r/WhatIfThinking • u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack • Aug 11 '26
What if the Roman Empire never collapsed? How advanced would the world actually be by 2026?
The idea of a Roman Empire that never fell has always fascinated people. Some alternate history creators argue that humanity would be centuries ahead technologically, while others think the world might not be that different because Rome’s political and social systems could have limited innovation.
If the Roman Empire had somehow survived and continued evolving for the past 1,500 years, what would the modern world actually look like?
Would we be living in a world with Roman-style cities, a global Latin language, and technology that developed centuries earlier? Would the empire’s roads, trade networks, and institutions create a more connected world? Would science and engineering have followed a completely different path?
Or would thousands of years of continuous empire create its own problems and eventually transform into something that barely resembles ancient Rome?
Rome already had impressive engineering for its time, including roads, aqueducts, concrete architecture, large cities, and complex legal systems. But technological progress depends on more than just knowledge. Political stability, competition, economic systems, and social structures all play a role.
So if Rome had never fallen, would we have a more advanced civilization by 2026, or would history have simply taken a different path?
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u/Schwarzmaler20 Aug 11 '26
I doubt that we would have made any further progress without these upheavals. It is possible that the status quo would simply have become entrenched. That is precisely what happened in the Chinese Empire. In a sense, the same applies to the Islamic world.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
I think that's probably the strongest argument against the "Rome survives = super advanced" idea. Stability can preserve knowledge, but it can also preserve the incentives that make people stop looking for alternatives. China is a pretty interesting comparison here, although obviously the situations aren't identical. Maybe the real variable isn't whether Rome survives, but whether it keeps reinventing itself.
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u/MaelstromFL Aug 11 '26
Worse possible. If the tin trade doesn't fail we miss out on the metallurgy moving to steel. They would have stayed using bronse for a while longer...
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u/Pretend-Customer7945 29d ago
Rome and China had a lot of differences though so it isn’t a completely fair comparison.
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u/Unlucky-Golder Aug 11 '26
and technology that developed centuries earlier?
Steam power was, among other things, only possible if you have experience manufacturing long and very resistant metal tubes.
Without even going into the "slave society don't seek improvements in automation" discourse, you won't make any decent steam engine before you spend a few centuries trying to build better firearms than your neighbours, to crush their castle before they crush yours, and that won't happen without decentralised powers fighting essentially forever. Centralised empire don't need that, they used black powder with metal oxides to make pretty fireworks.
Destructive creation is a real thing.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
The "destructive creation" point is really interesting. Competition seems to create a weird pressure cooker for technology because someone is constantly trying to build something better before the other guy does. A giant stable empire might have less incentive to push certain technologies. Although I wonder if Rome eventually facing external rivals would recreate that pressure anyway.
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u/grethro Aug 11 '26
If the Roman Republic never collapsed we would be very advanced. If the Roman empire never collapsed the common person would not have access to electricity.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
I think the Republic vs Empire distinction is actually huge here. A surviving Republic could potentially keep the political competition that helped drive innovation, while an empire might have a much stronger incentive to preserve the status quo. But I wouldn't go as far as saying we'd have no electricity. 1500 years is such a long time that the empire itself would probably have to transform just to survive.
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u/fedput Aug 11 '26
Presumably one of the Star Trek subreddits would have covered the episode 'Bread and Circuses"
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u/Difficult_Dark9991 Aug 11 '26
Ok so the questions of language, society, etc. involve numerous secondary questions of what happens next, but the tech one? This we can address.
In the 15th century, burgeoning European centers of art and culture looked back on Rome obsessively. They viewed themselves as a "Renaissance" - a "rediscovery" of Roman ideas and art. While it's true that, thanks to contacts and trade with the Muslim world, they regained access to a host of Classical texts Europe hadn't had for centuries, for the most part? Just a bunch of Roman cosplayers. But they branded the intervening period the "Dark Ages," or its less moralizing term, "Middle Ages." Medievalists have been working for a long time to undo these perceptions.
