What causes cultures to decline and fall?

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Why do cultures fall? Do the inhabitants of a civilization in decline always know that it's happening? And were disease and invasion not the only factors to blame for the final days of the Aztec Empire? These are some of the questions tackled in the new BBC TV series Civilizations Rise and Fall, and I was joined by three of its experts, Luke Kemp, Caroline Doddspennock and Islamisa, to learn more about these stories and why they're more complicated than we might at first expect.

I kicked off by asking the three experts to introduce themselves, beginning with Luke. I am Luke Kemp. I'm a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. In short, my job is to think about the very worst-case scenarios for the future, not just global societal collapse, but also potentially even things like human extinction. But in the light of my work, I've also tried to look not just to the future, but to the past.

I'm Islam Aisa. I'm a British Egyptian historian. I've written a history of the city of Alexandria and I'm Professor of Public Humanities at Birmingham City University. I'm Caroline Dodds-Penak. I'm professor of international history at the University of Sheffield.

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