Why America Is Not a New Rome (review)

In case you were wondering whether the United States is the new Rome, you can now put your mind at ease: it most definitely is not. However, if you were thinking that the United States is in some ways similar to ancient Rome, then you are in good company. In the first chapter of this book, Vaclav Smil analyzes the many works in which America has been compared to the Roman Empire of old, some favorably (the “Pax Americana” with the “Pax Romana”), some unfavorably (Rome the imperialist, the Roman Empire in decline).

As he also points out, the United States is not the only political entity that has been compared to Rome. The Byzantine Empire was a prolongation of the classical Roman Empire; there was also the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and tsarist Russia that fancied itself the “Third Rome.” Napoleon consciously modeled his titles and symbols on those of ancient Rome, and the British also liked to compare themselves to the Romans. So looking back at the old Romans with nostalgia is nothing new. But all of these attempts to bring back some of the glory (or shame) of the Roman Empire were meant to highlight the achievements or defects of some contemporary state by comparing it to Rome.

Drawing a comparison is making an analogy, not describing an identity. Yet that is what Smil assumes is being done. In denouncing the comparisons others have made between the United States and ancient Rome, he demolishes them by recounting all the ways in which they differed: in technological innovations, in the use of machines and energy, in death and morbidity rates, in standards of living and the distribution of income. Even in the factors that are most common in other authors’ comparisons, namely military might, political hegemony, and social or moral corruption, he finds far more differences than similarities. Thus he spends considerable effort defining the term empire, in order to prove that “the United States has never been an empire” (p. 54). In short, he has set up a straw man and knocked it down.

If this work accomplished only that, then an article would have served his purpose. But here Smil has focused his considerable talents as a researcher on aspects that other historians of that period have largely neglected. Readers of Technology and Culture will be especially interested in chapter 3, “Knowledge, Machines, Energy.” In it, he combines his reading of Latin and his knowledge of physics to analyze Roman technology. He admits that the Romans were good civil engineers and architects, but does not praise them for it as other authors do for, as he points out, they acquired their engineering knowledge from the Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians and applied it on a large scale. Scaling up a technology can require innovation as well, but he finds the Romans often falling short there. For example, the famous aqueducts and sewers of Rome may impress scholars and tourists, but they were totally inadequate for a city the size of Rome, with its million inhabitants. In mechanical engineering, the Romans fell behind the Greeks and showed no interest in innovation. They had water-wheels, but few of them, and throughout their history they continued to rely overwhelmingly on human labor (and a few animals) as sources of energy. Smil contrasts this intellectual stagnation not just with the United States today (an easy contrast) but with China under the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), a contemporary of Rome’s that contributed numerous inventions to the world: cast iron, steel, the horse collar, the suspension bridge, the rudder, and much else.

Chapter 4, “Life, Death, Wealth” is also worth reading, not for what it tells us about the United States, but for what we learn about ancient Rome. I knew the Romans were often sick and died young, but it came as a surprise that their rates of morbidity, mortality, and life expectancy were much worse than those of...