The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

This research has shown that lead and copper pollution—produced by the smelting of lead, copper, and silver—were both very high during the Roman period, falling back in the post-Roman centuries to levels that are much closer to those of prehistoric times. Only in around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did levels of pollution again attain those of Roman times.

It may initially be hard to believe, but post-Roman Britain in fact sank to a level of economic complexity well below that of the pre-Roman Iron Age.

It is indeed thought that parts of the Levant did not regain the levels and density of population that they sustained in late Roman and early Arab times until well into the nineteenth, or even the twentieth century.

I am no advocate of twenty-first-century imperialism—empires, it seems to me, have had their day—but it is a mistake to treat all empires of the past as universally bad in an undifferentiated way.