© Walter Scheidel May 2021 Farewell to standards? A response to Richard Hodges Walter Scheidel Stanford University <scheidel@stanford.edu> The 2021 issue of the Journal of Roman Archaeology, the first one produced under new leadership after its founder stepped down as editor, features a review of my recent book Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by the archaeologist Richard Hodges.1 Both the content and the tone of that review invite reflections on strategies of scholarly research and on policies of academic publishing. I focus in the first instance of matters of perspective, method and substance before finishing with a few comments on professional responsibility. Basics Following an opening display that bears little resemblance to what one usually encounters in academic reviews and that I will turn to near the end, Hodges (H.) offers what he considers a summary of my arguments (in a section labeled “Escapism”) followed by a section (“Getting to Denmark”) mostly on late antique/post-ancient Danes and Denmark and a final one (“The theft of history”) on postcolonial approaches to the study of what has come to be known as the Great Divergence.2 “Escapism” gets off to an inauspicious start. It opens with a long paragraph that does indeed reflect the main argument of my book. Yet it manages to so primarily because it is a 175-word verbatim quote from page 9 of my book that is reproduced as if it represented H.’s own words (3). While one might charitably suspect an editing or typesetting error, the absence of the relevant page number from the end of that passage (which accompanies all of H’s other quotes from my book) would seem to speak against this. Which raises an intriguing question: is it technically possible, in the context of a review, to plagiarize the book that is being reviewed? Never mind. As with any summary in a book review, the real question is how well it conveys, in all the necessary brevity and unavoidable simplification, a sense of the book’s structure and contents. Unfortunately, readers who have not had a chance to look at the book itself never find out. “Part I deals with the European anomaly. Much emphasis is placed on the patterns of empire” (3). And that’s it: what does that tell us? “Part III, on why Rome and its collapse matters (“the first great divergence”), reviews the period from Justinian to Frederick Barbarossa” (3). Part III does cover that period, but it has nothing at all to say about “why Rome … matters,” or “why … its collapse matters.” (In fact, it explores why nothing comparable to the Roman empire in 1 2 Hodges 2021 on Scheidel 2019. Pending final publication of JRA 2021, I refer to the page numbers in the FirstView version of H.’s text. For the meaning of that last term (which H. avoids), see below, p.7. terms of size and durability re-appeared in Europe during that period.) “Next, a long chapter, pursuing the central theme, embraces world history from Genghis Khan to Napoleon” (3). Yet readers will look in vain for “world history.” “Part IV then focuses upon themes: “From convergence to divergence,” “Nature,” and “Culture,” and Part V on “Institutions,” “New Worlds,” and finally a conclusion entitled “Understanding” (3). These may be themes, but in the present case they are simply the chapter headings. I must stress that I do not, by selective quotation, suppress any further information, for there is none. Thus, the key parts of the book (Parts IV and V run from p.217 to p.502 and make up 54% of the main text) do not warrant even a single sentence that might explain what they are about.3 For some reason, only Part II, on the factors that sustained Rome’s expansion, and – even more so – the short epilogue at the end of the book receive any attention. For those who would like to know, in my book I proceed from a comparative evaluation of the persistence of large-scale imperial state formation in different parts of the Old World (Part I) to an exploration of how the Roman empire could be established in a part of the globe that would never again support similarly dominant polities (Part II), detailed consideration of the plausibility of alternative trajectories of state formation – in the form of a restoration of large-scale empire – in the medieval and modern periods (Part III), an assessment of the nature and the underlying causes of different trends in state formation in Europe, East Asia and elsewhere (Part IV), and a 165-page survey of the various ways in which these divergent macro-political trends can be used to account for divergent outcomes in socio-economic development in different parts of the Old World, most notably in Europe and China (Part V). Little if any of this can be divined from H.s own “summary.” Instead of even attempting to perform this most basic of services for his readers, H. spends the final part of “Escapism” reminding us that “calculating demography before modern times is laudable but highly suspect, especially for the Roman and Medieval periods. The data need to be carefully described and the results deployed with mitigated caution” (4). I could not agree more and have (I hope!) generally sought to follow these sensible precepts in the two books and 50-odd articles and book chapters on questions of ancient and pre-modern demography that I have published over the last 30 years. H.’s sweeping claim to the contrary – that in the book under review “[t]he author offers no such caution” – derives from an extraordinary misreading of a single graph (Fig.E.1 on my p.525), which is labeled “Actual and counterfactual concentration of state power in Europe, 250 BCE–1800 CE (in terms of the population of Europe ruled by the largest power, in percent)” and displays different scenarios concerning the proportion of the population of Europe that was claimed by the most populous polity at a given point in time. It is worth pointing out – since H.s fails to do so – that I employ the same method to estimate the relative intensity of imperial rule in different parts of the Old World from antiquity to 1800 in Part I of my book, where I also discuss at some length – which as I recall more than one perspicacious draft reader found excessive and/or tedious – the margins of uncertainty involved 3 In view of this, it barely matters that “Understanding” is not actually a “conclusion” but for the most part simply the final chapter of Part V, with a “synthesis” section added at the end. 2 in this exercise. Further technical discussion can be found in an appendix on pp.533-535. As none of this seems to meet H.’s standards of “caution,” it is unfortunate that he fails to specify what they might be. Yet even though such calculations form the backbone of Part I of my book and the chart in question is clearly labeled, H. somehow contrives to misinterpret the latter as referring to actual population numbers rather than percentages, which leads him to denounce “graph E1 … with its “actual” population peaks in the later 6th c. to 9th c. With the possible exceptions of Scandinavian and eastern Europe, this Early Medieval peak is preposterous, flying in the face of a huge amount of modern archaeological evidence” (4). This population peak is a figment of H.’s imagination: what the chart shows is the temporary rebound of empire in Europe first under Justinian and then under the Carolingians, very roughly illustrated by the share (and not the number) of Europeans ruled by the most populous empire at the time. H. might have benefited from a dose of “caution.” Evidence To be sure, shortcoming such as these are commonplace in reviews: failing to give a sense of the contents of a book and its main points, or lambasting authors for claims they never made. H. is hardly alone in this and by themselves, such slips, however disagreeable to the author and misleading for readers, would hardly warrant a response. But in the second half of his text H. touches on matters that are of more general interest. In the section entitled “Getting to Denmark,” H. introduces “two issues: one a matter of detail, the other an explanatory mode” (5). They are chosen because “they reveal the inherent problem” with my approach, which H. identifies as “narrow” use of evidence and conflict-oriented explanations of historical processes (5). H. makes much of my use of the phrase “getting to Denmark,” which in the Social Sciences at least has become a widely recognized metaphor for establishing political and economic institutions that are highly conducive to human welfare.4 This expression has nothing to do with Denmark per se, except in the sense that that country generally scores highly on standard metrics of human development. My book consequently does not specifically discuss Denmark or the Danes. H., by contrast, seizes on this metaphor about contemporary social, political and economic development to devote an entire page to the archaeology and history of Danes and Denmark from the Roman period into the early Middle Ages, chiding me in the process for “mak[ing] no connection between Denmark in the modern era and Denmark in either Roman and Viking times” (5). 4 H. is aware of the fact that I use this phrase in this way, as he reproduces (once again without identifying it as a verbatim quote) my explanation on p.539 n.26. Then again, elsewhere in his text he repeatedly betrays confusion about this phrase by rendering it as “getting a Denmark” (2) and “getting Denmark” (8). This expression was coined by L. Pritchett and M. Woolcock in 2002 and has been popularized above all by F. Fukuyama, to the extent that is now widely attributed to him. 3 H. does not actually explain the purpose of this excursus, and I must confess that even after multiple readings I find it hard to understand how it is meant to relate to my own work, let alone challenge it. H. references shifts in political and economic development in Roman and postRoman Denmark, credits early Danes with having contributed the “emergence of the Medieval state” by acting as “aggressive change-makers in terms of governance, urban planning, and rural procurement practices,” and bemoans scholars’ (and Netflix’s (!)) abiding focus on “the familiar Viking aggression” (5-6).5 All of this seems perfectly reasonable. More to the point, in no way does any of this conflict with the thrust of my own narrative: that post-Roman Europe, no longer weighed down by a mega-empire, underwent a rich variety of restructurings and innovations that played out in unexpected ways and laid the foundations for later transformations. Much of this took place in regions that had previously been ruled by Rome, but obviously not just there: post-Carolingian Germany, which I discuss in my book, is merely the heftiest example. Norse, Irish, Slavs: all were touched by the enduring absence of an overbearing apex predator state, and all contributed to the new world it made possible. So why H.s’ insistence on covering the finer points of early Danish history? As far as I can tell (as I said, this is never made explicit), it appears to be motivated by his contention that “[t]his book deploys hypotheses based upon historical data. Archaeological evidence to provide some quantifiable bases for the thrust of his history is absent. Why? Could it be that, as with the Vikings, the