The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The imperial-decay pattern, in full.
Gibbon wrote what remains the definitive case study in institutional decay at scale — a millennium of slow rot in which the Roman system degraded not all at once but through the accumulation of small compromises, each defensible in isolation, none survivable in aggregate. Reading it now, the pattern is recognizable in any large institution: the moment the machinery of coordination starts serving its own maintenance rather than its original purpose, the decline has already begun.