What does it mean for an empire to fall?
The Strange Death of Roman Europe.
A few weeks ago now my editor Jasper sent me this tweet by Insider’s Tanya Chen, in which she claimed to be reeling from the discovery that a significant proportion of men spend a lot of their time thinking about the Roman Empire, and I wouldn’t have minded the character assassination so much were it not for the fact I was literally in the middle of a conversation about the Roman Empire at the time.1 Anyway. If you’re one of the people who finds this baffling or annoying then I can only apologise, because I’ve had a new thought about the Roman Empire: specifically, what it tells us about what it means for something to “fall”.
Some years ago now I recorded a podcast with the historian Kevin Feeney (recently heard explaining why so many men are obsessed with Rome on the radio station WNYC). In it, I asked why the empire had fallen, and received an answer that confused the hell out of me: perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it simply turned into something else.
At the time, this baffled me: the fact that Rome fell is one of the main things people know about Rome. (One of the most famous history books of all time is literally called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire!) It’s also, I suspect, one of the reasons some of us are obsessed with it. Never mind all the nonsense about politics or military strategy. The fact our own civilisation was preceded by another whose rise and fall we have on record – the inescapable awareness that civilisation can fall – will never not be haunting. There’s a whole genre of sci-fi stories set in universes where Rome never fell, for god’s sake! Rome absolutely, definitely fell.
The more I’ve read about late antiquity, though, the more I sort of get Kevin’s point. The date generally given for the fall of the western empire – 476, the year a passing German warlord deposed the ironically named boy emperor Romulus Augustulus, and that was the end of that – turns out to be weirdly arbitrary, for a whole bunch of reasons I’ve banged on about before.2 Sure, in the year 400, the Roman Empire definitely existed, and however you look at it it definitely doesn’t now. But just because something was once there and isn’t any more, that doesn’t mean you can point to a moment it “fell”
To put it another way, consider a question. When did the British Empire fall?
Ask Google when Australia became independent and it will provide an answer which is highly specific but also, on the face of it, insane: 3 March 1986. That’s the date of the passage of the Australia Act, two related bits of legislation passed in London and Canberra, which formally ended the British government’s ability to interfere in Australian politics.
Those, though, were the endpoint of nearly a century of gradual separation, taking in the federation of the six colonies and the adoption of their new constitution on 1 January 1901, and royal assent for legislative independence on 9 October 1942. It’s mad to suggest that Australia was still a British colony at the point Neighbours entered production, even if London did, technically, retain some rights; but the other dates are not obviously correct either.
Even countries whose departure from the empire was a lot less friendly can’t necessarily point to a single date. Wikipedia offers six different milestones on the road to Irish independence from the United Kingdom, starting with the proclamation made during the Easter Rising of 1916 (commemorated now, but entirely unofficial at the time), and ending with the Ireland Act on 18 April 1949 (the final, official cutting of ties, which hardly anyone remembers now). As with Australia, independence was not an event but a process.
Oh, and complicating things farther, at the point those two independence processes began, the empire had yet to even reach its peak. It wouldn’t do so until after the First World War.
Few of us, I imagine, would say that the British Empire is still a going concern. But when did it “fall”? Did it end with the return of Hong Kong to China back in 1997? Why, given the retention of a few territories like the Falklands or Gibraltar, is it not in some sense still there? Come to that, given that there’s a large chunk of South America which Paris still claims as a department of France, does that country still have an empire? Is there, given hegemony and global military presence, an American empire? Or, given its economic involvement with large chunks of Africa, a Chinese one? Can we really say that the Russian Empire ceased to exist in 1917 just because it changed its name?
And if we can’t pin down exactly when empires in our own time begin and end, why on earth do we imagine that those of the past should have neat beginnings or endings?
People are born, and die, on specific dates. There is plenty of debate about when a foetus becomes a person, what the technical definition of death should be, and so on; but there is, nonetheless, a line. It’s essentially a binary state. You are either alive or you are not.
But institutions don’t work like that, because they aren’t individuals but collections of people and imagined communities. Companies can divide or merge as well as go bust; the origins and endings of states are determined as much by the stories we tell about them as they are by objective reality. Which is why, of course, I managed to genuinely shock an Irish friend with the information that his country had officially been a British dominion until after the Second World War.
To bring us back to our earlier theme, consider what this means for a political party. You’d struggle to pin down a single date when the British Liberal Party died, either. On some measures, it happened a century ago (George Dangerfield’s retrospective book The Strange Death of Liberal England dates to 1935); on others, it’s still technically with us. However you look at it, though, it’s hard to argue it’s still the force it was in 1906. Something that was there no longer is.
So don’t be fooled. Britain may, today, have a Tory Prime Minister. That doesn’t mean the Tory party isn’t dead.
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Quick precis: by then, Rome had not been the imperial capital for some time; a thing calling itself itself the Roman Empire persisted for nearly another millennium, until the Turks finally took Constantinople in 1453; that passing war lord, Odoacer, thought he was paying homage to its emperor, Zeno; and even if he hadn’t, Italy was reconquered the following century. That was something the inhabitants of Rome experienced as a sort of apocalypse, because it involves cutting the aqueducts. The fall of the western empire in 476, though? It’s not clear they even noticed.