Victorian/Netflix version of ancient history is far too seductively embedded in our modern paradigm to worry about a huge new dataset that might challenge it?” (6). There is much to unpack in this passage. It has frankly never occurred to me to distinguish between “historical data” and “archaeological evidence.” I always thought archaeological evidence was historical data. This specious distinction only makes sense if one were to equate “historical” with “textual,” a conception so narrow that even back in the nineteenth century scholars gradually found themselves compelled to abandon it. H.’s complaint seems to be that I rely too heavily on “historical” = textual evidence in constructing my argument, neglecting archaeological evidence (which I take the “huge new dataset” to be). His points invites comment on three issues: scope, balance and salience. First, scope. My study is a work of synthesis that covers, or at any rate attempts to cover, several thousand years of political, military, social, economic and cultural history across much of Afroeurasia. It is not a narrative of what happened during all these millennia and on all these continents. It is an extended argument about chains of causality and path dependence over the long run of history, an argument that these days – as I point out in my book (on pp.19-20 & 26) – will be seem more familiar and congenial to historically-oriented social scientists in fields such as Economics and Political Science than to most humanistic historians (or, I suspect, most archaeologists). In conception and execution, any such exercise must inevitably embrace parsimony and reduction to a degree that is likely to make many historians and archaeologists uncomfortable. Immediate engagement with primary sources, whether textual or material, becomes virtually impossible; 5 I am supposed to be one of those scholars, which is a bit odd since a search of my book reveals only seven appearances of Viking(s), three of them passing (half-sentence) references to their operations in early medieval France, three in the bibliography (to the publishing label Viking Penguin), and one in the index. 4 dependence on secondary scholarship is a must. Syntheses of particular regions or periods are the long-run historian’s best friends. None of this is new or particularly noteworthy. Several recent introductions to world or global history touch on the trade-offs involved in this kind of work: the loss of detail, nuance and, indeed, of conventional claims to expertise; the gain in discerning patterns and dynamics that would otherwise remain hidden from view.6 For these reasons, my book, just like any other work in this vein, relies on the best efforts of what one might call intermediate synthesizers. H’s, by contrast, considers the presence of “very little raw or original data” (2) to be a fatal flaw: “In drilling down into the 65 pages of notes and references, too often it transpires that these are works by the author himself or, in the case of the ancient and medieval worlds, secondary histories written by textual historians that make minimal reference to the archaeology of these eras” (2). This brings us to the second issue, balance, even as it conflates several different issues. First of all, given that my book’s bibliography runs to some 950 titles, it would be quite remarkable if I were able to rely to any significant extent on my own work in producing an account that ranges across thousands of years and several continents. Second, of course I rely on “secondary histories” rather than on “raw or original data:” that is the only way to go. Third, is it true that these secondary historians generally give short shrift to archaeological material? Let me just say that in putting together the early medieval sections of my book (especially those in Part IV, which H. passes over in silence), I felt mildly embarrassed about the extent to which I found myself relying on Chris Wickham’s superb scholarship that digests and distills a huge amount of archaeological data. To be sure, not everyone I draw on lives up to such admirable standards of intellectual omniverousness. Is that my work’s Achilles’ heel? It might well be if it made a difference. As it happens, it does not: in this case, it does not actually matter whether some of the intermediate synthesizers I rely on privilege textual over archaeological evidence. Why is that? This takes us to my third point, salience. My study is propelled by a series of overarching questions: In terms of the scale of political organization, how (much) and why did post-Roman Europe differ from other parts of the Old World that had witnessed the rise of large land-based empire? How robust was the absence of large land-based empire from post-Roman Europe west of Russia – what would it have taken for this form of organization to return? How did the persistent absence of large land-based empire from most of post-Roman Europe affect later political, economic, cultural and scientific developments that a very large number of scholars in different disciplines have sought to connect to the so-called “Great Divergence,” the appearance and acceleration of sustained transformative development in parts of Europe? Everything I cover in my book is subordinated to these questions. In assessing the evidentiary base of my account, the most salient question is not whether it maintains a particular balance of 6 E.g., Crossley 2008; Guldi and Armitage 2014; Hunt 2014; Olstein 2015; Conrad 2016. 