From my reading I don't think there is a consensus as to why the Western Roman Empire collapsed. There are many theories, of which in some theories economic factors are important. I think TMW has raised an interesting question. Is America declining? I think Americas relative power is probably declining. Other powers such as China are on the rise, and this was true of Rome's neighbors, such as their Germanic northern neighbors and their Eastern neighbors as the Sassanid Empire (Iran).

@Jamietuk, with regards to inflation there are many economists who predict inflation for America, due especially to the amount of US dollars held by China, and it is possible that at some point these dollars may come flooding back. Peter Schiff talks about this a great deal. The Roman Empire did indeed come close to collapsing during the third century due to inflation. I am surprised that you should wonder where TMW got this idea from.

Q Is America declining?
A No
Why we need 4 pages to answer this really easy question I have no idea.

This does heighlight one of the most confusing aspects of western society, however. Half of the time we seem to be shocked about the awful living conditions in other parts of the world, and then when said parts of the world finally start pulling themselves out of the shit they live in we get shocked by our relative decline in power. C'mon people, it's not something to worry about. The Chinese have stopped their 20th century policy of doing everything they could possibly think of to destroy their economy, and have started to grow rapidly to catch up. South Ameica has gone from having a coup in one of its countries every couple of months to merely having one every few years and is growing faster. None of this should be considered a bad thing, and in no way suggests that north america or europe is going to collapse any time soon.

Oh, and to all those people who are convinced the UK has declined because we don't send toffs off to be governors of uncomfortably hot nations with impressive numbers of unpleasent skin diseases anymore, a quick analysis of the living conditions of the average Brit now compared to 100 or 50 years ago will show you otherwise.

Well it depends upon what you mean by declining? Did the British Empire really decline? Certainly its relative power declined, but at the same time the wealth of British citizens has increased.
I have read this about citizens of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire might have meant that for a time that standard of living for many people actually increased as they no longer had to pay the taxes necessary to support an empire fighting wars thousands of miles from where they lived.

Guys, in case you missed it. TMW posted this on the previous page:

"Okay, guys, I admit defeat on this argument. I am simply numerically overwhelmed and I am currently reevaluating my thoughts."

@pastoralan

It appears to me as if the Goths of the late 5th/early 6th centuries wanted to be Roman. Granted, this was not a unanimous position, or else Amalasuntha wouldn't have faced the issues she faced within the Gothic community. And clearly, once Justinian began his mad project to reassert direct power over the Italian peninsula, the idea of assimilating the Goths into the existing power structure ended.

But let's look at things from a Gothic point of view for a moment. For almost a century before Odoacer, since Theodosius confirmed the final split of the Empire, real power in the Western Empire rested in the hands of a series of foederati generals who are essentially indistinguishable from pretty much every Emperor after the end of the Julio-Claudians, excepting the fact that one of their parents were born outside the Empire and their farcical pretense of operating under the authority of the puppet Emperor of the moment instead of in their own name. Aetius and Stilicho are essentially indistinguishable from Septimius Severus or Maximinius Thrax, soldiers born to non-traditionally Roman parents on the fringes of the Empire who took power based upon their military background. Their ambitions were not barbarian but Roman. Looking at the Goths, we see a people who desparately wanted to be Roman, and whose leadership dreamed Roman dreams.

To me, it seems that the principle cause of the lifespan of the Roman Empire was its generous citizenship policies. I forget which emperor it was that extended citizenship to every non-slave male within the Empire, but that action kept the Empire from falling apart during the third century. However, by the fifth century, this expansive idea of citizenship declined, and for some reason, Stilicho, Aetius, Odoacer, and Theodoric weren't considered Roman enough to seek titles to match their power.

The Eastern Empire had an amazing gift, in the 6th and 7th centuries for vanquishing one moderately different polity, only to set the table for a stronger, more assertive and more hostile power to feast on the remains. They could beat other powers, but they couldn't hold on to their victory. Incidentally, this is why Islam is a worldwide religion now and not just a set of odd practices that either died out in a few generations, like the Cathar heresy, or a durable system of local beliefs that don't really seem to spread beyond their original adopters, like Voudou. In the sixth century, court politics at Constantinople resulted in first Belisarius and then Narses laying waste to the Romano-Gothic Empire in the Italian peninsula. However, Constantinople was too far away and too administratively primitive, and trade links were too few to really weld the peninsula back to the Eastern Empire. Byzantium could not sustain their dominance. In this battered, plague-ravaged war zone (think about the hellscape of Warsaw in 1944, and you come up with a modern analog to Rome in 555), the Lombards, who did not dream Roman dreams and really were alien to the Empire, saw opportunity and carved themselves a true kingdom upon Frankish lines. And they seized this opportunity, and truly ended the Western Empire.

