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Podcast: New Books in Ancient History
Episode: Peter Heather and John Rapley, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West" (Yale UP, 2023)
Description: Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration.In Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (Yale UP, 2023) Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rap...