5 different types of evidence. What matters is whether a re-balancing of those types of evidence would materially challenge or undermine my argument. As far as I can tell, the answer is no. Not many elements of the key questions I just summarized would even in theory be sensitive to the kind of archaeological work that H. is talking about. The overall patterns of empire formation in different parts of the Old World are so well established that no amount of new evidence, archaeological or otherwise, could call them into question: archaeologists are not suddenly going to discover that late medieval Europe was politically unified after all. Nor is archaeological evidence particularly germane to my counterfactual scenarios of imperial restoration in post-Roman Europe. And for the single most important (and, to my mind, most interesting) question I address in my book – the relationship between post-Roman socio-political fragmentation and the Great Divergence – the “archive” of ancient and medieval archaeology invoked by H. is of little if any conceivable relevance. The principal candidate for a more archaeology-driven account would seem to be Part II, my discussion of the factors that made Rome’s expansion possible. There is certainly much to consider beyond Rome’s militarism: Nicola Terrenato’s recent book (not mentioned by H.) is a good example.7 Regrettably, H. fails to spell out how he thinks this might change the story. None of what he touches on – “the invention of a new concrete mix,” “institutional persuasion” and “social alchemy” (7) – conflicts in any substantive way with what I say in my own chapters: institutional persuasion and social alchemy were as essential for sustaining the mobilization of Romans and allies for military purposes as they were for creating and maintaining “Rome’s distinctive built environments” (7) foregrounded by H.8 This is emblematic of a bigger problem. Throughout this section, H. does not provide a single example of how archaeology’s “huge new dataset that might challenge” existing paradigms actually does so as far as my book is concerned. If my reflections in the preceding paragraphs seem a bit abstract, they are so because H.s does not formulate any substantive challenge for me to engage with – not one illustration of how closer consideration of archaeological data would affect my argument about the nature, causes and consequences of divergent patterns of state formation across a wide swathe of history. What we are served instead are three pages replete with innuendo about Victorians and Netflix and disjointed observations on matters as diverse as Ribbe urbanism and Roman concrete. Is it really too much to ask of H. that he let his audience know why he thinks his exposition is relevant? Divergence At long last, H. turns to an issue that is not only meaningfully related to the objectives of my book but is eminently worthy of discussion. Or, more precisely, he briefly gives the impression that he is going to do so. Thus, the final section, “The theft of history” (named after Goody 2006) 7 8 Terrenato 2019, reviewed by Maschek 2021. I regret that it came out too late for me to critique it in my book. I may however note that coercion and elite buy-in – mainstays of my own account – are generally regarded as the key drivers of empire formation across world history: the 61 chapters in Bang, Bayly and Scheidel 2021 add up to the most comprehensive survey to date. Cf. Padilla Peralta 2020: 244 for the strong preponderance of military over religious time expenditure (including temple construction) in mid-republican Rome. 6 opens with a reminder that “long-term frameworks can be reworked, and periodization reenvisioned, without resorting to long-held Eurocentric models. There is now a huge literature challenging the preeminence of Europeans in the making of the modern era” (7). That is very true, but it is equally true that this literature is itself part of an even larger literature that explores the origins and dynamics of the so-called “Great Divergence:” the acceleration of economic growth and various indices of human welfare in Western Europe and North America far beyond conditions observed in other parts of the world. Conventionally dated to the nineteenth century, this process has attracted immense attention, debate and controversy. It is easy to see why: it eventually transformed the whole world in what by historical standards was a rather modest amount of time, and it happened only once – in fact, it could happen only once, because when it did it the changes it wrought swiftly engulfed the whole planet, suppressing alternative paths of development. It is fiendishly difficult to explain a process that was unique. In grappling with this problem, relevant scholarship has expanded so much that entire books have been written just to survey and assess all the competing arguments, theories and viewpoints.9 Much of my own work on this book was taken up by sifting through the multidisciplinary literature captured by these meta-studies, which makes up a large part of my bibliography. In Part V, I spend about 165 pages trying to relate a wide variety of competing and complementary claims about the roots of the Great Divergence to the underlying phenomenon of enduring competitive polycentrism in post-Roman Europe. It helps that most explanations fall into one of a few dominant clusters. To quote from my book’s introduction, “Leading contenders include institutional developments from feudalism, church power, and religious schism to the creation of communes, corporate bodies, and parliamentarianism; social responses to perennial warfare, and more generally the overall configuration of the main sources of social power; the contribution of New World resources