Book Notes

[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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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

[based on a free review copy provided by the publisher]

Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, New York, 2006. 238pp.

In late 2004, about the time that the Anglosphere Challenge was published, WIRED magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote an influential article called The Long Tail.

Looking at the sales figures of companies in a new generation of online industries (such as digital jukebox company eCast), he discovered that substantial corporate income was being made from the vast array of goods which didn’t appear on anyone’s “hit” list. Sales figures showed a so-called power law distribution. As one moved down the sales ranking, sales volume dropped dramatically. In the new world of online marketing and distribution however, people were responding to more choices in products (the “Long Tail” of the sales distribution curve) by purchasing a wider variety of goods. Vendors were selling less of the lower ranked items, but in aggregate were actually selling more. As Anderson puts it, “popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.” The early online success stories were companies that carried the “hits” of their industry but offered a new and efficient way to find and access older and less famous choices.

The so-called Pareto principle … where 80% of sales come from 20% of catalog items … was giving way to a new and more attenuated sales pattern. The Long Tail of sales persisted, in modest but significant numbers, as far down the sales ranking list as anyone wanted to measure. Whether it was ITunes, Netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody (an online music rental service), or eBay, it seemed clear that even a huge inventory of goods, if matched successfully with a large enough pool of purchasers, would attract sales of almost every item. The cleverest retailers were finding new ways to lengthen the Tail (add inventory) and fatten the Tail (increase unit sales).

At the time, Anderson proposed three rules for generating a Long Tail business.

1. Make everything available.
2. Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
3. Help me find it.

Anderson’s article generated plenty of “why didn’t I think of that” moments and the phrase Long Tail has since become a dot-com buzzword and a handy way to encapsulate how the Internet has become a streamlined vehicle for providing, finding, and selling many kinds of goods. Some of those goods can be dropped on one’s shoe (as Amazon, eBay, and WalMart.com prove every day) and some of those goods (like eBooks and music files) seem more like an electronic dance between your credit card, your computer screen, and perhaps a digital appliance.

Now Mr. Anderson has assembled a more thorough, more data-rich inspection of the Long Tail concept. By working closely with economists at prominent universities, and using a Long Tail weblog to engage the assistance of a community of readers, the author has evaluated a number of Long Tail industries (and actual sales data sources), to see whether his ideas about the Long Tail in his earlier article hold up under scrutiny.

The short answer, with a few modest caveats, is Yes.

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