One main point they make – and it is well worth bearing in mind, given the world’s apparent inability to recover from the financial meltdown of 2008 – is that, as scholarship and archaeology now show us, the Roman Empire had reached the peak of its wealth but a few years before the barbarians started to take Rome to pieces in 410AD.

The authors of Why Empires Fall are Dr John Rapley, a political economist, and Prof Peter Heather, a medieval historian who specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire they have collaborated to draw parallels between the end of that empire in the 5th century AD and the condition in which the world is now. She ended up the shortest-serving prime minister in our history. Last autumn, Liz Truss tried to do something similar, and while she and her colleagues could not see the horrors this would bring, the markets luckily did. In the early 1970s, the Heath government printed and spent money promiscuously, using some of it to fund tax cuts it ended in disaster. There was an example of this in Britain only last year. When one sees political leaders – ours and those of other polities – make the same mistakes over and over again, one also sees how inevitable it appears to be that those charged with ruling us seldom appear to grasp that point. From 399 to 1999, the life cycles of empires, they argue, sow the seeds of their inevitable destruction.One does not need to be a professional historian to know that history repeats itself. In this exceptional, transformative intervention, Heather and Rapley explore the uncanny parallels - and productive differences - between the two cases, moving beyond the familiar tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to learn new lessons from ancient history. In Why Empires Fall, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in freefall. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet.

Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather