Reddit reviews The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization documents using quantified archaeology how the collapse of Roman hegemony devastated the economies in not just the ex-imperial West but also the still-imperial East. Coins, manufactured pottery, and other goods are all sharply less evident after the Fall; animal skeletons are smaller, and there's generally pretty consistent evidence all around of much lower standards of living, even in the areas that maintained Roman culture and governance.

A big reason: the loss of the network effects the stable Pax Romana gave to the entire region. The Roman economy was surprisingly specialized, because trade meant everyone didn't have to produce everything themselves. When the trade routes broke down, people had to become less specialized — and thus, less wealthy.

> The last of which was a gradual morphing into a mostly-but-not-completely Germanic society in place of a mostly-but-not-completely Greco-Latin society.

It didn't morph into "A Germanic society". It collapsed over a relatively short period and was replaced by a patchwork of several such societies, which established themselves in its ruins. That's a fallen empire by any definition. See Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005) for a solid refutation of the "gradualist" idea that "the Empire never fell it just changed". The consensus is that the speed and extent of the impact of the fall varied from place to place, with the northern and fringe regions that were effectively propped up by the Army and administration and an economy dependent on them going far more "Mad Max" than Italy or Africa. But Ward-Perkins shows pretty conclusively that the post-War tendency to downplay the fall as kind of gentle "morphing" is essentially nonsense, as a mass of archaeological and documentary evidence indicates.

I'd recommend two books that, while in contention historiographically, together do a good job of describing the length of Roman decline and the immediate effects on its citizens: Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity.

I point you to Bryan Ward-Perkins, history professor of oxford, and one of the main proponents of collapse theory, because though the literary evidence shows a peaceful transition, the archaeological evidence shows a very destructive collapse in complex society.

In fact, modern scholarship is shifting back towards the, as you put it, "barbarians over running western europe" because archaeological evidence has multiplied a hundred fold and confirms this collapse in ways the earlier (and purely literary based) theories of Peter Brown and Pirenne didn't.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Rome-And-Civilization/dp/0192807285/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343195688&sr=8-1&keywords=the+fall+of+rome+and+the+end+of+civilization

Also, adopting roman customs does not mean they were roman, any more than the holy roman empire was roman itself because of the name. The hallmarks of Roman society, centralized bureaucracy, a standing military, taxation and mediterrenean wide trade, all vanished, taking along with it the highly urbanized society that Rome was noted for, and replacing it with feudal and rural aristocracies with the bare vestiges of continuation, mostly in the guise of the church, but not the state.

Keep in mind too, the literary evidence also shows that the Germanic successor states in Italy and Gaul governed themselves under primarily their own Germanic customs and common law, as opposed to the populace who were subject to Roman law. Hardly the full integration you're implying.

Un livre intéréssant sur le sujet : https://www.amazon.fr/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285

Edit : Qui mentionne le plomb dans les calottes glacieres d'ailleurs. Je ne sais pas pourquoi ça fait re-surface comme actualité

Edit 2 : Le livre est dans la /r/Askhistorians recommended booklist

I tell you what, i'll give you the booklist from a class i took called "Fall of Rome," and you can go to the library and check them out and read them and make your own evaluation.

The Roman Empire, a Study in Survival, by Chester G. Starr

The Later Roman Empire by Avril Cameron

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins

Byzantium, by Judith Herrin

Then there's a book on Charlemagne by Matthias Becher and another book by an Italian whose name i cannot remember right now. Also, look up Henri Pirenne and his thoughts on the rise and fall of Rome, both East and West.

No, it really did fall.

See The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Ward-Perkins.

Roman Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Briton all had significant urban centers. These all disappeared after the barbarian conquests. Rome was a city of over a million people in it's heyday. It's population collapsed to less than 50,000. The grand buildings were turned into stone quarries.

London had a population of 60,000...and was almost completely deserted after the Saxon conquests.

That same story was written over and over again across urban centers across the Roman empire. The population dispersed, or killed, or enslaved by the Germanic or Hunnic invaders.