The great myth of empire collapse

While I share the view there, it's kind of a macro view. The day to day 99% percent view also depends on an empire and on a collapse. Having regular blackouts and no running water in the 90ies wasn't fun at all, even zo the quality of life improved dramatically a decade or two later.

I recently read the book 'Barbarians' by Terry Jones (the ex-Python) and Alan Ereira. It suggested that, because the Romans were such a brutal bunch who levied high taxes, some people were happier after the collapse of their empire.

If anyone is interested in the rise and fall of empires, I strongly recommend the 'Fall of civilizations' podcast. It is a masterpiece of podcasting.

https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

I am not sure what “the collapse of an empire” means. True empires bleed off colonies or satellites, often over hundreds of years; sometimes with wars, sometimes without.

Today being imprecise with language to smear one’s political opponents is in fashion; a lot of talk about “empire” and “regime” etc. is just propaganda.

The fall of a government will leave a power vacuum and people will rush to fill it; violence might be part of the fall but will almost certainly be part of the competition to be the replacement. We have dozens of examples in the last hundred years.

During all those times, people have to live their lives; things go on pretty much as normal for most people not involved in the struggle for power. However there are disruptions to utilities and financial systems; many people lose their life savings and sometimes feeding people is hard, let alone doing business like manufacturing.

The only thing that is “apocalyptic” about the fall of a government and its replacement with a new one, is when the new government is full of radical ideologues that use the force of government, and ultimately violence, against their political opponents, such as in the Russian Revolution, the Nazi rise to power, and Mao’s rise to power.

This is not a foregone conclusion; we didn’t see intentional mass starvation or genocide in Iran, for example, although there were thousands of executions as the new regime purged its opponents.

The British empire collapsed within the last 100 years so you can ask living people today what it was like to love through a collapse of the empire they lived in.

I find the article's dismissal of population collapses rather dishonest.

There is no doubt that urban centres basically disappeared after collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and that population density went significantly down. Once the city-based specialists were gone, so was any ability of rural folk to buy anything that could not be produced by primitive methods in their own community. And without an efficient trade network, there was no way to import food if local crops failed. Hence, famines, which the previous empire was mostly able to hold in check by moving food over the sea at big distances.

A major problem of the Early Middle Ages was diminished security - all those Viking, Avar, Hun and Pecheneg raids were absolutely real, and their targets weren't "the 1%". Of course loot from the rich would be taken, but so would poor young women for sex and their children into slavery, and their meagre food reserves for the raiders to eat. That is what happens to settled people without an efficient defense of their borders.

We have had two big imperial collapses right in Europe within living memory - the Nazi Reich (by war) and the Soviet Union (economic). Ask the survivors if they "noticed". They absolutely did. I would even say that the working class "noticed" the most, as they usually had fewest reserves to survive the subsequent chaos.

It wasn't that different in the past.

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