Brooks Adams reads Western history from Rome to the nineteenth century as the working of a single law: societies move from an age of fear, ruled by priests and soldiers, to an age of greed, ruled by usurers and merchants, and then decay. He traces it through the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, the English Reformation and modern centralization.
A bold and pessimistic 1895 theory of history by the brother of Henry Adams, for readers of grand-scale historical speculation. Download the free EPUB.