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<h3>How Empires Really End</h3>
<h4 class="MsoBodyText">by Sean
Corrigan</h4>
[Posted
October 25, 2004]

<img alt src="http://www.mises.org/images3/rome.gif" align="right" border="0" width="181" height="312">H
ere is what the standard historical textbooks will tell you. The Romans, after
nearly four centuries of occupation, abandoned Britain in the year 410 a.d.,
when the western Emperor Honorius sent a"Rescript"—or official
proclamation—to the leaders of the British municipalities, telling them,
thereafter, to look to their own defense.

Those same books—with
their urge to chop history up into neatly packaged slivers—then roundly
declare that “Civilization” was abolished and that the"Dark Ages"
promptly began.

They will inform
you that, within the space of barely two generations, the feeble British had
abandoned the fertile lowland fields and farms, which their ancestors had tended
since the last Ice Age, giving them up to a few boatloads of Germanic pirates
and that they began to flee, finding a bleak refuge in the harsher highlands on
the oceanic fringes of their island.

And why would
this not be true—no less than Rome herself
was sacked by Alaric and his Goths that same year, was it not?

As for Honorius,
well, he was sheltering safely in Ravenna while
his people were enduring the barbarian siege. The story goes that when he heard
the news of its ruin, he thought it was a lesser evil than would be the death of
his pet cockerel of the same name!

But rather than
using the words of a fool in purple, historians consider the cataclysm was
better encapsulated by the pen of St. Jerome, who gave out a whole series of
lamentations, wailing, in one letter, that:

"...the
bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman
Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly,
the whole world perished in one city."

Here and now,
sixteen centuries later, in my line of work as an investment analyst, you come
across more and more latter-day St. Jeromes, wherever you turn.

I know of people
who are selling up and moving to seek Shangri-La in the Southern Alps of New
Zealand. I’ve met those who think Paradise is
to be found among the palm trees of the Dominican
Republic or Costa Rica.

A smart and very
highly-educated American with whom I’m friendly speaks for many when he ends
an e-mail with the words:"I’m looking forward to seeing you in Zurich.
The way things are here, I might even stay."

In fact, it’s
becoming increasingly common for well-to-do professional folks and retired
businessmen to reveal, in the course of a conversation, that they are prey to
increasing anxieties about their future.

These people
evidently fear that their quality of life can no longer be guaranteed and they
often don’t know what they can do about it.

Meanwhile, out in
the wider world, the Gold Bugs and the more extreme religious crazies (of all
faiths) have seemingly set up a joint venture.

These two
incongruous lobby groups have joined hands in trying to persuade people that the
End of Days—financial or universal—is at hand.

What they seem to
have agreed upon is that when God/Jehovah/Allah/Shiva is shortly revealed in all
His mighty wrath and when He causes credit to collapse and the stock market to
plunge, He will expect the Faithful not to be caught up in the rout.

Oh, no! For the
mark of the True Believer is that, when the Crash comes, he should be ready to
take the Lord straight to where he has his gold coins buried instead!

As that
mellifluous voice of carefully-crafted pessimism, Bill Bonner, put it, in a
recent piece:

"We
like gold the way we like stacks of firewood, jars of canned green beans and
cheerful women. They make the going so much more fun when the going gets rough.
As we mention above, the going has never been easier. So easy have things become
that people no longer see the need for reserves.... But someday, the
going may not be so good. We hold it in inventory for the day when ‘just in
time’ fails and ‘just in case’ comes back into style..."

This sounds
eminently more reasonable, but, in truth, it is simply more of the same
doom-mongering—just more soothingly and articulately expressed by a master of
the art.

For my part,
I’ll admit that our rulers’ chickens finally may be coming home to roost,
and that ours will be the generation up to our necks in guano.

However, I’m
among those who also find this vogue for paranoia—this cult of the Apocalypse—both
unattractive and unfruitful.

The lesson of
history

This is where the
story of Rome— and the
manner of its telling—is particularly instructive. This is because, as
frequently happens in life, if we look beyond the banner headlines of despair,
we can find cause for hope.

We can also draw
several parallels with what is happening to us today—though not on the way our
present crop of St. Jeromes would do it.

Let’s take a
glimpse at how Rome and her
history can give us a reaffirmation of our unshaken belief in the ability of
Everyman, acting as a free individual, to repair all the damage ever done by
history’s tyrants and their tax gatherers.