and global trade, and of mercantilist colonialism and protectionism; the emergence of a culture of sustained scientific and technological innovation; and a shift of values in favor of a commercially acquisitive bourgeoisie.”10 All of these features have repeatedly been invoked to answer a very specific question: why did the Great Divergence appear where it did? – and thus, by implication, not somewhere else, or never. This question is intrinsically Euro-centric in that it seeks to explain a process that first began to unfold in (parts of) Europe. That does not mean that it should or indeed can be addressed with exclusive reference to Europe. Much of the debate revolves around the question of how and how much this process owed to interactions with other parts of the world, and the related if ultimately counterfactual question of whether other parts of the world had already been on the cusp of analogous transformative development. It is impossible to pursue answers to these questions by looking at Europe alone: comparative analysis is essential, as is analysis of the manifold linkages and transfers between Europe and other parts of the world. Part V of my book is organized to reflect these imperatives and the scholarship that embraces them. Chapter 10, on institutions, deals with the rich literature that (1) seeks to identify political, 9 10 Vries 2013: 153-438 and McCloskey 2010: 125-384 (with McCloskey 2016: 83-146) are the most comprehensive critical surveys. Daly 2015 is a much shorter accessible primer. Scheidel 2019: 14. 7 social and economic features of medieval and early modern Europe that can be interpreted as having contributed the eventual Great Divergence, and that (2) compares these features and their putative consequences to features and putative consequences in non-European societies that for historical and environmental reasons appear to have been best positioned to foster transformative development of their own, foremost China and also South Asia and the Middle East. In Chapter 11, I cover explanations that foreground the contribution of Europe’s relations with other parts of the world. International trade, colonialism and plantation slavery all belong in this category. Once again, I adopt a comparative perspective by exploring possible reasons for the observable differences between early modern European approaches to overseas expansion and those documented elsewhere, again primarily in China but also in the Middle East and South Asia. Finally, Chapter 12 deals with the production and application of “useful” knowledge in Europe, China and the Middle East, and the question of the emergence of “bourgeois” values. As should be clear even from this thumbnail sketch, my discussion is consistently transcontinental and comparative. None of this is inherently “Eurocentric,” as H. avers (7), except in the formal sense that the central question is concerned with developments that first appeared in Europe. So why, H. asks, is Jack Goody’s work missing from my account? Or, more broadly, where does the approach his work exemplifies fit into this analysis?11 The short answer is that this approach is fully subsumed within the various clusters of explanations upon which Chapters 10 to 12 are based. In the context of this response it is hard to do justice to the finer points of the debate, so an exceedingly economical overview will have to do. Very broadly speaking, there is a subset of literature that vehemently positions itself against earlier explanations of the Great Divergence – which train their gaze above all on Europe itself – by stressing the extent to which Europe drew on innovations from elsewhere, most notably the Islamic world, India and China; how far certain parts of the world had advanced while Europe was lagging behind (Song to early Qing China and the Indian Ocean zone in the late Middle Ages tend to be the most popular examples); how Europe’s ascent uniquely benefited from bullion imports from the New World and/or from African labor, both on New World slave plantations and in Africa itself; how European institutions or cultural features were not that different from those elsewhere and/or not obviously better at fostering development; and more vaguely how other parts of the world might have experienced their own version of a Great Divergence if Europeans had not intervened.12 All of these theses and related ones have been much debated: once again, the best I can do here is refer to the meta-surveys cited above (n.9). Some have been judged more compelling than others: China was an economic powerhouse; European technological, scientific and organizational borrowings were common and well documented; the products of Black labor made an immense contribution to early industrialization. Others rest on shakier foundations, such as the elision of specific institutional or cultural differences or the importance of bullion transfers. But what matters most is that they all have one thing in common: they cannot account 11 12 H. himself states that he selected Goody’s works “as representative of modern postcolonial scholarship” (2). For these and similar perspectives, see, e.g., Hodgson 1974; Abu-Lughod 1989; Frank and Gills 1993; Pomeranz 2000; Inikori 2002; Marks 2002; Goody 2004; Hobson 2004; Goody 2006; Parthasarathi 2011. 