Chapotraphouse

The modern examples fundamentally misunderstand the premise, the empire didn't collapse, Syrians and Iraqis had less violent places to go, what if they hadn't? tbh no idea what the fuck happened in Somalia that warrants some investigation. I don't like referring to the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia as an empire but as examples of societal collapse and reorganization that does not support this essay's thesis at all...

WRT Rome, the Black Death, dynastic changes in China, well it's really easy to argue this point when you just shrug off massive mortalities and assume disappearing populations successfully resettled in the hills. For the egyptian example of commoners becoming 'richer', there are many examples of decreasing material sophistication in collapse periods. i find it hard to justify life being qualitatively 'better' for a commoner in sub-roman societies losing access to clean water, stone buildings with tiled roofs, roads, quality ceramics, utinsils, etc., and it's not like obligations of tax disappeared, they just might've paid less to smaller strongmen

The conclusion fails to fully metabolize the lessons presented in the rest of the article.

Collapse can happen. It carries costs and victims but also benefits and beneficiaries. In a globalised, interconnected world facing threats such as nuclear weapons, a future collapse is likely to be far worse, with far higher costs. Many states today are also far more benevolent than those of the past. While the fall of Somalia may have been good for much of the populace, the same is not likely to be true if Denmark fell apart. Think of it as the Somalia-Denmark rule: the more helpful a state is, and the more citizens rely on it, the worse the result if it collapses.

The empire, being globalized and interconnected, does not have a single Rome. It has many Rome-lets like Denmark, where a very small percentage of the world's population actually lives. By siloing the world into nation-states, rather than examining the empire as being globalized and interconnected, they fail to make the connection to how the world will drastically improve when the empire falls. If Denmark fell apart this would have major implications for the empire, implying a global collapse.

They take this critical view of history and then seemingly draw no lessons from it that can be applied to our world today.

It's quite literally not a myth; Romano-Britain was a total collapse accompanied by massive population decline, warlordism, disappearance of cities and the obliteration of literacy, same for most of the western empire, whatever limited mobility and sanitation options people had disappeared, that is not good for the 99 percent

The collapse of West Asia brought on by the Mongol Conquests and their almost immediate fracturing killed the majority of the population and left entire regions blasted wastelands, West Asia didn't recover developmentally or demographically until the late 18th century and in some crucial areas it never recovered

The author mentions the Bronze Age Collapse; Ugrait was completely destroyed, it's population massacred, famine decimated Syria, the entirety of the North Mediterranean was depopulated, literacy disappears and the birth of far more vicious empires like the Assyrians begins

The Inca, the Aztecs, the Maya, Cucuteni–Trypillia, the Indus Valley, the Minoans; there is no interpretation of the data that asserts the 99 percent benefited from the collapse of these civs, all we see in these cases is desolation, disease and death followed by centuries or even millennia of far more oppressive social structures emerging in the aftermath

The author is lost in the vision of their initial premise, they can't even see the data in front of them, or they didn't bother to look

the history is written by people who can pay historians - paraphrasing someone.