This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
Empire is back
Lessons from the decline and fall of Rome. And a sly take on fictional imperial glory
AI-generated image for TWTB
The Big Story:
With the Venezuela attack and threats to Greenland and other countries, Donald Trump has pushed the United States into an exclusive club, a threesome of military superpowers seeking to recover their nation’s golden age.
Now, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China and Trump’s USA are all pursuing overtly expansionist aims and dreaming of restoring imperial greatness, even though the last true empires disappeared in the 20th century and decolonisation is underway in academia and cultural institutions.
Our first book says revanchism is useless:
As the history of the Roman world also emphasizes, empires can respond to the process of adjustment with a range of possible measures, from the deeply destructive to the much more creative.
This Week’s Books:
- A fascinating comparison of the long-gone Roman empire and the West.
- A novel about a fictional empire (it even has fake footnotes!)
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Originally published at https://medium.com