8 for the fact that the Great Divergence happened where (and when) it did rather than somewhere else or not at all without making explicit reference to conditions that were specific to Europe. The many contingencies invoked to account for observed outcomes merely yield variants of the original question of “why Europe?” If Europeans benefited from foreign knowledge, colonial imperialism, forced labor, or the misfortunes that befell their rivals (Mongols invading China, the Ming retreating from the oceans, Mamluks or Ottomans tightening the screws), the question that needs to be answered is why was it that Europeans were in a position to benefit in ways that contributed to their Great Divergence while others were not? Answers vary. As I argue at great length in Part IV of my book (which is completely ignored by H.), the physical environment may well have played a major role: unlike East, South and West Asia, western Europe was better shielded from the great Eurasian steppe, with long-term political and economic consequences; the Americas were closer to western Europe than to China, not to mention South or West Asia. Thus, what one might call dumb luck – the vagaries of geography and ecology – arguably played a huge role in Europe’s divergence, which is precisely why in Part IV I spend so much time on these factors and their socio-political corollaries and consequences. Then again, this does not seem quite sufficient. Commercialized belligerence that was rooted in persistent fragmentation and competition appears to have been a significant factor.13 So were some cultural idiosyncrasies, most notably when it came to the creation of a very particular culture of knowledge production that nobody has yet been able to document elsewhere.14 For example, as I argue at some length, the fact that the Atlantic was not as wide as the Pacific cannot by itself explain the fact that Europeans took over the Americas: political context was a powerful factor as well in mobilizing or discouraging certain forms of overseas expansion. Crude geographical determinism is not the answer.15 What matters most for present purposes is that there is a difference between documenting the complex ways in which European development was embedded in and indebted to information, material resources and dynamic processes in and from other parts of the world and addressing the much narrower question of why it was western Europe that pioneered the Great Divergence (and subsequently reaped growing and in many ways outrageous benefits from it). These issues are obviously related but they are not the same. The Goody-esque approach referenced by H. tends to focus on the first one; my book is devoted much more narrowly to the question of how different clusters of explanations of the fact that the Great Divergence commenced in parts of Europe rather than elsewhere are connected to and predicated on the enduring inter-state and intra-state polycentrism of the post-Roman era. As I pointed out earlier, everything in my book is subordinated to that specific problem – and so is my focus on scholarly literature that is directly germane to that specific problem. That said, the question of the causes and dynamics of the Great Divergence will continue to spawn debate and further shelf loads of books (or bulging folders of their electronic versions), and that can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, H. seems to lose interest in this vast and exciting 13 14 15 E.g., Hoffman 2015 and most recently Sharman and Phillips 2020. See most recently Strevens 2020. Scheidel 2019: 420-71, esp. 454-72. 9 topic almost as soon as he brings it up. After the two sentences that I quoted above (on pp.6-7), he veers off to call yet again for the creation and application of an “archive” – not the archive he referred to previously (which features archaeological advances of the last 50 years) but an archive of historical evidence from different parts of the world that could be used to challenge existing master narratives (thus his long quotation from Mike Featherstone) (8). Yet just three lines later he falls back on the archaeological version of the archive when he indicts my own “archive” that “is limited and constructed not upon a modern understanding of the quantifiable elements of the Roman world” but rather “upon a pyramid scheme of suppositions drawn from unquantifiable sources. This is a serious drawback, since S.’s graphs and equations have specious bases in a largely unquantifiable archive” (8). You will recall similar indictments from his earlier sections. It strikes me as particularly unfortunate that H.’s turn to an issue that is actually highly relevant to the aims and methods of my book – how to approach the Great Divergence – is so swiftly abandoned in favor of a rehash of earlier invective. It is almost as if Goody’s work is brought merely up as a prop to justify the long quote about the need for an “archive” of non-European evidence which in turn serves as a prop for the return of the archaeological archive. This double rhetorical ploy raises doubts about the depth of H’s interest in the questions my book seeks to address (and which I have sketched out on the preceding pages). As for the substance of his criticism, there is really nothing to add to what I already explained above – that I discuss the basis for my graphs (there is not a single “equation” anywhere in the book) in considerable detail. As best as I can make out (although I am not sure what H. means), the “pyramid scheme of suppositions drawn from unquantifiable sources” seems to be my fairly basic outline of some of the principal dynamics of Roman history. H.’s final dismissal is particularly baffling: “Unlike Goody, or the master he so often cites, F. Braudel, because S.’s archive is limited, it is not very apparent as to why Rome failed and why its collapse matters” (8). Leaving aside the mangled syntax, I should note that in my book I very