Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (now revised and updated) stands as a monumental achievement in historical scholarship. With meticulous detail and a narrative flair that rivals the best thriller writers, Cline dismantles the simplistic notion that the Bronze Age world ended because of a single invading horde known as the “Sea Peoples.” Instead, he paints a picture of a perfect storm: prolonged drought and climate shifts disrupting agriculture, mass migrations (or invasions) by those same Sea Peoples, internal rebellions in overstretched empires, and the sudden evaporation of international trade networks that had sustained prosperity for centuries. Cline’s multi-causal explanation is a breath of fresh air in a field often addicted to monocausal myths.

He rightly reminds us that civilizations do not topple from one blow but from a convergence of stressors that expose underlying frailties. Yet for all its brilliance, Cline’s analysis harbors a glaring blind spot—one shared by virtually the entire academic establishment. As a tenured professor at George Washington University, Cline operates within a worldview that treats centralized economic planning as not just inevitable but desirable. He chronicles the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of palace bureaucracies during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE without ever asking the obvious question: What if this very centralization was the original sin that made the Bronze Age empires brittle in the first place? What if the emperors’ growing habit of allocating grain, bronze, and labor by imperial fiat—rather than allowing free individuals to trade and innovate—was the slow-acting poison that rendered these societies unable to withstand drought, migration, or rebellion?
 

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

 Tom