The first thing
to be pointed out is that, however dramatic the official version of those past
events, what historians—and, more emphatically, archaeologists—are coming to
realize is that, changes in political leadership aside, nothing very much at all
can otherwise be found to distinguish the days before 410 a.d. with those
afterwards.

Rome may
have swapped leaders. Violence may have been done and property destroyed on a
considerable scale. Individual tragedy was, we suspect, both undeniable and
heart-rending, as it always is in such times.

Yet, the vast
majority of men and women still lived their lives, tended their livestock, took
their goods to market, and worshipped their gods, as they had always done—Rome,
or no Rome.

The thrifty and
the enterprising still, on the whole, fared better than the prodigal and the
unthinking. In fact, freed of the crushing exactions laid upon them by a Rome
always eager to bribe its vast, unproductive military class
into quietude, they may even have been left to enjoy more of the fruits of their
own labors than usual.

But, the academic
historians have always sought to ignore things like this, for these are concerns
of common people—of traders and farmers—and historians focus mainly
on the swaggering fools at the head of the State—on generals and governors.

Even if we
momentarily share their obsession and even if we stick to the old texts,
unbacked by any harder evidence, the accepted view does not bear much scrutiny.

Take the case of
those feeble Britons, for instance.

Here, it should
be noted that Honorius’ letter was not a denial of some grovelling plea for
aid, but a recognition of their de facto and self-attained independence.

In early
5th-century Britain, memories still burned with the flames of the pogrom
unleashed by Emperor Constantius II’s emissary, Paulus Catena, sixty years
before, after the native leaders had backed the wrong contender in a struggle
for his master’s throne.

Many of the
current leaders’ fathers had probably collaborated in fomenting what the texts
call the"Barbarian Conspiracy," in 367 a.d.—traditionally viewed as
yet another mark of Britain’s weakness, but now
being revised into what may actually have been another concerted attempt to shed
the Imperial yoke.

In fact, far from
being wretched, the Britons invaded the continent several times themselves after
this supposed disaster; notably, under Maximus in 383 a.d., and, again, under
Constantine III in 409 a.d. They even deposed two previous, more circumspect
leaders in swift succession in order to give Constantine
his shot at the title!

Thus, just a year
before Honorius wrote his famous missive, one faction of the Island Celts had
already come close to deposing him, while another spurned his rule completely.

As Zosimus wrote
of the period:

"... [events
saw] some of the Celtic peoples defecting from the Roman rule and living their
own lives, independent from the Roman laws. The Britons therefore took up arms
and, braving the danger on their own behalf, freed their cities from the
barbarian threat. And all Armorica and
the other Gallic provinces followed their example, freed themselves in the same
way, expelling the Roman officials and setting up a constitution such as they
pleased..."

If this was the
case, if some Celtic Washingtons and Jeffersons had, indeed, won and formalized
their people’s freedom, what of the notorious ”Groans of the Britons”
letter, addressed to Generalissimo Aetius a generation later? Surely this must
prove that British sheep were still being shorn by Saxon wolves?

Well, perhaps not,
for it can better be read as the futile obsecration of one pro-Roman (and
Augustinian?) faction, losing out to their retro-Celtic (Pelagian?) foes.

Note that, in it,
the plaintiffs were bleating that “the barbarians push us to the sea; the sea
pushes us back to the barbarians: between these two kinds of death, we are
either slaughtered or drowned.”

Anglo-historians
swell with pride here, assuming that their virile Saxon forebears are pushing
the effete Welsh off the cliffs of Cornwall, but a far
more realistic construction is that supreme commander “Vortigern’s” men
are riding the imperial faction into the surf in Kent!

Moreover, as late
as 470 a.d.—when the Saxons had supposedly started their"ethnic
cleansing"—it was a contingent of 12,000 Britons under King Riothamus (tentatively
identified by some as Vortigern’s disobedient warrior son, Vortimer) which is
said to have sailed up the Loire in the unsuccessful effort to succor the
Emperor Anthemius against his Gothic foes.

So, contrary to
popular belief, military aid and military adventurism did not always flow West
from Rome, but often it was directed the other way
around!

The victors
write the history

But, no matter.

Objective truth
counted for little when generations of Englishmen had been schooled in the ways
of Rome and were taught to
treat its authors’ propagandistic Latin as plain fact.

