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Posted on June 24, 2024 | 24 Comments
The present global meta-crisis seems certain to affect not just global politics but also the underlying structure of global politics in the existing system of nation-states. What’s the outlook for modern nation-states as the crisis unfolds? The question is probably too broad, and better addressed on a case by case, or at least a power bloc by power bloc, basis. I’ll aim to do that here with reference to one country and one power bloc, with the help of two recent books bearing on the issues.
First up is Caroline Lucas’s Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024). So the focus here is the largest and politically most powerful nation in the multi-nation state of the United Kingdom, where I live. My England.
I’ve got a lot of admiration for Lucas, who’s long ploughed a lonely furrow as the UK’s only Member of Parliament for the Green Party, and is one of the few voices of sanity in the mad world of national politics. Her book is written from the conviction that ‘progressives’ need to embrace discussions of Englishness lest it’s left to the ‘populists’ to shape the issue.
While I find over-easy distinctions between these two political p-words irksome, I suppose the return in this election season of the ghastly Nigel Farage does bolster her point. Anyway, I’ll say a bit more about progressives and populists shortly. Overall, I think the founding conviction of Lucas’s book that we need to talk about England and Englishness is reasonable. But she does kind of pre-empt the answer to the question of England in her subtitle, and when she writes, “A country without a coherent story about who and what it is can never survive and prosper” (p.9).
But what if there’s no coherent national story to reclaim? I ask this not as a ‘progressive’ who feels squeamish in talking about Englishness and would rather self-define as British, or European, or a citizen of the world. The question is more empirical. What if, at this point in world history, England (or Britain, or Europe) just can’t create a coherent story, and therefore in Lucas’s terms can’t survive or prosper as a political entity?
Modern nationalisms work best when there’s an external occupying or controlling political force to contend with beyond the boundaries of the defined nation. Hence the relative ease in constructing Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms defined against England. Nationalisms can also work as a kind of future-oriented modernisation gambit – a new nation that’s building itself and going places in the modern world. Neither of these really work in the case of contemporary England – an old, uncolonized nation of declining global influence which is now one among many facing intractable political, economic and Earth systems problems.
Lucas says a lot of sensible things in her book, but never really gets to grips specifically with what a reclaimed Englishness might be in this context. Really, I think she set herself an impossible task. She has some good suggestions for constitutional reform that might enable England to transcend the constraints of the existing British state, but she’s wisely pessimistic about the chances of them happening. She finds hope, as I do, in the way that “ordinary people can come together and rise to challenges, even when the state will not” (p.213), a point to which I’ll return. But, still, the question of a distinctive Englishness that the ‘populists’ find so easy to articulate eludes her. She discusses “two deeply rooted English instincts: one towards violent exclusion, and one towards radical inclusivity” (p.226). But these instincts are far more deeply rooted than anything that’s specifically English. If anthropologists like Christopher Boehm are to be believed, they’re the basic heritage of the entire genus Homo.
Anyway, long story short is that I don’t think Lucas succeeds in reclaiming ‘our national story’. But there’s no shame in valiant failure at such an ambitious project, and much to be learned from her book along the way. There is, however, more of a problem in a couple of areas of her analysis that I think point in radically different directions to a reclaimed Englishness.
First, Lucas really doesn’t get much of a grip on questions of landownership, nature and farming (the latter barely discussed at all) in her two chapters on these issues.
Chapter 6 (‘English Nature’) begins by quoting George Monbiot: “One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry” (p.149). Now, I know I’m not exactly impartial when it comes to Monbiot’s recent writing, but what I’ll say in favour of that quotation is that it works as a rhetorical rallying cry against the appeal of literary pastoral traditions in the context of a writer who’s singularly dedicated to eliminating livestock farming in all its forms as almost the root of all evil.
In Lucas’s hands, the quotation slips its leash – if that’s not an inappropriate metaphor – and goes rampaging across the intellectual territory she’s trying to navigate. Nature loss and the destruction of the countryside in England, she says, basically arises for cultural reasons, as per Monbiot’s remark: “The problem is our tendency to treat nature as something beautiful but separate: a bucolic realm to be viewed with a sense of whimsical nostalgia” (p.156).
No, the problem is the way we’ve got locked into maximising net present value in a global economic system geared to the overproduction of cheap agricultural commodities. And the way we get beguiled by politically dangerous soundbites that are palpably absurd when you stop and think about them. Adam Smith’s notions about ‘the invisible hand of the market’ delivering public benefit out of private self-interest remain a long way out in front in terms of the most consequentially damaging soundbite absurdities of modern times. But I fear that notions about the existential threat of poetry are gaining ground.
Lucas’s own analysis undercuts the ‘poetry’ quotation, both by identifying poetry that understands perfectly well the complexities of people’s relationships with farming and nature, and by identifying the real forces of nature destruction in the contemporary political economy. But the literary-cultural optic that she chooses prevents her from bringing this centre stage.
