling complexity out of his picture, like a sawbones chopping off dispensable limbs, or a cook making nail soup only of nails.

Culture, for him, consists only of language and religion. His understanding of European geography misses the continent’s most intriguing feature: the watershed of mountains and bogs that divides Mediterranean-side and Atlantic-side economic zones. In consequence, the author cannot see Europeans’ strivings for unity, or appreciate the achievements of the Roman Empire and European Union in nurturing wide-ranging exchange of goods and culture. His summation of English history—portraying a “nation of taxpayers” who “contrived to curb both royal power and aristocratic patrimonialism”—is whiggishly old-school.

Mr. Scheidel’s account of early-modern science leaves out the importance of long-range adventurism in gathering examples and specimens for examination in Europe. He finds that the state promoted Western science but was “associated” with scientific ossification in Islam. The admission seems to undermine his thesis, but Mr. Scheidel waves the contradiction aside. Islam, he thinks, was “of no particular relevance” in Europe. He never raises the paradox of industrialization: that it occurred in a world of multiplying human and animal muscle-power—which suggests that, beyond a certain level of demographic growth, rising demand strains available labor and prompts mechanization.

An underlying political agenda is detectable, but it is not clear how far Mr. Scheidel is committed to it. Success, in “Escape From Rome,” is measurable in wealth and might. The author disclaims Eurocentrism, but the implication is clear: The world is indebted to the West for “modernization.” On the “road to prosperity,” he writes, you need a “pro-business elite.” “Sovereignty was key.” The world may soon again have the chance to discover if tiny, insulated states are truly preferable to vast, multicultural collaborations.

Mr. Fernández-Armesto is the author of “Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States” and editor of “The Oxford Illustrated History of the World.”