Climate collapse and pandemics: the fall of Rome

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From the Princeton University Press description:

"Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria.

He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague."

This is a highly readable, even exciting narrative which situates the Roman Empire within the climate cycle of the:

• Roman Climate Optimum (200 BC - 150 AD)
• Late Roman Transitional Period (150 - 450)
• Late Antique Little Ice Age (450 - 700).

Agrarian societies are highly susceptible to climate deterioration and its attendant woes of famine, plague and attack from similarly-stressed 'barbarians'. Consequent depopulation subverts both the economy and the military. The later Empire was, as Harper demonstrates, constituted as a sequence of structural-political responses to increasingly debilitating challenges. In the end it was all too much.

This is by far the best, and most compelling account I have read of the dynamics underlying the fall of the Roman Empire (and also the rise of Islam, which brought the final coup de grace). Another case where climate science and paleogenetics are revolutionising history and archaeology.

One small criticism: Harper uses anachronistically the categories of capital and wage labour. But Rome was not capitalist, it was mercantilist, dominated by a mode of production based on ubiquitous slavery as Harper explains in great detail.