A related problem is her analysis of landownership. Lucas rightly points out that land in England is concentrated in too few hands, suggesting measures to distribute it more widely (I’m doubtful about the measures, while agreeing with the principle). The implication of distributing farmland more widely is presumably that there would be more farms, probably with more people working them – but Lucas never broaches this issue or discusses the implications for food production and the wider economy. She says that “large landowners dominate the fundamentals of farming” (p.142) and imputes bad agricultural practices to their self-interest. But – while an oversimplification – it would be truer to say that the fundamentals of modern farming with its emphasis on the mass production of cheap commodity crops support large-scale landownership.
This connects with Lucas’s cultural critique of English views of nature as something “beautiful but separate” that I just mentioned. England, she says, is in love with the countryside but “loves it in the form of a picture postcard … rather than as something intertwined with the basic fabric of who we are” (p.153). Well, if the countryside is to be intertwined with the basic fabric of who we are, that implies a lot of us must live and work in the countryside. Bingo. Surely, then, we should break up the large farms and move towards a small farm future with a peopled countryside?
It’s no surprise that Lucas doesn’t go there. Only nutters like me who don’t expect to be taken seriously in mainstream political discussion step outside the window of acceptable opinion and embrace such possibilities. But instead of bemoaning the elegiac tone and sense of loss in English cultural conceptions of the countryside as if these conceptions were themselves somehow to blame for its ecocidal industrialisation, it would be nice if a greater number of ‘progressive’ commentators would work with the grain of those cultural conceptions and fashion them into the sharp political critique they potentially could be – a sense of loss among people alienated from the possibilities of a productive rural life, and a sense of anger that the countryside has become largely the preserve of the rich. Over-easy recourse to dismissive language about bucolic realms and whimsical nostalgia risks making the mistake that Lucas sets out to avoid, of a perceived metropolitan elite not taking ordinary English conceptions seriously.
Still, it’s an urban world nowadays and no doubt it could be argued – in fact, it endlessly is – that it’s unrealistic to project any substantially rural future for people in England, or most other countries. The modern industrialisation and global market penetration that England helped pioneer has created a world of urbanism and fluid capital. Understandably, this is the assumed backdrop to Lucas’s proposals for a fairer and more generative contract between an English state and citizenry, involving things like a universal basic income, land value tax and better public services.
However, there are questions that Lucas doesn’t broach about whether the present British state (or a future English state) can adequately fund such proposals, or indeed can even maintain its stingier present commitments to its side of the bargain. Here’s where the second book I’m considering is informative.
Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West (Allen Lane, 2023) is co-authored by a historian of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather, and an analyst of the US-dominated imperium of the modern West, John Rapley. Their book tries to discern the prospects for the latter by applying lessons from the former’s fall.
Their argument in a nutshell is that empires ultimately generate their own demise by prompting alternative power centres. In the case of Rome, the empire’s predatory expansion was checked by increasingly organized resistance at its inner peripheries – to the east and south from the Persian empire and to the north and west from Romanized Germanic ‘barbarian’ groups. When the expansion of the Huns from the outer periphery pushed these latter groups into the lands of the western empire itself while imperial attention was focused eastwards toward the Persian threat, provincial landowning elites allied themselves with more local barbarian overlords. Rome as the imperial city and the western empire in general came to a swift end as a result, not principally through military conflict but through being rendered increasingly irrelevant – Rome remained “a sacred precinct” (p.34), but had little political or economic power.
Heather and Rapley apply a similar optic to the modern empire of the West. Predatory colonialisms directed the flow of global resources to the imperial centre, initially in Europe, but after World War II and the Bretton Woods settlement primarily to the USA, with the European powers and their offshoots as junior partners. This net transfer enabled forms of welfare capitalism with generous entitlements for ordinary people within the western imperium, like Britain’s much celebrated National Health Service. But with institutions like the NHS it is, in Heather and Rapley’s words, “vitally important to understand that this extraordinary edifice was constructed on a flow of wealth from the less-developed world to the West” (p.143).
That flow has started to dry up, not least because of better political organisation by those ‘less developed’ countries of the West’s inner periphery, mirroring their antecedents in the inner periphery of the Roman empire. In the modern case, this manifested when these countries first flexed their collective muscles at the 1999 trade talks in Seattle. But more importantly, say Heather and Rapley, the rise of China to global power status after languishing in the outer periphery with the “reinforced backwardness” (p.124) of the Mao Zedong years has called the West’s number. The economic globalization and industrial offshoring the West has practiced in the last thirty years or so, initially towards China and increasingly to other countries of the Global South, has, they argue, benefitted the West’s elites and industrial workers in its erstwhile Global South periphery, but not really ordinary people within the old imperium.
