Peter Heather

At its fullest extent, apart from that Dacian hump, it's lasting for 500 years, half a millennium.

So time from us to Henry VIII.

Nothing has lasted that long.

Makes the British Empire look like a complete joke.

Flash in the pan.

Yeah, absolutely.

Nothing.

Complete nothing.

So it's doing something right.

Although it's colossal and unwieldy, it works in an amazing way.

That's right.

I mean, there's a pattern of underdevelopment still.

What's different from China is that the Roman system doesn't take in all the kind of arable farmers of Western Europe.

Some are left outside, whereas the Chinese system incorporates basically all the sort of arable farmers of the eastern end of Eurasia.

But that farming area is still very underdeveloped.

Population densities aren't high, and you don't have any large structured states.

So if you look at the expansion pattern of the Roman Empire, it basically takes over all the bits of Europe that were worth taking over in about the first century B.C.

Tough hit on the Scots there, but we'll let that... But they did argue that actually Britain was not worth taking.

Yes.

You always go a bit further than the Scots benefit.