Why Empires Fall
Dan Snow's History Hit
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The Importance of Declining Empires
I'm always very struck by our obsession with the idea that decline will be followed by a fall. And actually the story, interestingly, of European empires more recently is European people in the imperial metropole have never been richer and never been more content as their empires collapsed. So what is declining and what is falling I think is sometimes kind of important. But it doesn't necessarily mean absolute decline, and that's the big difference with Rome, that there's no reason to think it will lead to a fall.
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