I think Heather and Rapley possibly oversimplify the ‘backwardness’ of Mao’s complex autocracy, and the ‘forwardness’ of today’s industrialism in the Global South, but are broadly right. This isn’t an original thing to say and it elides a lot of complexities, but I believe there are links here with the strange new politics around ‘progressives’ and ‘populists’ in the West and the kinds of globalism and localism they respectively favour. Aspects of progressive thought are cleaving towards state-corporate globalism, and this easily distances Western progressives from erstwhile working-class allies, and from opportunities toward economic localism. This opens the localist space up to populist politics of one kind and another, not all of which are inherently disreputable.
For Heather and Rapley, the chances of the West regaining the heights of its former power are low. The arc of its demographics and labour productivity count against it, and so do its levels of debt, which at one point they describe as “a vast Ponzi scheme” (p.147). I’d go further and say that most world systems, empires and trade-intensive economic networks – most of the rewards to work and money in the modern world, therefore – are ultimately Ponzi schemes, insecurely propped up on too much bad credit flowing from the human and natural worlds. Sooner or later they seem destined to collapse because of these inherent contradictions. Indeed, in a chapter entitled ‘Death of the nation?’ Heather and Rapley ponder this very possibility:
It would be hard to overestimate how much is at stake here. The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed into non-existence when the centre found itself left with insufficient funds to maintain its fiscal contract, and defend the interests of its tax-paying, tax-raising elites. The state revenue crisis unfolding in the modern West has different roots, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to realize that this poses a threat to what has become the characteristic state form of the modern West, one which is potentially just as existential as that which undermined the Roman West in the fifth century (p.155)
They retain some hope that this outcome isn’t sealed. They argue for rapprochement between the West and China, and – like Lucas – also for a fairer distribution of benefit within Western societies between the haves and the have nots. But, most importantly, they show that there’s very little wiggle room for Western politicians to work with on this. It’s not just a case of kicking out the Tories and instituting more generous public services. There are a set of intractable underlying structural problems that make this challenging, and indeed that threaten the very possibility of ‘the nation’.
Heather and Rapley say almost nothing about climate change, energy futures, water, soil and other biophysical issues. In some ways this is a weakness, but in a sense it sharpens their point about collapse. Even neglecting these challenging issues, there may be an inherent political trajectory toward the eclipse of the nation-state in the West.
This is the context in which I discussed what I called ‘the supersedure state’ in my book A Small Farm Future – small, local, successor polities to existing nation-states like Britain or England. It’s also the context in which I discussed ruralisation in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. Despite what you may read elsewhere, I harbour no bucolic fantasy of a willing return to English village life – nor do I want to force people out of cities. The issue instead is that, as Heather and Rapley put it, “a point may well come when citizens begin to wonder what they are getting in return for their tax compliance”. And if that point does come, as with fifth century Rome, this could herald “the collapse of the entire system” (pp.159-60). In this situation, ruralisation would reflect people’s choices made for the most part in grave economic distress. I’m not convinced this situation will be avoidable for many places in the future, which is why I write about it now it in the hope that this might somehow help lessen the distress. Forewarned is forearmed.
If that future occurs where I now live, I don’t foresee ruralisation as a simple process of urban to rural migration in England, but a complex process of population displacements within emerging supersedure states that could take many forms, but will be oriented in some way to pre-existing cultural ideas and probably to the crumbling power of London, a ‘sacred precinct’ which isn’t going to disappear overnight.
So when Lucas suggests that we shouldn’t reject the idea of national identity or national stories because “some sense of collective identity is necessary to help people connect to their fellow citizens” (p.220) I think she’s right about the necessity for collective identity. But I’m not convinced ‘England’ will be the most prominent container for it in the long term.
The history of the supersedure states in the immediate post-Roman period is sobering. In what’s now England, outright collapse and violence (although some argue it was a bit more complicated than that). In parts of continental Europe closer to the imperial core, alliance between Roman provincial elites and incoming barbarian warrior aristocracies paved the way for what we often gloss as ‘feudalism’, arguably locking ordinary people out of political power pretty much down to the present.
It’s not hard to see how a similar neo-feudalism might take root in a collapsing post-national England. A landlord’s society of local farmers, landowners and business elites allying with brokers of regional political power, paying nominal obeisance to London and calling the shots over a large, impoverished class of local landless or land-poor workers.
I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. A happier possibility is that some of those local farmers, landowners and business elites, losing their wider markets and influence, will cleave to more republican and egalitarian forms of local politics, helped along by incoming refugees from the professional classes and by well-established and well-connected local working classes.
This is the context in which I agree with Lucas’s point about ordinary people coming together and rising to challenges, even when the state will not. I think they may be able to, but it’s far from a done deal. There are always those who are trying to make themselves into extraordinary people at the expense of the ordinary ones. Quite often, they succeed.
I don’t believe anyone can predict how all this will play out in different places, but the outcomes will be critical to the shape of the future, and to ordinary people’s life chances.
A second possible class conflict is suggested to me in Heather and Rapley’s interesting observation that the Northern Europe of Rome’s inner periphery had much greater resources than the Mediterranean heartlands of the empire. This ultimately told in its favour, but it required more complicated technology to coax into productivity, which took time to assemble (p.83).