Who understood
that these same worthies and their teachers were all too eager to trace their
contemporary naval and commercial pre-eminence back to the alleged superiority
of their race?

Who realized that
history must bend if Victorian overlords were eager to see in their own Empire a
reflection of more ancient glories?

Thus was conjured
up the myth of the Anglo-Saxon supremacy and its counterpoise, the rapid descent
of the degenerate post-Roman Britons back to the mud huts and pig sties from
which their Italian masters had briefly roused them.

As evidence for
this, the historians cited the collapse of urban society.

They noted the
dwindling of the cash economy as the barely-civilized savages retreated to rural
isolation and relied, once more, upon barter for the exchange of their few, poor
goods.

Deprived of their
Tacituses and Cassius Dio’s, they scorned the natives’ lack of learning and
mocked the dearth of literacy, which had replaced the renowned intellectual
salons of the auxiliary castra.

The fact that the
Celtic Church, sponsored by the
sovereign Celtic princes, was the re-educator of continental Europe
and that its footsore saints were the proselytizers of both
Faith and Science throughout these times, was neatly overlooked.

Even on the
economic front, the distortions are plain.

New
archaeological evidence and recent reinterpretations of old data suggest the
towns had been undergoing a continual period of slow decay for many years prior
to 410 a.d. and that the cause was not to be found in barbarian
depredations, but in Rome’s own dysfunctional society.

For far too long,
Rome had lived by conquest—through
seizing, by force of arms, what its spendthrift patricians and Caesarian mafiosi
could not hope to gain by trade alone.

But once the
Empire came to butt up against lands too infertile to be worth the taking, or
against terrain too inhospitable for its Legions to control in the face of
active native"insurgents," this predatory State turned increasingly
inward to devour its own wealth producers instead.

Punitive taxes
were needed, above all, to pay the vast numbers of soldiers.

In some
strikingly modern ways, it was mainly the military contractors and the tradesmen
(and trollops) in the towns (vici) which sprang up alongside the
legionary camps who did well out of equipping and servicing (in all sorts of
ways) their oppressors.

Naturally, in
response to these tolls, rich men sought to keep their wealth to themselves, as
far as was possible.

Rather than
squandering money—some of it borrowed at hefty rates of interest—to build
public edifices, such as baths and temples, solely for reasons of prestige, the
urban elite began actively to avoid such impositions.

Indeed, the
former privilege of Roman citizenship and the pride of holding the offices which
accrued to it became such a burden that the wealthy retired to the Dominican
Republics of their day, their country villas.

There, they could
minimize the loss of their property to overt taxation and there they could avoid
the constant, unsubtle pressure for those contributions aimed at displaying
their loyalty to the regime.

So, unrepaired
and unfrequented, town centers began to look dilapidated, long before any
unwelcome barbarian tongues were heard in their near empty streets.

Fex urbis,
lex orbis

Added to all this
was the presence of that perennial, wasting affliction, that debilitating
disease so often visited by reckless rulers on their long-suffering subjects—monetary
inflation.

Long before
Alaric’s Goths had plundered the so-called Eternal
City, its money had become so debased that Imperial tribute
and taxes were having to be levied in kind, not in cash.

This greatly
decreased the efficiency of the process. It also hurt the leadership indirectly,
because it made tax collection more personal and more violently confrontational.

Gradually, then,
the whole empire had become little more than an arena in which competing
warlords would raise forces to bid for the throne.

Increasingly, its
farmers and merchants were seen as nothing more than tax slaves to be exploited
in order to provide the Dole to the restless urban proletariat and to buy the
fickle loyalties of the ever-important soldiers.

Over time, the
difference between the"barbarians" and the Romans was becoming
blurred, too.

For one, the
legions’ military pre-eminence became eroded as the hardy peasants of Italy
in its ranks gave way to the unwilling sons of the conquered
who were conscripted in their place.

Additionally,
many sons of the unconquered would volunteer to join them—attracted by the pay
and conditions and by the very modern enticement of the chance to learn a trade.

There was also
the prospect of becoming a man of mark back home when the volunteer’s term was
up. This was an advancement aided substantially by the often sizeable retirement
bonus with which nervous emperors made further attempts to keep the military
caste onside.

That bonus, could,
of course, be most readily employed as capital in a business which relied on the
veteran’s ability to use his inside contacts. He could call in a few favors,
grease a few palms and so win a lucrative tender to supply his old army mess
mates with their victuals, their gear, or their trinkets.

