How Empires Fall: The Marxist Perspective - GreekReporter.com https://share.google/n3pQhqNj7jYWaDY9G
Touched upon many many times in other threads but more generic here
The trouble with this sort of analysis is that it starts from a set of political beliefs and tries to shoehorn events into them. It's more interested in justifying itself, than it is in learning anything about history.
So what we get is a whole load of platitudes like "if you're nasty to people, they won't like you", and "if you can't afford to pay for defence then eventually you'll get conquered". It only becomes useful if it can show that such decline is inevitable, but frankly "Nero was a bit of a plonker, so 400 years later the Roman Empire fell" isn't very convincing.
What people forget is that sometimes Empires don't as much fall as are actively destroyed. An example I'd give is Achaemenid Persia. The literature is now moving away from the idea that the Empire was in terminal decline. It could have survived generations but not a Macedonian army
A perfect storm
Machiavelli may not have been working on empire scale but still makes a lot of sense.
Quote from: Ian61 on Aug 23, 2025, 07:55 PMMachiavelli may not have been working on empire scale but still makes a lot of sense.
Surely required reading :)