Perhaps one could argue something similar about the European colonial conquest of North America. This ultimately released a vast agrarian and industrial productivity that put the USA at the centre of world affairs in the twentieth century. But we now see more clearly the damage – ecological and cultural – that these technological developments caused, leading to a more positive re-evaluation of lower-input indigenous practices both in Europe and in North America once derided for their supposed inefficiency.
For my part, I embrace that re-evaluation, which is why I tend to favour low-tech (but skilled and ecologically informed) livelihood approaches like firewood coppice over high-tech and high-energy industrial ones like ground-source heat pumps. Perhaps it doesn’t always have to be either/or. There’s a case for both/and. But all too often the local, low impact way is regarded as an impediment to high-tech, high-connectivity progress ideologies (in politics too, as well as in technology), putting it in danger of being swept away by those better connected with central political power, or with what they believe the science says (which often amounts to the same thing).
And so I discern another kind of class conflict between periphery and centre – one of local ecology versus global technology that’s superimposed upon the political conflict of collective localism versus aggregative political power. From the withy beds of the inner periphery here in Somersetshire, perhaps the day will come when I will have to take my stand against the English.
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I don’t really know my history well enough to make a coherent comment on the nature of the structure of political power, but what I see around me now is a sort of neo-feudalism in which people are still, legally, subject to the laws of the state, but in which Western states no longer have the economic power to protect their citizens from the predations of corporations.
I wonder whether city-states (in name or just in terms of the power they exert) are also a dynamic to watch for; or networks of them, like the Hanseatic League.
My own voting dilemma is a matter of whether to ensure the Tories are kept out locally, or ensure the Greens keep their deposit. I’m leaning toward the latter.
It must be a quality of the internet that thinking about locating political economy focuses on the parties rather than on what can be done in the really local community and township politics where you might have some concrete power.
Hi ken,
I grow most of my own fruit and veg (enough to preserve plenty, more than we could eat fresh), I have a job at a community garden growing food for the local community kitchen, I do voluntary work growing vegetables for the soup kitchen in the churchyard at my church alongside my pastoral role there, and I participate in multiple less formally organised forms of community food resilience and mutual aid. But most of the regular commenters here know that about me already, and there’s an election a week from today, and Chris did write about a book by a Green Party member, so I mentioned it in passing. I’m not under the impression that any of the running parties are likely to deliver a congenial small farm future, and it’s not a major focus of my life, but I am still going to vote.
It’s not hard to see how a similar neo-feudalism might take root in a collapsing post-national England. A landlord’s society of local farmers, landowners and business elites allying with brokers of regional political power, paying nominal obeisance to London and calling the shots over a large, impoverished class of local landless or land-poor workers.
This is in some ways a best-case scenario. It assumes that there is some way of returning a large number of people to what is now industrially farmed land. It assumes that it is possible to segue from tractors to serfs, all the while keeping London fed. I have a hard time seeing it.
No modern city, including London, will be supplied via human and animal powered agriculture. If there is no diesel for the tractors and no synthetic nitrogen for the fields, there will also be no functional infrastructure in London. London can’t survive without a functional electric grid and if there is enough energy to keep the grid going, there is enough energy to continue industrial agriculture.
But perhaps you don’t envision London remaining habitable, it becoming an empty shell of a city that need not be supplied by muscle-powered feudal estates. Once again, this presumes that there was somehow, at some time, a successful transfer of a significant part of London’s population to those estates.
I just don’t see how this transfer will happen. As long as London remains habitable, it will rely on industrial food production, transport, processing and distribution. If that whole industrial supply chain fails and people can’t live in the city, I don’t see how hungry, weak, ill-skilled urbanites are going to trek out (or be herded out) to sterile industrial fields and become feudal serfs.
The sorry fact of the matter is that the only time when there is the slightest chance of moving large numbers of people out of cities and onto any kind of farm, be it peasant owned, feudal or communal, is when there is no urgent need for any of them to move. Right now (or better yet thirty years ago) is when enough resources might actually be available to make it (kind of) happen. If we wait until cities actually fail, it’s too late. But if cities have not yet failed, good luck persuading governments to make people leave them. It’s a classic Catch-22.
In order to escape this paradox, a far-sighted political class would have to plan decades ahead for the eventual failure of modern industrialism and modern cities. But warnings of eventual failure have been trumpeted since at least 1972, with not the slightest sign that those warnings have penetrated the skulls of the leaders of any nation, including England. In the US, nearly half the population thinks a return to 1950’s greatness is only one election away. Talk about woolly covered eyes.
It sometimes seems like there are only a few people around who aren’t completely deluded. You are one of the few, Chris, but you have a sisyphean task ahead of you, and millions of bales of wool to collect.
While tipping points are very much a thing, I think you have a very binary conception of failure, here, which is puzzling to me.
