Resumen de The Political Economy of Survival: The Eastern Roman Empire’s Transition to the Early Middle Ages

Paolo Tedesco

• The scholarly literature is rife with studies asking why empires collapse. The majority of these works endeavour to explain how competitive exogenous pressures or internal challenges to the predominant power of the dominant group, or a combination of both, create the conditions and opportunities that are sufficient for the substitution of the ruling class, the destruction of previous institutions (mostly coercive apparatuses), and a change in the mode of production. Put differently, these studies tackle the question:

  Why, under certain conditions, were empires unable to reproduce their existing structures?1 By contrast, relatively few studies examine why, how, and under what circumstances, in the face of severe crises, empires not only survived but managed to transform themselves into new polities that made possible their reproduction for centuries to come.2 John Haldon’s The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740 addresses this very question.