Bryan Ward-Perkins

Back in the day I used to play this board game called "Republic of Rome" with some of my friends. Dealing with the late republic, the joke was how that while you were busy trying to conquer the world the whole lot of us could be undone by "paper and dice," as one bad roll of the die and one bad event card too many could collapse the game. Why bring up this personal anecdote? It's that to a large degree that the author is dealing with the concatenation of events that tore apart the Western show more Roman Empire, between political strife, bad harvests, plague, and, most of all, the great barbarian invasions. This is in opposition to the new conventional wisdom that the changes of the 400s were more transformative than destructive. Ward-Perkins is not buying this concept; he's seen too much hard evidence to the contrary. It took the empire to uphold a sophisticated economic system and without that socio-political armature the whole structure could not be maintained. Besides talking about how the need for a usable past for the European Community helped lead to the current academic orthodoxy of Late Antiquity, Ward-Perkins takes the fate of the Western Roman Empire as a warning about the dangers of too much economic complexity and specialization. show less

The term 'deglobaliztion' is used much too freely. The real thing is tragic, even terrifying. It has happened once. At the start of the 400s AD the W Roman Empire still ensured the security & coinage to allow trade to flourish from Egypt to Scotland. Ordinary people even in remote corners, owned many products of sophisticated manufacturing (pottery, coin, tiles etc) produced in specialized factories e.g a variety of wheel-turned, glazed pots, roof tiles, earthenware pipes, textiles, show more well-made shoes: made sometimes by the state (for the army sometimes in huge specialised commercial factories in e.g. N Africa.

By the end of the 500s this was all gone in the West. Sophisticated manufactures disappear from daily commerce and fm the homes of ordinary people and trade itself all but disappears. Only small numbers of poor quality goods & very few/no coins are found outside large cities. Only wooden, thatched buildings. None could build or afford stone. By the end of the 700s this level of wealth was gone in the East, too except for Constantinople & the Levant.

The remarkable story of an economic plunge from the sophisticated, literate 'global' economy of the Empire to the crude, poor, hungrier and more local 8th Century Europe is told fluently and with solid data backing by Bryan Ward-Perkins "The Fall of Rome" (OUP, 2005) show less

A brief (I read it in one sitting) but thorough book making the focused point that the end of the Western Roman Empire was, in fact, violent and calamitous, a once-orthodox position now increasingly challenged by a view emphasizing the peaceful and negotiated transition from Roman to Germanic rule and settlement. Ward-Perkins makes a compelling argument for the narrow version of his thesis, and he's careful to note instances where the end of Rome was less violent or calamitous than others. show more In particular, his arguments about economic history — the collapse of post-Roman economies to, in some cases, more simple and impoverished versions than even pre-Roman civilizations — are compelling. His arguments for the violence of the fall of Rome are more rooted in interpretations of a scanty literary record, though from my own biases it's also an easier anecdotal case to make that bands of armed men moving into a new territory, even when officially welcomed, might have been violent and disruptive. show less

è davvero un buon libro per molte ragioni, alcune delle quali forse non farebbero contento l'autore.
Intanto è un libro che mostra anche ai non specialisti che l'"oggettività" storica non esiste (diciamo che è un falso problema che interessa solo chi vuole parlare male degli storici) e che il risultato parziale delle nostre conoscenze sul passato è sempre il frutto di una dialettca in continuo movimento.
E' un libro sincero (l'autore dichiara sempre le sue parzialità)che offre un quadro show more di sintesi molto utile e di gradevolissima lettura sulle nostre conoscenze del periodo in questione e sui punti controversi delle differenti interpretazioni.
Ma il pregio maggiore - a mio avviso - è che, in realtà, la lettura ci stimola a riflettere sul nostro presente: quale migliore risultato per un libro di storia? show less