Anglosphere

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

In the past few months, I’ve had a chance to review two substantial books on the Fall of the Roman Empire and its after-effects (Peter Heathers’ Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.) These books summarize the post-WW2 archaeology and literary analysis covering the late Roman and post-Roman periods, and offer a useful corrective to a more recent trend in scholarship which has created a soft-soaped “Late Antiquity” … in competition to the “Dark Ages” of popular imagination. For these revisionist scholars of the last thirty years, the migration of barbarians into the Roman empire (both eastern and western branches) was both justifiable (“they only wanted the Roman good life”) and relatively benign (“they settled in and became staunch allies”). Heather and Ward-Perkins discredit this post-modern, New Age image of the Fall pretty thoroughly but we shouldn’t be surprised if major portions of Western academia and literati will choose to hold onto such a rosy-hued version of Roman/barbarian relations. If only the Romans had been nicer to the barbarians, they’ll proclaim, so much unpleasantness could have been avoided.

Equating America with Rome has been a spectator sport for a very long time. A dominant power — economically, militarily, and culturally — is widely resented, and subtly envied, whether by those pretending to dominance themselves, or those merely poor and hungry. Either too vulgar and decadent for ongoing success. Or too conservative and religious for such success. Either too powerful and entangled in every global squabble, or too disengaged and ignorant of the world’s woes and complaints. The Rome analogy is an endlessly flexible tool, especially when historical examples can be drawn from the founding of Rome (roughly 750 BCE) through to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453 CE. There’s something for every philosophical and political stripe in a Roman history that lasts more than two millenia. Pick and choose at will.

The Rome/America analogy has certainly been worked overtime since 9/11. Will Goliath topple? It’s the question of the era, just much as it was in the early fifth century. It’s not that people want the barbarians to win. It’s just that they really, really want the new Rome to lose.

A particularly ham-handed example of the comparison was written by Niall Ferguson in 2004 called Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. The counter-arguments … about whether America is an empire, about whether its best days are past, about whether “pride goeth before a fall,” about whether its decadence or its sanctimony is the greater global danger … obsess the domestic audience as much as the foreign. So we should brace ourselves for a steady, indeed growing, stream of public commentary that seeks to make comparisons with Rome, and if Heather and Ward-Perkins are correct, seeks to portray any Fall of an American Empire as altogether a matter of minor inconvenience on the way to a far, far better place. The fact that we’d have to see the American economy retrench to the 1820s (before telegraphy and mobile steam power) in order to make the Roman/Late Antiquity analogy ring true seems to have escaped the chattering classes completely. The fate of the hinterlands of modern globalization under such a collapse hardly bears contemplation.

Let’s take a look at a concrete example of how the academic confection called Late Antiquity will be applied to judging America and American options in coming years. Just recently, foreign policy academic Michael Vlahos wrote an article posted on TCS Daily called The Puzzle of New War. The article begins by noting that all the hand-waving about terrorism and guerrilla warfare being something “new” is in fact overblown. The Romans themselves dealt with a variety of antagonists: states (e.g. Dacians, Parthians, and Sassanid Persians), non-state actors (the various tribes, clans, and ethnic groups around Roman imperial borders), and mere “lawless elements” … the bacaudae or bagaudae of fifth century Gaul and Spain.

Then the author describes the Roman solution to non-state parties: negotiation and elite subsidies. If that didn’t work, legionary invasion and ethnocide were applied. The Romans had a very immediate practical use for conquered peoples, of course: slavery. Vlahos notes that the Roman way is clearly not the Israeli or American way. In the current Middle East conflicts, the goal has been the suppression of armed opponents, not the obliteration of civilian populations, let alone their enslavement. America (and Israel) won’t eliminate such populations, so how, Vlahos wonders, can they deal with them ultimately?

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2005, 239pp.

In an earlier book review article on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, we got a chance to revisit the subject with a new generation of scholarship at hand … to correct for the prejudices of Edward Gibbon’s contemporaries, to integrate substantially more knowledge about events in the eastern Empire, and to apply more modern perspectives on economics and communication to our understanding of the “Fall.”

The who, when, and where of the Fall have been known for centuries, at least in rough outline. Heather’s book provided a thorough overview of the details. The how and why have also been subject to generations of debate and mountains of written scholarship. Nonetheless, it’s only in the last fifty years that new perspectives on the “what” … as in “what actually happened, where?” have been more fully addressed by archaeology. The details of settlement and material culture which can give us a physical baseline for cultural activities is only now coming into focus.

A comment by Albion’s Seedlings reader “Mark” led me to an online interview with Peter Heather and Oxford colleague Bryan Ward-Perkins … both had co-incidentally written books on the fall of the Roman Empire in the same year (2005). I’d enjoyed Heather’s book so much, and found the online interview so interesting, that I was inspired to borrow Ward-Perkin’s title from the local library.

This second book approaches the subject from a very different vantage point … it reviews the latest perspectives on the why and how of the fall of the Roman Empire, and discusses the material impact of the Fall in the centuries following the abdication of the final western Emperor (476 CE). Finally, it discusses the academic “sugar-coating” of the Fall of the Empire that has taken place over the last 30 years. How did we go from centuries of “The Fall of the Roman Empire” to a “Transformation of the Classical World” in the scholarship of the 1990s? What combination of EU political requirements, post-modern post-colonial fantasy, and New Age religiosity converted the Dark Ages into “Late Antiquity”? The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization goes quite a ways to solving both the historical puzzle and the academic muddle of the 21st century.

This year, we’re not celebrating the 1600th anniversary of the invasion of the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves across the Rhine river, which triggered a fatal seventy year crisis in the western empire. After reading Ward-Perkin’s book, you’ll only be surprised that the EU didn’t commission an anthem, a logo, and a cartoon mascot! By let’s first turn our attention to an outline of Professor Ward-Perkin’s compact, beautifully written book.

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Macfarlane, Alan and Iris, The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant that took over the World, 2003. (also published as Green Gold: The Empire of Tea). 308 pp. in small format.

In past blog posts, I’ve reviewed several books that help us understand the dynamics of international trade over the last thousand years or so. Our world has been globalized for a very long time and we have examples of how the two ends of Eurasia had very different needs, interests, and capacities. In one such case, the elements of material culture (glass-making and glass-using) were to have profound impact on how Westerners viewed the world in advance of other cultures. Alan Macfarlane’s book on Glass was a well-written and stimulating account of the role of glass-making in global technological change.

Macfarlane has followed up with a similar, but rather more personal, book on one item of material culture and trade – the tea leaf. His family were tea planters in Assam (northeast of India) during the mid-20th century, and Empire of Tea is co-written with his mother, who experienced life as memsahib in the 40s and was emotionally traumatized by the plight of the agricultural workers on the Assamese tea plantations. The harsh physical demands on the workers picking the tea leaves continue to this day.

Empire of Tea, per normal for a book by Alan Macfarlane, reflects encyclopedic research with a deft and approachable written style. It’s a small book and a relatively quick read, and very well organized, but one comes away with a strong sense of the botany, medicinal effects, history, economic impact, and social import of tea in human history over the last 1500 years. An excellent starting point to the literature, in other words.

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