by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
How did Byzantium endure for 1,000 years after the fall of Rome?
One of my reading projects over the past year is to learn more about empires: how they are established, why they endure and why they crumble.
To this end, I’ve recently read seven books on a wide variety of empires. The literature on empires is vast, so this is only a tiny slice of the available books. Nonetheless I think these 7 titles offer a fairly comprehensive spectrum:
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (Adrian Goldsworthy)
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (Peter Turchin)