Or at least, that's my take on things.

Unless you're really good at research, you know more than I do about this period. So now I have some questions. Based on my limited knowledge, it looked to me like Theodoric didn't have the wherewithal to put together a government with any kind of holding power. Sure, he wanted to be Roman, but he didn't have the cultural or physical resources to manage it. That's why I likened him to Charlemagne. It's all very well to have yourself named Emperor of Rome, but Aachen Cathedral isn't Hagia Sophia.

Late Empire Rome/early Byzantine period history has fascinated me for about a decade or so. So, I have spent some time thinking about these ideas. I'll get into this more when I have time, but to make a long story short, I think you're probably right about the resources issue, but had the Eastern Empire accepted the Goths as Roman as the Julio-Claudians accepted the Hispanians or Gauls as Roman, I think the Italian peninsula could have been wedded to the Byzantine Empire for quite some time.

Seems fairly interesting.

I guess my only issue is the one of citizenship. Was it not opened out citizenship to the Goths which won their loyalty, and telling thm they could be kings of this land which made them dream 'roman dreams' ?

I mean the EU extends it's borders to groups which aspire to join, extending citizenship with it.

The US on the other hand claims puerto rico as a decolonised region, while refusing full citizenship to it's people (one of the definitions of a colony being that it is ruled from afar without the locals having a say - and while puerto ricians may not want to pay federal taxes, they currently don't get and representation at federal level)

Europe has trouble with migrant workers (from africa crossing into Spain and Italy) just as the US has trouble with Mexicans/south americans - and i use the word 'trouble' loosely here - but how do citizenship laws compare?

Is policy of the EU and US with regard to 'illegal aliens' remarkably different? Is the tone in the media/political parties any different?

China is almost precisely the opposite, all of i'ts internal migrants are Han chinese moving to the outer provinces and becoming a majority in regions where they were previously not. That amount to an internal invasion (but since the Chinese national army invaded and took control of these regions decades ago, and international treaties recognised the territory as Chinese for centuries it is considered internal politics by everyone else, not empire building...) China as an Empire has had some setbacks (over-population, Japanese invasion, western agression...) but it's making a comeback.

What does that say about the 'US empire'?

@pastorlan: I quote wikipedia as my only source, but before Theodoric, Odoacer was the 'King of Italy'

"Odoacer retained the Roman administration, senate, law and tax system of Italy. In return, he won a high level of support from the senate and people."

Odoacer was a western emperor in all but name. Had he come along a century earlier, he would have been emperor in name as well, assuming he got rid of whichever of Constantine's idiot descendants was currently sitting on the western throne. For some reason though, he was never really regarded as a Roman in the same way that Septimius Severus was. I have no hypothesis about why Roman citizenship was limited in the late 4th through 6th centuries in a way that it wasn't since the Social Wars, but it seems to me as if it was, and that was a critical reason why the Roman Empire ended in the west to be replaced by Frankish, Lombard, and Visigothic kingdoms.

Orathaic: There has been at least one Puerto Rican referendum on statehood. (after a quick jaunt to research, there have been three of them)

They are all local, but none of the results have come out with a majority for either statehood or independence. I very much doubt that the US Government would attempt to keep Puerto Rico as a territory if a majority of the people living there did not want to.