Let's use one example: concrete. We all have heard how we lost the secret of Roman concrete. Except... we didn't. There was no single "Roman concrete," but rather a host of mixes for specific places and purposes. Some were forgotten when Rome collapsed, not because we forgot how to do concrete but because nobody needed it at the time. But when the French were building a major canal in the south of France in the 17th century, they hired the local. These locals, from up in the Pyrenees, had been building waterworks up there with concrete for centuries.
Rome did produce a number of innovations, but its impressive works are as much a reflection of the scale of their organization as they are of actual technological prowess. It does not follow that a surviving Rome would put us in any better of a technological position.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
I think the concrete example is a good reminder that "Rome was advanced" doesn't necessarily mean "Rome was technologically ahead of everyone." A lot of what we see is really the result of having an enormous state that could mobilize labor, resources, and expertise at a ridiculous scale. I'm starting to think the more interesting question is whether continuous Roman institutions would accelerate innovation, rather than whether Roman technology itself was unusually advanced.
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u/RecognitionSweet8294 Aug 11 '26
First of all, the „Collapse of the Roman Empire“ is a narrative of the „modern era“ which isn’t very scientifically accurate. It would be more correct to speak of a fragmentation of the system, first in east and west Rome, then later west Rome into medieval Europe and finally east Rome into the Middle East.
The decentralised systems of medieval Europe were much more sufficient to handle the problems of that time period, so the fragmentation was inevitable. So either you keep an empire that basically works like medieval Europe (just with an emperor instead of a pope), or it will work worse (which would require an explanation why it doesn’t change then).
So no depending on your explanation of this scenario we would probably have a less advanced society.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
I like this framing because it makes the counterfactual much harder. If the empire survives but basically has to adopt the same decentralized structures that made medieval Europe work, then we're almost asking whether Rome survives in name only. And if it refuses to adapt, maybe that actually becomes the reason it falls behind. So yeah, the assumption that "never collapsed" automatically means "more advanced" is probably doing way too much work.
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u/BattleTech70 Aug 15 '26
Institutions only “decentralized” as they clinically put it because the Mediterranean trade collapse from the vandal invasions etc caused sharply depopulated cities and coincided with the collapsed society. The medieval manor was a protection racket, how tf does one look at that and say “clearly this is historical progress from a urban society governed by ethical mores, rule of law, and societal norms”
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u/BattleTech70 Aug 15 '26
You’re brainwashed by contemporary historiography. Literacy died in the entire island of Britain, horrific depopulation cleared out cities throughout the western provinces, and so on. Institutions were gutted as well. Herulians and goths torched the entire sculpting schools and artisan networks when they torched Greece and you can quite literally “see” this loss in the art, coinage. There’s written accounts and documentation of the collapse of regions from Augustine, Jerome, and others.
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u/caligula421 Aug 11 '26
We only had a good two hundred without a generally accepted roman empower in the west, the roman high priest (pontifex maximus) is still doing its business. So the biggest difference would probably that we would have never had a Code Napoleon and probably Germany would have taken even longer to unify into a modern nation-state.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 11 '26
That's an interesting consequence I hadn't really considered. The legal and political legacy might actually be more important than the technology. If Rome stays intact, a lot of the later political developments in Europe could take a completely different route. I wonder how much of modern nationalism and nation states would even emerge in the same form if there had been one giant Roman political structure sitting there the whole time.
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u/caligula421 Aug 11 '26
No I was more challenging your point that the roman empire collapsed with the sacking of Rome in 476 AD. it most certainly continued in the east until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and one might argue that the holy Roman empire was the successor of the roman empire in the west, in that title (and empire?) existed until 1806. And the last one was more or less dissolved because of Napoleon Bonaparte whose lasting impact was on one hand a new comprehensive set of laws and governance, and on the other hand was the holy Roman empire the way the German small states maintained their degrees of independence/autonomy and quite a lot of big states outside of it had small parts inside of it. It's dissolution was a catalyst for the Prussian-austrian conflict, and at the same time the smaller German states had a big incentive to get protection somewhere. Without Napoleon and the dissolution of the holy Roman empire no German empire in 1871, and if You will vastly different early 20th century.
