Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution Corresponding author’s e-mail: peter.turchin@uconn.edu Citation: Turchin, Peter. 2020. The Great Escape: A Review Essay on Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel (Princeton University Press, 2019). Cliodynamics 11: 77–87. The Great Escape A Review Essay on Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel (Princeton University Press, 2019) Peter Turchin Complexity Science Hub Vienna and University of Connecticut Why Europe? Why did Europe, the northwestern peninsula of the great Afro-Eurasian landmass, enter a rapid phase of development around 1500, which by 1800 (or 1900 at the latest) resulted in its military, technological, economic, and cultural dominance of the world? This event in world history was enormously consequential. It resulted in what the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel calls the Great Escape, which ena- bled a large proportion of the world population (but sadly not all) to escape poverty, high childhood mortality and endemic disease, ignorance, and oppression. This is such an important question that thousands of articles and books have been written to answer it. Escape from Rome is a recent and valuable addition to this debate (full disclosure: Walter Scheidel and I have collaborated on several projects and published a joint article, see Turchin and Scheidel 2009). Scheidel is one of the rare (but becoming more common) historians who are willing and able to entertain general theories to answer Big Questions. He ruefully acknowledges that his focus on general explanations (including such bugbears as “geographic determinism”), the big picture, and “long-termism” is bound to irritate “microscopically inclined historians.” But his careful (even if verbal and qualita - tive) theory building coupled with a mass of quantitative data for testing these ideas, presented in tables and maps, amounts to what one could call “verbal cliodynamics” (for cliodynamics, see Turchin 2008). Borrowing a page from evolu- tionary science, Scheidel distinguishes the questions of ultimate causality (which is where geography and ecology play the most important role) and those of proximate mechanisms (the interplay of a multitude of cultural, social, institutio- nal, economic, and military factors that are shaped and constrained by geography and ecology). The wealth of historical detail on the proximate causes helps to flesh out the bare bones of the theoretical argument concerning the ultimate causes and is a particularly enjoyable aspect of the book (at least, to those of us who have an “inner historian”).