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syllabus_of_errors 's review for:
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
by Kyle Harper
The Fate of Rome is an excellent, modern, cross-disciplinary analysis of the end of the Roman Empire that takes the perspective that climate change and disease played a much larger role in the end of both the Western and Eastern Empires. Despite the sense that global warming and pandemic ended Rome might seem like pseudoscientific drek in 2021, it’s rigorously researched and in the historical orthodox.
Harper starts with a discussion of Rome’s rise coinciding with the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO), a multi-century span when the cooling trend of the Holocene was interrupted. Foreshadowing the effects that would make the 540s so horrible, the RCO had a combination of moist weather, a high energy output Sun cycle, and no major global volcanic activity. During the RCO, Rome exploded in the Iron Age world and became the largest empire the world had ever seen.
Disease was of course nothing new to premodern societies. But Harper points out that Romans and settled practitioners of agriculture and city-dwellers were significantly undernourished. The Petri dishes of Classical Era cities, the lack of nutrition, and globalization of Roman trade routes led to the terrible new phenomenon of pandemic. Starting with the Antonine Plague, Roman plagues ceased being local affairs, and now swept all of the Empire.
The end of the RCO meant the edges of the Empire underwent dramatic climatic changes in a short period of time. The Empire-wide food trade networks were disrupted by changes in weather: aridification in some areas, flooding in others, all bad for agriculture. Climate change also triggered massive “barbarian” migrations from the North and East, under whose pressure the West famously collapsed.
Unlike many histories of Rome, I appreciate that Harper continues with the Eastern Empire through the reign of Justinian. The East famously flourished after the official end of the West through the rise of Islam. I think the ending note is very interesting: Harper describes the religions of the Empire (Christianity, Judaism, and finally Islam) as eschatological (that is, doomsday) faiths. The medieval philosophy that the world has only been decaying since the Garden of Eden became mainstream in the face of the disease, famine, and death Romans experienced. That judgement day was soon nigh has to be understandable and is shared across the Abrahamic faiths.
What an excellent history of Rome, and one that doesn’t try to dumb-down the concepts or vocabulary. It’s accessible to non-historians, but is also a valid piece of writing. Harper represents the latest in our understanding of the end of Rome. Infamously, there are over 200 factors to the end of the Empire. But in our day in age, with the latest cross-disciplinary research available, it’s time the climate and disease get their fair credit as the top factors.
Harper starts with a discussion of Rome’s rise coinciding with the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO), a multi-century span when the cooling trend of the Holocene was interrupted. Foreshadowing the effects that would make the 540s so horrible, the RCO had a combination of moist weather, a high energy output Sun cycle, and no major global volcanic activity. During the RCO, Rome exploded in the Iron Age world and became the largest empire the world had ever seen.
Disease was of course nothing new to premodern societies. But Harper points out that Romans and settled practitioners of agriculture and city-dwellers were significantly undernourished. The Petri dishes of Classical Era cities, the lack of nutrition, and globalization of Roman trade routes led to the terrible new phenomenon of pandemic. Starting with the Antonine Plague, Roman plagues ceased being local affairs, and now swept all of the Empire.
The end of the RCO meant the edges of the Empire underwent dramatic climatic changes in a short period of time. The Empire-wide food trade networks were disrupted by changes in weather: aridification in some areas, flooding in others, all bad for agriculture. Climate change also triggered massive “barbarian” migrations from the North and East, under whose pressure the West famously collapsed.
Unlike many histories of Rome, I appreciate that Harper continues with the Eastern Empire through the reign of Justinian. The East famously flourished after the official end of the West through the rise of Islam. I think the ending note is very interesting: Harper describes the religions of the Empire (Christianity, Judaism, and finally Islam) as eschatological (that is, doomsday) faiths. The medieval philosophy that the world has only been decaying since the Garden of Eden became mainstream in the face of the disease, famine, and death Romans experienced. That judgement day was soon nigh has to be understandable and is shared across the Abrahamic faiths.
What an excellent history of Rome, and one that doesn’t try to dumb-down the concepts or vocabulary. It’s accessible to non-historians, but is also a valid piece of writing. Harper represents the latest in our understanding of the end of Rome. Infamously, there are over 200 factors to the end of the Empire. But in our day in age, with the latest cross-disciplinary research available, it’s time the climate and disease get their fair credit as the top factors.