“London” is many centuries older than fossil fuels, so it becoming wholly uninhabitable overnight seems unlikely outside of massive sudden sea level rise, nuclear attack, or similar catastrophe. (Recall that various fires didn’t wipe London off the map either, and nor did the Black Death). Those things could happen, of course. Things like failure of the electrical grid mostly don’t happen all at once, though: we’re likely to see, for example, rolling blackouts or intermittency of supply rather than just suddenly having the power go off one day and never come back. Similarly, fossil fuels aren’t going to simply disappear without warning; we’ll instead see price spikes and similar. The larger infrastructure that underlies things like public transport and sanitation can take some of those spikes in stride (though not as many as would be the case if we hadn’t had 45 years of neoliberalism extracting profit without investing in capital), but not all of them, so I expect things like transport companies going bankrupt will become more frequent; that in turn will further erode employment opportunities in the city to the point that eventually people will look for work elsewhere. Will some of those people basically be destitute for the rest of their lives? Probably. And I wouldn’t like to put a timeline on any of this — we don’t yet have electric grid problems in London, but we do have Thames Water in quite a bit of financial trouble..
What seems very likely to me is that many areas now part of Greater London, which were formerly considered rural settlements in their own right, will revert to being much more sparsely populated and much more intensively farmed. That farming will be difficult: what were once fields are now very much paved over, and soil remediation won’t be straightforward in an energy crunch. Some areas will probably become less habitable when the Thames Barrier finally fails, too; we might need to re-locate our docks again, and that is one likely event that I think will result in mass migration, though there is also much of London where the ground is high enough not to care about the water so much as the number of people. But I don’t see “a future London that is vastly different than it is now” as having somehow failed, any more than I see the current state of London (or any other city) as success.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem of where on earth people will go when they’re displaced from cities, and it doesn’t mean displacement won’t happen, both in gradual ways and in more sudden ones . It’s absolutely worth thinking about this. But framing changes in population density as success or failure (rather than a messy mix of some successes, some failures, some completely wild things none of us can foresee etc) seems to be putting the issue into a much smaller box than is helpful, at least from my perspective.
I bring this issue up only once a year and my comments here and above are the ones for 2024.
A truly modern city does exist in one of two binary states: it is habitable or not. The habitable state is what exists now, but this state only exists as long as key systems, most importantly the electric grid, remain functional for enough hours of the day. It’s true that not everything has to work all the time, just look at Beruit, but below a certain minimum it’s all over, you just can’t live there.
Referencing the durability of historical London to past disruptions is not relevant to the London of today. They are not the same. How London gets its water and food are not the same. If there is no water from the tap and no electric power in the grocery stores, how will people live? Read up on the infrastructure that produces clean water at a London tap to get an idea of how different London is now from even 100 years ago. The energy resources needed to keep the water flowing are enormous.
You say that due to disruptions to the infrastructure of modern London, ” eventually people will look for work elsewhere”. But where will they go? The obvious answer seems to be “out of the city to a farm in the country”, but what is not obvious is how they will do that. They can expect little from the government, which will already have exhausted its resources in its failed effort to keep everything in the city functioning smoothly. For government, it would be far less effort to keep everyone in the city and keep them fed and watered as best they can than set them up someplace else. For most unemployed city folk the hurdle of upping sticks and moving to the country, all by their own efforts, is just too high. They are more likely to stay put and eke out an existence from the dole and whatever else they can scrounge.
Kathryn, take a minute to imagine yourself and your family faced with the prospect of moving to the country next week. If you have a car, are you going to load it with some clothes, tools and cooking gear, climb in and drive to the nearest open field and set up camp? Are you going to knock on Chris’s door and ask for a place to camp, for good? Perhaps if you are the first family to leave, or among the first trickle of refugees, you might find a friend to take you in, but wait a little too long and camping in an open field might be your only choice.
Then what? Even with your gardening skills and a trunk full of tools, it will be extremely challenging to sleep in a car, grow your own food, find water to drink and fuel to stay warm. Even if you brought a bucket full of seeds with you, how will you get through the time to the first harvest? I suggest that you won’t be able to make it work. It’s too hard.
Establishing a functional subsistence farm is an enormous undertaking, best done over decades, or even generations, and with the full support of nearby family and community. Lacking that support, or the full support of government at all levels, or a bucket-load of cash, creating a small farm out of bare land is almost impossible. It would not be quite as bad as being plunked down on the Arctic ice and being told “live like the Inuit”, but it’s close.
Joe
1) I don’t drive or have a car, so you’re making some assumptions about how easy it is for me to leave London
2) I don’t actually live in a hole in the ground, and while my family is mostly in Canada (and in extremis, I still have farming relatives I could go to working for), members of my household do have relatives and close friends in other parts of England and the rest of the UK. I don’t think Chris needs to worry about me turning up and camping. I don’t think we’re unusual in this. Granted, many of those people also live in cities, but not all of them do.
