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Are all great civilisations doomed?

If plague, war or natural disasters don’t destroy our own, then ‘a cascading systems failure’ seems likely, on past evidence, says Paul Cooper

4 May 2024

9:00 AM

4 May 2024

9:00 AM

Fall of Civilisations: Stories of Greatness and Decline Paul Cooper

Duckworth, pp.544, 25

To quote Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, ‘We’re doomed, doomed!’ That seems to be the message of Paul Cooper’s eminently readable series of essays about how and why 14 civilisations rose to greatness and then collapsed.

He begins with the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, and he finishes with Easter Island in the 18th century.

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