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Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe |  | Author: Peter Heather
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $19.22
as of 9/9/2010 08:05 CDT details
You Save: $15.73 (45%)
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 45730
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 752
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0199735603
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.1
EAN: 9780199735600
ASIN: 0199735603
Publication Date: March 4, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780199735600 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Here is a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states.
The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. The emergence of larger and stronger states in the north and east had, by the year 1000, brought patterns of human organization into much greater homogeneity across the continent. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer.
Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together for the first time, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in the light of modern migration and globalization patterns. The result is a compelling, nuanced, and integrated view of how the foundations of modern Europe were laid.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Enthusiasm unbound July 23, 2010
Kenneth Woods
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Peter Heather's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious, and his ability to make sense of a complex pattern of migrations is impressive. While the narrative flows well (even if the jaunty asides do not all work), there is too much repetition. Perhaps the author thought this necessary because the book was so long that the reader could not be expected to pick out and retain all the key concepts. It seems that the publishers decided to keep the price down by eliminating photographs and plates, but they omitted to eliminate all references to photographs and plates, much to the frustration of this reader. The price could have been kept down more effectively by reducing the size of the text and by making it tighter and easier to follow. Let's hope the next edition will be a five.
 A Medievalist thanks you, Mr. Heather July 3, 2010
Hyla's Brook (Canaan, NY United States)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I now have Heather's book "Empires and Barbarians" on my reading list, but haven't bought it yet. For 30 years I've corrected people who refer to 500-1000 AD as "The Dark Ages" by telling them that those 5 centuries were "The Early Middle Ages." "Post Roman Europe" is a term that's fine with me - anything but the Dark Ages.
Look forward to reading this book soon.
Common Sense at His Best June 18, 2010
Fernando Villegas (Santiago de Chile)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What Heather has done is a monument to that very difficult to find virtue, common sense, in fact an absolutely uncommon virtue, that very thing that in spite of having such a "vulgar" denomination Schopenhauer -without using that name- considered the feature proper of genius, the gift to see what it is -the idea behind the fact- instead of looking at merely external relations and making empty abstractions. Heather does precisely that; he dismiss much of what has been said and considered dogma about the so called barbarian invasions looked as happening this or that day in the form of full peoples with clear and unchangeable identities. With Heather we see a more realistic description of the process and by the same reason we can understand lot better the formation of Europe -his target- and as an extra, a lot more the actual formation of identities and peoples. A must reading for every history geek and anthropology student.
Scholarly treatment of imperial-barbarian relations June 5, 2010
Elizabeth McBrearty (Tucson, Arizona USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is the third of Peter Heather's books I've read, and, to my mind, it's his best yet.
Heather's studies have always focused on the very late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, especially the Goths, to whom he devoted an entire book. In "Empires and Barbarians," he synthesizes his two interests. Using modern sociological studies of immigration patterns and an historical analogy with 19th century Boer voortrekkers of South Africa fleeing the advance of the British, Heather puts together a fascinating account of the changes in German societies between the time of Julius Caesar and the 3rd and later centuries AD. These changes, he says, were caused by the proximity to and economic exchanges with the Roman Empire, a much more highly developed society (the "development" of the subtitle). A desire for a closer relationship with the empire caused various German peoples to migrate to its borders, displacing older tenants and causing strife, which by the time of Marcus Aurelius at least, had caused the empire to retaliate (the "migration" of the subtitle). One other pressure also caused German migration, the influx of the Huns. Heather doesn't speculate on the reason for Hunnish movements. I, however, have always been intrigued by the thesis of William McNeill's older book "The Rise of the West" that it was the efforts of the Chinese empire to secure its borders from barbarians that caused a westward shift of these peoples.
Heather's main interest, though, is in reconciling what he calls the old "grand" narrative (based on ancient Roman and Greek authors) of massive barbarian migrations with the more recent archaeological version which severely limits or even completely denies the very existence of these movements. Here is where the analogy with the Boers comes in: Heather suggests that the invasions were not massive, but consisted, rather, of small groups of families and friends whose males were armed warriors ready and able to use force to enable their passage and settlement. A further comparison with American wagon trains also comes to my mind. I find Heather's arguments quite persuasive.
Several caveats, however. The book is quite long, and the paperback edition is clunky, and its binding tends to break with use. The print is also small and hard on the eyes. Finally, while Heather's style is engaging, his argument is very closely reasoned and based on a lot of details. In order to keep track of it all, I was obliged to keep notes on the dates of various late 4th and early 5th century events. It's not an easy or fast read. For those willing to stick with it though, "Empires and Barbarians" is vastly rewarding.
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