What if Christianity never existed?
Walter Scheidel’s tour de force of world history is based almost entirely on counterfactuals.
In Review
Escape from Rome
The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
What’s a historian to do when everything about a topic has already been written? Write about what didn’t happen!
That’s a rather cheeky way to introduce what is in fact a tour de force of world history. Walter Scheidel, who teaches classics at Stanford University, aims to answer the question of why Western civilization bounded past the rest of the world economically in the 18th century (a phenomenon that historians generally call the Great Divergence) by asking a different question: Could history have unfolded differently?
Scheidel begins by rejiggering the familiar terms. The Great Divergence becomes the Second Great Divergence, and he classifies what happened in Europe immediately after the Roman Empire as the First Great Divergence.