explicitly refuse to pay much attention to the time-honored (and arguably over-researched) question of why Rome fell:16 I am much more interested in why nothing like it reappeared. The answer to the even more exciting question of why its collapse matters – which mostly requires engagement with the more recent past – has nothing to do with H.’s archaeological archive. Or has he now returned to the second, Featherstonian archive? It truly is impossible to tell. In the epilogue, “the author bludgeons the reader to believe that the world today likes to think it lies in the shadow of Rome and its fall” (8). I must admit that I have no idea what “the world” thinks about anything, and I am not aware of having attempted any such brainwashing: in fact, there is not a single word about this in my text. We are left with the overall impression of a reviewer almost painfully out of his depth – in his apparent incomprehension of the methods, objectives and constraints of problem-driven big history as well as in his aggressive lack of interest in the key questions that guide my project.17 16 17 Scheidel 2019: 11, 128-31. The contrast to the social-science-oriented review essay by Koyama 2020 is striking. 10 There can be no doubt that the relationship between archaeological research and this kind of social-science-inflected big history is very much worth debating, and that the Journal of Roman Archaeology would be an excellent forum for such a debate. H.’s piece is a missed opportunity. The only things we have had a chance to learn are several basic take-home lessons. If you review a book, tell your readers what the book is about. If you quote from it, say so. If you urge caution, lead by example. If you object to the modus operandi of an author, familiarize yourself with the practices that are characteristic of the genre to which the author contributes, especially if you lack first-hand experience with it. If you introduce material that is not covered in the book, tell your readers whether and how consideration of this material affects the points made in the book and its conclusions. If you criticize an author’s approach, tell your readers whether and how a different approach would affect the points made in the book and its conclusions. If you are unable or unwilling to do any of these things, ask yourself if you are the right person to write a review. Style By focusing on the content of H.’s text, I have probably conveyed the impression that what he has produced is, at the end of the day, a rather unremarkable thing: a bad bad review – bad in the double sense of being unfavorable and of failing to observe any of the basic principles of reviewing I just enumerated. But his piece stands out for another reason entirely: its tone and style. The opening page, which I have left for last, is a sight to behold. H. entitles his text “Escapism for lovers of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator” (1). If that is intended as a witticism, I am afraid it goes right over my head. (No explanation is provided.18) H. quickly informs the reader that my book “is aimed not at peer academics but, as the jacket’s hyperbole suggests, at a popular audience and, my best guess is, airport bookshops in particular, with their jet-setting customers” (1). If only! I doubt that airport book stores are likely to stock a monograph with 1,031 endnotes and a 45-page bibliography published by a university press. I am also not sure how many jet-setters like to lug around 700-page tomes. Besides, as one can clearly see on page 26 of my book, I anticipated a predominantly academic or at least academically inclined audience. But, I am proud to say, not just them: unlike all too many professional scholars, the general public has retained a healthy appetite for a broad canvas and big historical questions. God forbid a credentialed academic might try to reach such lowly creatures alongside proper “peer academics,” and that university presses, instead of going quietly into the night, sustain their more technical offerings that can make or break tenure cases with the help of books of broader appeal. 18 The appended footnote (1 n.1) reads: “Ridley Scott’s film had a significant impact on the Roman city of Butrint, where I was excavating at that time. Increased numbers of visitors sought out the theater, believing it was where gladiators fought, rather than a place for performances of music and plays. Perhaps to exploit the fame of Gladiator, the Albanian government issued a 2,000-lek note with an image of Butrint’s theater inaccurately entitled “Amfiteatri in Butrintit.” Now we know. 11 Yet that is just the beginning. I quote H. in full: Its target readership is surely those who reluctantly take high-end vacations and head to Cape Cod, the Hamptons, or Tuscany and, forsaking their quotidian read, The Economist, opt for something “serious” and “historical” to keep their dinner companions exercised. At its heart is a “what-if” narrative, seeking ancient origins for modern circumstances. S. also aims to have written a book for our (pre-COVID pandemic) global age with its balancing of the West (essentially Europe) versus China. As the vacation dinner Chianti is passed and the primo is being consumed, one can picture the reader of this book opining on the now-proven merits of small, as opposed to big, political entities, of the significance of conflict rather than reason in historical process (see also my n.1) and, paradoxically, progress as opposed to stasis. Long before a digestivo arrives, the dinner party, we may assume, will be arguing about whether escape from the Roman world helps to explain