3) London is almost certainly not habitable by nine million people, but a city might well be a quarter or half a million (the city where I did my postgraduate work is a quarter of a million; the city where I was born was thirty thousand at the time.). It isn’t uninhabitable unless every single person leaves, but I have no reason to believe that absolutely everyone would leave London, or would need to, even without fossil fuels. This is why I think your framing is unrealistically binary.
I don’t think London is especially resilient or that Londoners are somehow exempt from reality. I don’t think the cities of the future are going to look like the cities of the past or the cities of the present. I don’t have any argument with the inherent difficulty of moving to the countryside — if it were easy I would have done it already.
I probably see more people who are finding London nearly uninhabitable than most. It’s not a great place to live if you don’t have a job, and food bank and soup kitchen use does keep going up. I take very seriously the possibility that things in London and other cities will become extremely unpleasant for a time — though I don’t expect this to be evenly distributed.
But I will laugh until my sides split if the so-called failure of London actually leads to a regeneration of farmland in the surrounding areas due to the return of the night soil carts.
It’s notable that Rome’s population was up around 1 million for a couple centuries, then fell to around 50,000 (and stayed that low for centuries thereafter, including the years when Michelangelo painted the Sistene Chapel ceiling, for example).
https://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-through-history/2189/
Market gardens reportedly had a role in post-collapse Rome. The Wikipedia page on Rome states that the sprawling city was reduced to “groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens”.
Indeed. I’m not in any way trying to deny that cities, as we currently know them, are in pretty big trouble; I do expect the population of London to fall. The question is simply when and how far.
Rome still exists today, though, despite that prior collapse in population.
I was wondering about the regional population changes *outside* the city of Rome during the decline and collapse of the empire, and found these estimates of the Italian population (within the country’s current borders) between 200 BCE and 1400 CE:
Estimates of the Italian population at the beginning of each century, 200 BCE to 1400 CE (in millions)
200 BCE– 7 million
100 BCE — 10
0 BCE — 15.5
100 CE — 15.5
200 — 12
300 — 9
400 — 10
500 –11
600 — 8
700 — 8
800 — 8
900 — 9
1000 — 10
1100 — 10.5
1200 — 11
1300 — 12.5
1400 — 8
(SOURCE: Lo Cascio and Malanima)
Thus, between the years 100 – 500, when the city of Rome’s population decreased by about one million, the population of Italy as a whole (within modern day borders) decreased by about 4.5 million. So it seems the depopulation of Rome is not a simple scenario of city residents moving to the countryside. Major depopulation caused by plagues didn’t start until later, in the 6th and 14th centuries, so I surmise that earlier losses of population (prior to the 6th century CE) might be explained by wars (including civil wars), famines, epidemics, and perhaps migration?
The collapse of Rome was said to be good for the peasants: “…the end of the Roman Empire meant the shrinking of tax burdens, weakening of the aristocracy, and consequently greater freedom for peasants. The crises of the great estates brought to the fore villages and rural communities, where peasants were more autonomous. Recent archaeological investigations in Tuscany have revealed large, stable village settlements, generally on hilltops (populated by about 100 inhabitants), based on self-sufficient economies.”
The food got better for the peasants, too: “…during the Early Middle Ages the peasants of northern Italy ate more and better not only than in the Roman era, but also [more and better] than in the High Middle Ages and the Modern Age up through the first decades of the 19th century. Peasants enjoyed a rich and diverse diet of vegetables, meats, and fish; not dulled — as during the previous centuries — by the monotony of grains.”
Population Dynamics in Italy in the Middle Ages: New Insights from Archaeological Findings
Irene Barbiera, Gianpiero Dalla-Zuanna
First published: 12 June 2009
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00283.x
[I accessed the full paper at JSTOR (dot org) using a free account.]
Interesting — a fair amount of fluctuation but it doesn’t look like the population went below 7 million or above about 15.5 million at any point, and nor did it halve during any one century between measurements.
The Antonine Plague was CE 165 to 180, and the Plague of Cyprian CE 249 to 262, and both would likely have caused subsequent difficulties with food supply, but are probably more of a cause of the fall of Rome than an effect — though it’s a bit chicken-or-egg really.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that we are not well-resourced to deal with epidemic diseases that have a high case fatality rate and high transmissibility. (COVID is very transmissible, thanks to spreading via aerosols that hang in the air like smoke, but has a relatively low case fatality rate as pandemics go.)
Concerning the fiscal stresses on contemporary states, (& also financially derived neo-feudalism), the key factor seems to me to be the Faustian compact between state authorities & the banking industry, whereby a very high percentage of all money in circulation has been allowed to be created by commercial banks as interest-bearing debt. This is a state of affairs hardly ever acknowledged, certainly not very often in academia, but which interestingly has been confirmed in an article in the Bank of England’s house journal (1st Quarter 2014).
