[dash2]

Like these guys' fascinating book, The Dawn of Everything, this article introduces but over-interprets some exciting new data.

A lot of what we're told about is new locations for urban life. But the claim that they weren't empires is arguing from absence of evidence. We mostly don't know what they were.

For an interesting pairing, see Bryan Ward-Brown on the fall of Rome, interviewed here by Razib Khan (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bryan-ward-perkins-the-material-...). There we do know what happened when an empire ended, and it was very bad for the people in it. That's because big empires are usually not replaced by anarchy, or by democratic nation-states, but by small empires, which have fewer economies of scale and therefore more taxation and exploitation.

[DiogenesKynikos]

In a lot of the former Western Roman Empire, taxation ended when the empire fell. Standards of living also rapidly declined.

Taxation in the empire had funded public goods, like aqueducts, roads and security, which enabled large urban centers and long-distance trade.

[bregma]

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?