It seems to me that they enjoy the fact that they have the best of both worlds: the benefits of US Citizenship, low taxes, and they can always avoid the "ugly American" stereotype by saying they're Puerto Rican. :)

As to the earlier question about Theodoric's cultural and physical resources, I'd like to go a little further back in history. Rome, as the center of a pan-Mediterranean Empire 2000 years ago, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially when compared with, say, Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch or even Massillia. Rome really produced only one product in surplus: law. The trade ships which traversed the Mediterranean weren't bringing Roman products out to the provinces; they were bringing the surplus of the Empire to Rome to be consumed by the wealthy, and shipping supplies out to the legions on the periphery, to keep Rome in power. Local chieftains during the expansion and consolidation of the Empire were bought off, brought to Rome and Romanized, and their peasantry became, accordingly, Roman peasants. Along the frontiers, individual barbarians and small tribal units, really more extended clans than anything else, would acquire a taste for Roman living: the baths, the wine, the games, and all that came with becoming first a villager and then a city dweller. The chieftains would be wealthy enough to live in true Roman style, and perhaps to live in the City itself, or at least one of the mini-Romes, like Trier, Cologne, or Belgrade, planted on the frontier as a way of paying off old legionaries. Poorer tribe members would join the legions themselves, indeed would eventually more or less become the legions, and hope that at the end of their 20 year stint, they'd get their forty acres and a public bath. They wanted to become Roman, in other words. And the genius of Rome while it was still the capital of the empire is that it let them.

However, when the true seat of power, or at least administration, moved to Byzantium, that changed the dynamics and economy of the Italian peninsula. No longer was Rome the stomach of the empire; that happy position passed to Constantinople. Over the fourth century, it doesn't seem to have mattered all that much. The entire empire was enjoying the boom that came with the stability that Diocletian and especially Constantine provided in contrast to the tumultuous third century, and, as the Renaissance demonstrated, a gigantic plague like the plague of Cyprian may have many devastating effects, but it also tends to be a marvellous redistributor of wealth. So, the Italian peninsula in the fourth century was probably able to putter on for a while off of the capital assembled during the long reign of Rome (the city). However, a century of being more or less a backwater will have its economic effects (look what 30 years of being a backwater has done to Detroit). Italy, by the fifth century, was accustomed to looking backwards, not forward.

Now, if you're an emperor, are you going to prioritize defending a backwater? Not bloody likely. When the competition for a defense dollar comes down to spending a little extra bit on keeping the Persians out of the richest area of your realm, the Levant and Egypt, or keeping some barbarian tribe out of a province you've barely ever heard of on the upper Danube or lower Rhine, several mountain ranges away from where you're at, it's not really hard to decide where your attention will be focused. Thus, it becomes much easier for barbarians to move in in the west versus the east. These barbarians want to stay. They want to defend their new homelands. They want to pay taxes and tribute. Excellent! They want a say of what goes on in their new homelands, though, too. Bogus.

Sometimes, emperors would bite on that deal, sometimes they wouldn't. Unfortunately for the western empire, one of the tribes that they didn't really adopt as foederati was the Vandals, and the Vandals had a cool idea: Africa looks fat and unguarded, why don't we go there? In my opinion, Vandal Africa was the mortal blow that killed an Italian-centered western empire. The Vandals continued trading African grain with the rest of the empire, but on significantly different terms than Africa's trade before the Vandals. No longer was the African surplus creamed off to purchase luxuries in Rome, or at least to keep the poor fed in Rome. No, now it was being used to bring luxuries to Africa. Plus, like the Vikings and English would later demonstrate, the difference between trader and raider often comes down to whether or not you have more killpower than the people you encounter on the sealanes. So, the bottom dropped out of the traditional imperial economy in the Italian peninsula.

Now, how do people deal with an economic crisis? All sorts of ways, really, but one especially common way is to assert that they may be poor, but dammit, their blood is important (see, e.g. the Nazis or the state of Arizona). Theodoric never really had a chance of welding the Goths to the Romans without at least the tacit consent of the Byzantines. Roman snobbery would beget Gothic identity, creating a wider gap between the two. Now, eventually, if left alone, this would probably end the same way the encounter between the Normans and the Saxons (one of my favorite quotes ever: "English is what happens when a Norman man-at-arms tries to seduce a Saxon barmaid.") or the Spanish and the Aztecs did; the larger population would mostly assimilate the newcomer through intermarriage, but because the newcomer had a near monopoly on the use of force, the newcomer's ideas about governance would have some impact upon the existing patterns of the originals. A relatively small group of newcomer purebloods would continue as an ever-thinner gratin upon the socioeconomic casserole, but mostly the creoles would wind up taking administrative power, and within a couple of centuries, there wouldn't be any pureblood newcomers left.

