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Peter Sarris, Kyle Harper. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1627–1629, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy205
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Kyle Harper has emerged as without doubt one of the most creative, engaging, and productive scholars currently working in the field of late antiquity. In two major publications (Slavery in the Late Roman World [2011] and From Shame to Sin [2013]) and through a series of punctiliously researched articles, he has added depth and color to our understanding of late antique social history, and of the differences Christianity did (and did not) make. As well as possessing a strong authorial voice, he also works (and writes) well with others, and there is evidently a strong degree of synergy between him and Michael McCormick.
That synergy is very much in evidence in Harper’s latest publication, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. In this study, Harper draws upon what might be termed the “environmental and biological turn” of the early twenty-first century (to which McCormick has contributed), largely synthesizing and distilling a range of recent studies detailing the proxy data of ice cores, tree rings, and other forms of paleobotany, and the increasingly exciting findings of researchers working on “ancient DNA,” to reconstruct the tempestuous environmental and microbial context in which the dramatic political and military events of late antiquity took place, and to set out how environmental and epidemiological factors may have impacted on and contributed to that history. As he declares in his preface, “only in recent years have we come into possession of the scientific tools that allow us to glimpse, often fleetingly, the grand drama of environmental change in which the Romans were unwitting actors,” whereby “in an unintended conspiracy with nature, the Romans created a disease ecology that unleashed the latent power of pathogen evolution” (5). To Harper, the impact of connected exogenous environmental and microbial interventions in late antiquity would be determinant: “at scales that the Romans themselves could not have understood, and scarcely imagined—from the microscopic to the global—the fall of their empire was the triumph of nature over human ambition” (4). The aim of the book, as set out in the first chapter, is to explain how “the final collapse of anything recognizable as the Roman Empire and the lightning conquests of the armies of jihad,” which framed the history of the Mediterranean world from the fourth to seventh centuries c.e., reveal “the contrapuntal motion of humanity and the natural environment, sometimes parallel and sometimes contrary, but as utterly inseparable as the sonorous lines of a baroque fugue” (22).
