The Collapse of Antiquity – Digital Book

The Collapse of Antiquity, the sequel to Michael Hudson’s “…and forgive them their debts,” is the second and latest book in his trilogy on the history of debt. It describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome, causing economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today’s creditor oligarchies.
In telling this story, The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today’s debt-burdened Western economies.

Published by Inlet, March, 2023.  512 Pages. 

Endorsements  

“In this monumental work, Michael Hudson overturns what most of us were taught about Athens and Sparta, Greece and Rome, Caesar and Cicero, indeed about kings and republics. He exposes the roots of modern debt peonage and crises in the greed and violence of antiquity’s oligarch-creditors, embedded in their laws, which in the end destroyed the civilizations of classical antiquity.”

– James K. Galbraith, author of Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.