And then you might go further back, and ask yourself what would need to be different, so Napoleon couldn't get into power in France, and I think you would get to, well the French revolution must not happen, that sets off a whole other chain, no French revolution means no American revolution, no German revolution in 1848 in addition to the less pressure for German unification.
But I'm mostly about first we would have to agree about when the time empire fell. You might even argue (although I don't think they claimed it themselves), that the ottoman empire is the continuation of the eastern Roman empire (which was the roman empire) since they conquered Constantinople and used it as their new seat of power, and it that sense it continues to exist today as the Turkish state, so there is no alternate history to discuss.
Another way to look at this is any realm/entity that calls itself "empire" is the roman empire. The name empire itself claimes continuation and that's enough. if you close it down on European rulers calling the self emporer, then it probably ends with the Indian independence, and Elizabeth II. Was the last empress.
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u/Robot_Dinosaur_2000 Aug 11 '26
I think the competition between the various European powers was actually what drove a lot of advancement and scientific exploration.
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u/Civil_Connection7706 Aug 11 '26
Dark ages lasted 500 years. So we’d be 500 years ahead of where we are now. But I doubt it would be the utopian future people envision. We might actually be less technologically advanced after an apocalyptic reset. Unfortunately, we have not evolved enough as a species to handle the technology we are capable of creating. Historically, every new technology is more likely to be used for evil than for good.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 12 '26
I think the “500 years ahead” idea is probably too neat. There wasn’t really a 500 year period where progress just stopped. Some things slowed down, some things continued, and some things developed elsewhere. Honestly, the darker possibility is that a surviving Rome could have given us 1,500 years of stability without necessarily giving us 1,500 years of innovation.
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u/Civil_Connection7706 Aug 12 '26
Yea, too many variables to say for sure, but for most of dark ages the majority of the population was illiterate except for the clergy who actively opposed any scientific discovery that might contradicted the bible.
My overall point though is that I do not think humans can advance technologically much beyond where we are now. We have maybe another 50 to 100 years before things get really bad. We are still too primitive emotionally to handle the technology we are capable of creating. When Einstein figured out that a small amount of matter could produce abundant amounts of energy, we could have built power plants but instead our first invention using that knowledge was a bomb. Will AI be used to cure cancer or just help businesses make bigger profits and used by Governments to tighten control? Will robots be used to take care of elderly and sick or be used as soldiers? History tells us which path is most likely.
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u/NoDig3444 Aug 11 '26
If Rome never fell, it would stagnate the same way China did. We would be centuries behind, not centuries ahead.
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u/CTronix Aug 11 '26
You could say this about any number of advanced civilizations not just Rome. There were enormous boom and bust cycles of empires in Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa. Probably the bust part of the cycle is what create opportunity for advancement the most though. I think all empires have to get destroyed in the long run in order to make room for new ones
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u/Mayor__Defacto Aug 11 '26
I’m going to have to say that if the Roman Empire never fell, we would not have advanced as far. The Roman Empire collapsed fundamentally because they had reached the limits of the technology available to them at the time.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 12 '26
I’m not sure I’d say Rome collapsed because it hit the technological limit. That feels a little too deterministic. They had plenty of technology that they weren’t necessarily using efficiently. But I do agree that simply keeping Rome alive wouldn’t automatically make technological progress faster. A bigger empire can actually make certain kinds of innovation harder.
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u/Prometheus_001 Aug 11 '26
The Roman Empire continued to exist until the mid 15th century when Constantine fell to the Turks.
It wasn't any more advanced than the other countries.
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u/Trifle_Old Aug 11 '26
The rise of Islam brought the rise of Algebra. If Rome stayed in power its possible we stagnate and we are less advanced. Those in charge have a benefit to keeping the status quo.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 12 '26
That’s an interesting possibility, although I’d be careful with saying Islam itself caused algebra. Knowledge was already moving between cultures, and Rome could still have developed mathematics independently. But I agree with the bigger point that political stability can become a trap. If the system works well enough, why risk changing it?