The equation changed between the Goths and Romans, though. And I think this is pretty much because Justinian's mad Gothic War was a catastrophe every bit as damaging to the social fabric of the Italian peninsula at least, if not to the entire Mediterranean basin, as World War II was to essentially everything between London and Manila. Looking at when the Goths took over, they were resented by the Romans. They were resented for their strange language, their parvenue status, their not entirely hidden Arianism, and most importantly, their success. Oh, maybe they weren't hated so much in the Po Valley, but everywhere else on the peninsula their demesne ran, the locals were poorly disposed towards them. Even when, as in the case of Theoderic, the Goths were able to provide security and good governance. The Goths were still too new to the area. So, when Belisarius started kicking Goth ass, the Roman locals actively cheered and frequently abetted the forces of Belisarius. For five years, Belisarius went wherever he wanted to in the peninsula, destroying whatever force the Goths could bring up. But Justinian wanted Italy back on the cheap. He never provided enough troops to Belisarius to really get the job of conquering Italy done because the Persians were always more threatening than the Goths. To me, it resembles when Hannibal was destroying every Roman army in Italy but could never actually hold his gains because Carthage could never send him enough troops to garrison areas taken. So, after fighting back and forth over the penisula for five or six years, with each side taking, losing, and retaking the same territory over and over again, and presumably killing off those who collaborated with the other power when they had possession of the area (think of the life of a preson who lived in Kharkov between 1941 and 1944, and you can imagine what this was like). Comes now the Great Plague of Justinian. Welcome to Europe, yersinia pestis; enjoy a virgin field where no one has immunity to you yet! Maybe a third of Europe dies within a couple of years. In battered and devastated Italy, the numbers are higher. The attempted extirpation of Gothic power by the eastern empire collapses, and the Goths are again masters of the peninsula.

However, Justinian was, to give the devil his due, persistent. After the plague and the latest in the never ending series of Persian wars ended, the madman actually tried retaking Italy again. And he more or less succeeded. Narses eventually broke the Goths, and Justinian could reasonably claim that Italy was fully imperial again. In the process, it was turned into more or less a mausoleum with vineyards, but it was, at least for the moment, imperially controlled.

So, what does all of this have to do with the question of culutral resources, as opposed to merely being an opportunity for me to spout off at length about what a gigantic douche Justinian was? Well, no other Eastern emperor was ever really foolhardy enough to try and reunite the two halves after Stilicho in a serious way. The Goths had the inclination to become Roman over time. Rome had the blueprint for how to Romanize barbarians. Given a couple of centuries where the two sides weren't engaged in more or less a war to the last, I think Rome would have more or less assimilated the Goths.

As to Charlemagne, I actually think of him as a fairly successful creator of an Empire. Granted, the French provinces broke off one by one from the Carolingian Empire, but Germany stayed Imperial, as opposed to German, until the rise of Prussia, no?

This has been a great thread to read. I love reading about the history (and fall of) ancient Rome.

Even if you grant the dubious proposition that the Holy Roman Empire was a centralized government, it never reached anything like the extent of the Western Roman Empire or any of the other major empires in history. Western Europe would be an empire; Germany, not so much.

Yeah, you're right about the Carolingian "Empire". I don't know if you could, using the available technology of the times, center an empire in Lorraine; sea lanes were the only way to consistently communicate and assert central power over long distances. But the Roman/Gothic hybrid could possibly have done it, absent the Gothic War. Ravenna did make a heck of a capital in the early medieval period. Heck, Theodoric didn't even take it from Odoacer; he was invited in.

@ Spyman: "@Jamietuk, with regards to inflation there are many economists who predict inflation for America, due especially to the amount of US dollars held by China, and it is possible that at some point these dollars may come flooding back. Peter Schiff talks about this a great deal. The Roman Empire did indeed come close to collapsing during the third century due to inflation. I am surprised that you should wonder where TMW got this idea from."

Some economists _predict_ inflation, yes. However the OP implied that America was suffering from high inflation NOW. To quote specifically:

"Inflation is a major problem in America today."

And later in the OP:

"Our economy is being hampered by inflation."

These statements are factually untrue. Therefore, my comment on this point stands.