Money & asymmetric debt are pretty much synonymous terms. It has become such a ubiquitous arrangement that governments see no alternative to borrowing via bond sales to fund the inevitable shortfalls in tax revenue – inevitable given that most citizens are also mired in debt as a condition of their need for bank-created money. in principle governments could legislate to remove banks’ extraordinary money creation privileges & take responsibility themselves for creating a money supply free of debt at point of issue. Before anyone cites QE, that was actually carried out from 2009 to support the banking industry by raising asset prices, which it did quite successfully.
It is difficult in a brief post to summarise this topic in a way that does not make it appear fantastical and deluded, but at greater length it can be done. It’s arguable that this financial model, which kicked off in 1694 with an arrangement between the British crown & a newly formed private consortium called the Bank of England, (not nationalised until 1947), was responsible for steering the whole global process of modern capitalism.
The collapse or wind down of western cities may be closer than some think , here in the USA there are plenty of papers written by engineers and the military that are worrying for the north east USA , their electric grid relies on 11 major substations all built around 90 years ago , failure of just one of these would cause rolling blackouts . The USA no longer makes these , general agreement thinks it would take 3 years to build a new one , this is before Germany started to deindustrialise , how the UK grid is set up I do not know .
England like most of the west has a large immigrant population that comes from impoverished countries , somehow I can’t see them taking it lightly to becoming a pesant again.
After the Crown the C of E is the largest land holder in the UK maybe we will see how they deal with making land available to small holders .
As for national and local politics I for one would want nothing to do with those that got us into the mess in the first place .( thinking of Thames water and complaints of turds floating under Westminster bridge at this moment )
Thanks Chris.
To your first demi-essay:
“The problem is our tendency to treat nature as something beautiful but separate: a bucolic realm to be viewed with a sense of whimsical nostalgia”
I think this is close enough to true.
It is our disenchantment and feeling of separateness from the world that allows us to pillage the natural capital around us, then build predatory imaginary/behavioral structures around the pillage so we can beat down our neighbors and become lords.
If we truly believed that nature is sacred and we are part of nature, there would be much more friction against our tendency to greed and tyranny. We have excellent examples of this from the past. Of course, sacredness fares poorly against concentrated evil.
And the second half:
“…collapsed into non-existence when the centre found itself left with insufficient funds to maintain its fiscal contract, and defend the interests of its tax-paying, tax-raising elites.”
And what might be the “interests of its tax-paying, tax-raising elites?”
First, the tax-paying elites are very different from the tax-raising elites.
The tax-paying elites are second tier. The true elites don’t pay taxes. At least not at net. The top tier gets much more value from the government than they put in. They are net recipients of tax money, not least in the form of interest on the national debt.
But the vast bottom of the economic pyramid in the US pays almost no income tax at all. Almost everyone pays sales taxes, but only the middle class and up pay substantial income tax. Loan interest, rent, and health care payments are far larger for most of the bottom tiers.
I just finished William Hogeland’s “The Hamilton Scheme”
In my view, that book is all you need to understand the founding of the American republic.
What was the primary motive of the top elite? Amassing huge wealth. How was that funded? By extracting money from the plebes and floating speculative debt.
Which brings us to your observation “…most world systems, empires and trade-intensive economic networks – most of the rewards to work and money in the modern world, therefore – are ultimately Ponzi schemes…”
But what causes a Ponzi to fail is not the paying out of interest on investment.
Instead, it is because greed sets the interest rate too high. Set the payout at the ‘Natural Rate of Interest” and everything works. How do you discover the natural rate of interest?
By observing nature.
In Northwest continental U.S. timberlands, that rate is 2%. If you only cut down 50 year old trees, you can continue indefinitely.
Thanks.
Eric, I am afraid that you are making a flawed analogy. Interest rates (or profits) mean that capital stock is bound in grow all the time, i.e. it assumes perpetual growth (or inflation…). A 2% extration rate of the forest is not at all the same as that 2% can’t be reinvested into the forrest to get more growth. I have cattle, they multiply themselves, even the origin of the word capital comes from cattle. But the number of cattle that my land can feed is determined by the productivity of the land and not the fecundity of the cows.
(another story is that the technically possible rate of extraction may not at all be sustainable in the long run due to effects on biodiversity etc.)
You have opened up a big topic here, Chris! Well, two topics, actually. I am not qualified to comment on the ‘English story’ topic, but I have been reading up on the collapse/decline of empires/civilisations since it became a hot topic for scholars and active environmentalists in the late twentieth century. The seminal work is usually considered to be Joseph Tainter’s 1988 ‘The Collapse of Complex’ Societies – it is cited by most of those writing on the subject since. These include Thomas Homer-Dixon ‘The Upside of Down’ (2006), David R. Montgomery ‘Dirt:the Erosion of Civilizations’ (2007) and John Michael Greer ‘The Long Descent’ (2008). (See Greer’s potted 2024 update here –
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/) There are lots more, but these are the ones I have found most useful for understanding the bio-physical overshoot which is definitely related to the decline of previous urbanised societies and their empires, although it is usually not the only salient factor. Debt and inequality also seem to be high on the list. How it will all play out globally in the next century, as fossil fuel energy sources run out, the global temperature keeps rising, ‘native’ populations in the richer countries are not replaced, etc., etc. – well, we can but guess – and propose positive alternatives, even though (as Joe says above) this should have started happening decades ago to avoid what is happening now.