Once more, the
parallels with today’s"revolving doors" are obvious, Mr. Cheney.

But, it wasn’t
just the soldiers:"foreign" tradesmen and artisans, too, had learned
what there was to learn from Rome and
they applied it both in their home markets and inside the imperial lines.

While this meant
tribal leaders far beyond the empire’s boundaries were able to show off their
collections of Roman jewellery and plate and to quaff the best Roman wines when
feasting with their henchmen—just as their unsavory equivalents today all
drive Mercedes and sport Rolex watches—it was they who often had the better of
the terms of trade.

This must have
discomfited the Romans then no less than China's new manufacturing
competitiveness or India’s growing software
programming skills frighten British and American union bosses today.

Rome, then, was
not only undermined from within, but it became much less singular in its
abilities, as knowledge of its technologies and innovations diffused across its
borders.

The lessons we
should draw from all this is that though things were, in some senses, gradually
getting worse as the Fifth Century began, many of the evils were not the result
of sudden irruptions of savages from the outer fringes of the world, but were
due primarily to a slow corrosion from within.

Inflation,
arbitrary government, swingeing taxation, the confiscation of property—often
undertaken on the flimsy pretext of punishing dissent, or after the accidental
infringement of some obscure regulation: these we would all recognize as things
which plague us today.

The development
of an increasingly remote, self-serving and fabulously wealthy governing elite;
the destruction of the bedrock middle class; the reliance of the poor on State
grants and subsidies; the inhibition of free enterprise and the pervasive
militarization of society—these are all things we also know all too well.

Our Rome,
too, may be ending in exactly this fashion and in this, the End-of the-World
crowd may be right about a coming reckoning.

But, just like
Ancient Rome was lost long before the Goths invaded her precincts, it will not
be our empire’s external foes who bring it down, but the
self-inflicted wounds from which it has been suffering for decades.

Should we care?

At the margin,
perhaps, we should, for we may have to work that bit harder to make our way
against people outside the empire who will now be able to compete on a more
level playing field than before.

But what we
should also remember is that Rome’s passing was not
universally mourned—certainly not by those at risk of its institutionalized
terror.

As the noted
British archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler summed it up, after a lifetime of
work in the field:

"I suffered
from a surfeit of things Roman. I felt disgusted by the mechanistic quality of
their art and by the nearness of their civilization at all times to cruelty and
corruption."

We should recall
also the passages above which showed that the Briton and some of their Gaulish
cousins thrived under their new found freedoms and their recovered
self-determination.

We should listen
to the testimony of the present generation of less-hidebound archaeologists and
historians who are beginning to see matters in a different light to that by
which their professors worked.

Men such as
Francis Pryor, who goes to great lengths to point out that history (and
prehistory, too, in his case) provides much more evidence of continuity,
overlaid with gradual change, than it does of revolutions or mass invasions.

In fact, based on
a careful study of settlement patterns, artifact finds and burial practices,
Pryor even doubts whether the"Anglo-Saxons" themselves might not be
largely or wholly a post-dated fiction, constructed to give one set of
relatively successful British kinglets a suitably glorious lineage, the better
to distinguish themselves more clearly from their losing opponents among the
other, no-less British kinglets!

At present, that
seems too far a stretch for me, but his point is nonetheless well made.

To return to the
main issue, will the fall of our Rome mean a fundamental change in the way our
lives will be lived?

I would contend
not and to support this contention, I would ask you to consider the historical
record again.

Life goes on

Over four
centuries of occupation—and countless more of commercial traffic—Britons
adopted certain Roman mannerisms, were influenced by Roman religious cults, and
sought to purchase Roman consumer goods, just as people in Tehran today wear
Levi Jeans and Nike trainers while listening to REM or Eminem on their iPods.

But, at heart
they remained Britons and, beyond even that broad classification, they were
individual acting humans, each driven to provide for himself and his family
through working to satisfy their needs.

In their labors,
these Britons were aided by the use of what capital they had and they
appreciated the benefits which came from specializing in a trade.

In this, they did
best when their property was most secure from either legal or criminal jeopardy.

Then, just as now,
they would look for opportunities to exchange the surplus to which their trade
gave rise. They would swap it for others’ surplus goods at the best mutually
agreed rate they felt they could achieve.