the major political issues of the globe today. Is the end of the Roman Republic and its conquest by an emperor a metaphor for the end of American democracy? To be sure, Brexiteers might find heart-warming passages about competitive fragmentation. Unexpectedly, perhaps to keep the dinner-party companions on their toes, the author offers several shout-outs for Scandinavian democracies. Is “getting a Denmark,” [sic] as he phrases it, a provocation to his likely readers, who will instinctively have no time for Nordic “socialism?” His final conclusion is barely less provocative: could it be a tacit nod to the Vatican’s present principal, as he settles on the Church as the main legacy of the ancient world in modern times? The dinner party, one can safely assume, will have ended in confusion, puzzled as much by the pyramid of analyses, one leading to another, as by its conclusions. (1-2) That something “speaks for itself” may well be an overused phrase, yet it seems custom-made for a case like this. This allows me to limit myself to just a few points. First, I wonder if I am the only one who has trouble reconciling H.’s unabashedly elitist sneer about “a popular audience” and “airport bookshops” with the faux-populist disdain in which he professes to hold One Percenters. Second, for someone so keen on “academic peers,” H. shows curiously little regard for the most basic norms of academic communication. Third, and to my mind most importantly, this is not a self-published text somewhere on a personal blog. This matters not only because of the opportunity cost of devoting space that could have been used for part of an actual review to posturing devoid of academic content. It matters above all because it raises questions about what kind of signals we – as professionally secure faculty – wish to send. As the academic Humanities feel the bite of cut-backs and realignments and several Classics programs (at least here in the US) have already been closed down, is this really the best moment to offer a prominent platform to those who openly denigrate attempts to reach an audience beyond academic circles? What message does that convey to students and junior academics who might consider career tracks and earning opportunities outside the Ivory Tower, or to those on the inside who look forward to swapping the grind of the tenure book for a more accessible form of engagement with a wider public? By the same token, one might ask how well the platforming of this particular tone and style is attuned to ongoing conversations on campuses, in scholarly associations and on social media on how to conduct ourselves as members of the academic community, and on how to make that community more welcoming, equitable and inclusionary. Why would a leading professional journal want to signal that this antediluvian blend of self-indulgent bombast, elitist contempt and blithe vituperation is still perfectly acceptable? 12 References Abu-Lughod, J. L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Bang, P. F., Bayly, C. A., and Scheidel, W., eds. 2021. The Oxford World History of Empire. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Conrad, S. 2016. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crossley, P. K. 2008. What is Global History? Cambridge: Polity. Daly, J. 2015. Historians Debate the Rise of the West. London: Routledge. Frank, A. G., and Gills, B. K., eds. 1993. The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London: Routledge. Goody, J. 2004. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Malden MA: Blackwell. Goody, J. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guldi, J., and Armitage, D. 2014. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, J. M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, R. 2021. “Escapism for lovers of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.” Journal of Roman Archaeology FirstView April 12, 2021. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759421000179. Hodgson, M. 1974. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, P. T. 2015. Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hunt, L. 2014. Writing History in the Global Era. New York: Norton. Inikori, J. I. 2002. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koyama, M. in press. “A Review Essay of Escape from Rome.” Journal of Economic Literature. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3544313. Marks, R. B. 2002. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Maschek, D. 2021. “How the Romans conquered and built their world, and why it matters.” Journal of Roman Archaeology FirstView April 16, 2021. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759421000192. McCloskey, D. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCloskey, D. 2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olstein, D. 2015. Thinking History Globally. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Padilla Peralta, D. 2020. Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parthasarathi, P. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scheidel, W. 2019. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sharman, J. C., and Phillips, A. 2020. Outsourcing Empire: How Company States Made the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strevens, M. 2020. The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science. New York: Liveright. Terrenato, N. 2019. The Early Roman Expansion into Italy: Elite Negotiation and Family Agendas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vries, P. 2013. Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth. Vienna: Vienna University Press. 13