Tainter’s negative returns on complexity is just an incredibly important concept.
Ask any mechanic about complexity , 5 year old cars doing to the scratch yard because we have the technology to make them but not to fix them !
Spellchecker. !!!
SCRAP YARD
Too many cars are scrapped for scratches.
Thanks for the comments.
Good point from Kathryn about contemporary neo-feudalism (I believe others like David Graeber have made similar arguments). And also about city states – definitely a model that’s in my mind. Civic republican refugia, trying to hold out against wider forces.
Thanks also for the debate, Kathryn & Joe. Much depends on the speed of collapse and the ordering in which the various collapse-ogenic factors kick in. I suppose my tendency is to think about medium-speed collapse driven by a mix of socioeconomic and not massively dramatic climate/energy/water stresses. But other trajectories of course are possible. The lack of any mainstream politics or discussion around this bugs me, and it means we have no plausible political trajectories into it. Hence the games I play of least-worst politics and best-possible scenarios within the grim realism of the years ahead.
Chris, very interested in your points here – I’d love to see you expand on them, or point to other sources that have. Not my area of expertise, but my feeling is that governments which tried to claim back money-raising powers in this way would, like their premodern forebears, be chronically short of the kind of credit (& popular legitimacy) that they’d need to sustain modern-style lives. Hence the unsustainable global economic growth treadmill and the unshackling of money that we’ve witnessed. Ultimately I think we need exactly the kind of economies you describe, but the process to getting them doesn’t look to me like it’ll be pretty for a lot of people.
Eric, thanks, interesting points. Which came first – the ideology of pro-human separation or the search for profit? Linking to Kathryn’s point, our contemporary ecomodernist mindset does seem to me to have neo-feudal elements, one of the hallmarks of feudal ideology being a God or Nature-ordained hierarchy which can be used to buy off those languishing low down in various ways (which is not to say that ‘hierarchy’, properly understood, is mere obsuscation). Contemporary consumerist expectations lock in subservience to elites. Agree with you on natural interest rates.
Christine, Ruben, Diogenes – yes, I think that collapse literature is important. I’ve certainly been influenced by Tainter. Overcomplicated contemporary cars, or for that matter just the entire 20th century car-driven road system perhaps exemplifies negative returns on complexity.
My voting dilemma for the UK General Election next week is trying to pick the least worst of the bunch. All of the parties have some policies I agree with and some I don’t (yes, the Conservatives and Nigel Farage are ghastly in many ways but I agree with them on immigration, and the Greens have their hearts in the right place but I can’t agree with their polices on defence and trans people). I made a list of the seven main issues I am interested in – the economy, resource depletion, food security, defence, immigration, biodiversity loss and Net Zero – and wrote a blog post comparing how the two main parties (Labour and Conservative) measured up against all of these. Mostly, they didn’t.
Interestingly, while doing my research I came across the All Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth (limits2growth.org.uk). I never even knew they were a thing, but they seem to have a lot of members from all parties and both chambers (the Lords and the Commons). I hope they start to get more media airtime after the election.
I read a article that covers quite a bit of your list on one bite , that was population , Europe is below replacement t as is the USA , the worst is south Korea followed by China , China lost three million population total and death’s over birth’s is increasing .
Wars were mostly fought for someone else’s real estate / commodities , problem is with a falling population there is no excess of males to fight those wars , you need them to keep your economy moving , ( probably the reason for mass immigration ,) but the immigrants will not fight the wars the powers that be want ,( case in point a friend that’s a fanatical cricket supporter is upset that fifth generation Pakistani kids born in the UK support Pakistan against England . )
Ukraine is running out of fighting age gun fodder and after a small border scuffle between India and China four Chinese family lines were wiped out as the only sons were killed ( one child family )
China and the west has just one war left until they run out of fighting age people .
I am struck by the slightly similar take in British economist Paul Collier’s new book (Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places) that frames Britain as ‘half Singapore – a successful, global-services economy – and half Tanzania – a dysfunctional, declining post-industrial state. And you can’t really leave the half you’re born in.’
To quote from one article about it: Britain is both of these countries. It is a highly successful services economy that enjoys the fruits of global markets, and a dysfunctional post-industrial state starved of investment and locked in a self-reinforcing cycle of decline. Both Britains have their own identity: a progressive, multicultural society, and a once-great land that has gone to the dogs. On 4 July one of these countries will vote for change, and the other will vote for Reform.
But there is hope!: … bringing together encouraging case studies of recovery from around the world, Collier shows how renewal is achievable through a combination of collective learning, moral leadership and local agency.
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/left-behind-a-new-economics-for-neglected-places-paul-collier/7598219?ean=9780241279168