In short, their
lives—like ours—were dominated, not so much by their rulers, as by plain old
economic necessity: by matters such as scarcity, choice, capital, income, profit,
and enterprise.

Do you suppose
that all of this was called into question because a Pope died, or an Emperor was
usurped?

Do you suppose
people thought that the local warrior prince—even if he spoke German, or Welsh,
not Latin—was any less, or any more, of an inevitable ill with which to put up
than were the procurators and legates of a distant sovereign?

Do you think it
will matter now if a President is thrown out, or if a Prime Minister resigns?

No.

Now, as then, Men
will adapt to their new circumstances—as they always do, if their government
allows them the necessary freedom.

Yes, there may be
economic upsets and, yes, certain long-standing trading networks might become
defunct. Conversely, new business ventures will suggest themselves as being
potentially profitable and ships will still ply the deep oceans, with holds
stuffed full of goods to exchange.

No doubt,
different loyalties will be expressed as the balance of political risks changes.

Threats to life
and property will take newer forms, though not necessarily less bearable ones.

Crucially, the
blessings of thrift and hard work and the fruits of enterprise will still be
enjoyed—especially where the State’s footprint lies a little less heavily on
the soil.

In summary, life
will go on today, as it did even when the mightiest Empire history had known was
sinking into legend.

Life will go on,
in the 21st Century as it did in the 5th—different, yet the same.

If we cut through
the religious intolerance and ascetic distaste evident in the words of the sour
old monk we met earlier, Saint Jerome himself,
from his hermit’s cell in Bethlehem, had already
recognized this, well before the embers had ceased to smoulder in his erstwhile
City of Light:

"The world
sinks into ruin...” he wrote, as mournful as ever. “The renowned city,
the capital of the Roman Empire, is swallowed up in
one tremendous fire; and there is no part of the earth where Romans are not in
exile...."

But, pay
particular attention to what he had to say next:

"... and
yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we are going
to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we are going to live always in this
world"

Well, of course,
his contemporaries did just that—and it was no sin that they did, either, but
rather a matter for thanksgiving!

For, why
wouldn’t we expect people to go about their daily lives in much the same
fashion as they did before; buying and selling, building and dreaming,
speculating and investing?

And why won’t we
carry on, pretty much regardless, even if our modern Western
Empire loses its pre-eminence in its turn?

No. The one thing
of which we can be sure is that—whatever the details of the looming change—more
will stay the same than will be altered by it.

What you
should do about it

Buy gold, then,
if you will—but only because you share the view that it is very much harder to
acquire than paper money is to create and that this means it should tend to
maintain its value better.                                                                                                              

But, whatever you
do, don’t buy it as part of a retreat from life you are making just because
times seem more uncertain than they used to appear.

In trying to
preserve your liberty from the zealots in charge of today’s increasingly
Roman State, don’t surrender it
instead to your fears by becoming either a metaphorical or an actual survivalist.

Don’t be
tempted to hole up in the mountains with only your water purifier, your rifle,
and your Krugerrands for company for, if the end of the world does come,
no amount of gold is going to comfort you very much.

But if it is only
our version of Rome which
falls—this will not invalidate the lasting truth that your own wealth is best
preserved when it helps another entrepreneur in the process of creating his.

This means you
must not hoard what is yours, for its real worth will only dwindle, if you do,
eaten away by inflation, confiscated by the tax farmers.

No, rather, you
must keep on trying to invest it wisely by using it to participate in
undertakings which make their owners a living through serving their
post-Imperial, just as their pre-Imperial, customers better than their
competitors can.

All in all, you
know the Emperor Honorius may not have been such a fool, after all.

Maybe his rooster—a
most useful bird, economically speaking— did
matter more than the fate of any ruler or regime, for the final
lesson we must draw is that, as long as Men are Men, entrepreneurship will
always outlast empire.

So, take note,
you “historians of decline”: our times will be no exception!

______________________________________

Sean Corrigan is the
Investment Strategist at Sage Capital Zuerich AG (www.sagecapital.com),
a Swiss-based organization dedicated to the cause of capital preservation and is co-adviser to
the Bermuda-based Edelweiss
Fund. See his Mises.org Articles
Archive, or send him mail
(corrigan@sagecapital.com). This
article is written for the exclusive use by Mises.org; the usual liberal
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