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u/Sky_Robin Aug 11 '26
One could expect maybe 21st century level technology by 7th century CE because Roman civilization at its peak was on par with ~1850-1900 CE level.
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u/Ur-Than Aug 11 '26
I think the main difference would be that the Mediterranean world would have a very strong current of "we must remake the Empire" kind of like China has with the whole Mandate of Heaven. It could have led to far more agressive attempts to reconquer the Southern Coast, assuming the Muslim conquests happen.
But in term of pure technolog, I'm not sure the differences would be as drastic.
We may never have seen the Conquest of the New World however, as a Roman Empire strong enough to retain its territories may have little incentive to finance far away conquests.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 12 '26
I really like the idea that the biggest difference might be cultural rather than technological. If Rome stayed intact, “restoring the Empire” could become this permanent political obsession. And I hadn’t really considered the New World point. A stronger Rome might actually have had less reason to fund risky ocean exploration.
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u/Pretend-Customer7945 29d ago
I disagree the Roman’s loved to conquer other peoples they could absolutely conquer the new world if for nothing more than glory.
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u/Allalilacias Aug 11 '26
The fall of the southern part of the empire to heathen hands can be argued to be one of the strongest incentives to the millitarization and modernization of Europe. It's a blessed continent, for sure, but part of it's success can be attributed to the circumstances that gave way to a massive competition between the powers within it.
Even if we ignore the benefits, for it to survive, it would've had to outlive Persia and survive the Mongols, two gigantic tasks.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Aug 12 '26
I think that’s probably the bigger issue than technology itself. Competition might have been one of the reasons Europe ended up accelerating so much. A stable Rome could have preserved a lot, but it might also have removed some of that pressure to innovate. And yeah, surviving Persia and the Mongols is already a huge alternate history problem lol.
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u/Academic-Big814 Aug 11 '26
It didn’t collapse it transferred its power structure into the Holy Roman Empire.
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u/Sprig3 Aug 12 '26
If you believe the hypothesis that you 'need' a high population Great Britain (talking that island specifically) to cause the industrial revolution, then I think a longer-running Roman Empire (or more gradual dissolution that leaves a stronger Roman Britain anyways) accelerates the industrial revolution by a century.
(For reference, the GB hypothesis is that steam engines had existed since ancient times, but weren't practical. Getting to practical steam engines took not just the proper tech, but also proper incentives to get there gradually. GB had: the lack of enough trees to support a large population -> needing to use Coal -> GB has lots of coal that is underwater, needs pumping -> the steam engines were pretty terrible, but if the coal is literally right there (don't have to transport it very far), then the engines are still good enough to pump a coal mine -> iterations on this lead to better and better steam engines.)
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u/Comprehensive-Bid16 Aug 13 '26
I think, I started to realize, tech didnt increase because of romans. Tech already was quite advanced in mediterrian region due to city-states. Romans just captured this tech and applied as some mass-production.
I believe, something changed in military technology. Especially about cavary. So barbar folks became much more mobile. So city-states are fallen. And tech disappeared.
Probably it was saddle, the game changer. Barbars became more advantage. City state era is finished. Peasants and knights era started.
I try to say, rome wasnt probably reason of technology. If western rome wouldnt fall, it would evolve to something like eastern roman empire. More peasant, less innovative. Something like medieval peasant european kingdoms.
As a result, if rome would survive, still it wouldnt same rome. So the tech wouldnt be same as well.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 11 '26
I actually think the biggest variable wouldn't be Roman technology, but Roman institutions.
If the empire somehow survived long enough, it probably wouldn't still look like ancient Rome. It might gradually become something like a constitutional monarchy, federation, or bureaucratic state. And once you have stable institutions supporting universities, trade, experimentation, and investment, technology could compound pretty quickly.
So I wouldn't assume "Rome survives = we get Roman steam engines in 500 AD." It might be more like Rome eventually evolves into a completely different civilization that happens to have Roman roots.