As 2008's Great Recession turned into the Great Stagnation, the West's share of global output declined from 80 per cent to 60 per cent, and has continued to fall, if more slowly, since. Real wages fell, youth unemployment soared, and public services were eroded as debt-public and private-rose dramatically. Self-boubt and internal division replaced the robust self-confidence of the 1990s in Western liberal-democratic political discourse. Simultaneously, other models, particularly the authoritarian central planning of the Chinese state, became increasingly influential on the world state…. Why has the balance of world power swung so dramatically agaist the West? In this a decline that can be reversed, or is it a natural evolution to which the West would do better to adapt? This is not the first time the world has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. Rome's rise to what was in its own terms global domination began in the second century BC, and its dominion lasted the best part of five hundred years, before crashing in the middle centuries of the first millennium AD. It may have been fifteen hundred years ago, but this book contends that Rome's demise still has important lessons for the present, using the Roman Empire, and the wider world that it spawned, to think again about the unfolding history and current situation of the contemporary West.