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The last days of the Roman Empire have never been more popular. “Six Ways Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire.” “Was the Roman Empire a Victim of Climate Change?” “The Real Reason for the Fall of Rome: Climate Change.” “Climate and the Fall of Rome.” “How Climate Change and Plague Helped Bring Down the Roman Empire.” “Climate a Factor in Rome’s Rise and Fall.”1 What arguably makes these titles so astounding is the fact that each appears in a mainstream media outlet, from PBS and The Smithsonian Magazine to Reuters, Vox, and The Spectator. Broader public interest in our field’s history is certainly welcome, even if it is motivated by contemporary fears of climate change rather than a deep appreciation for the humanities. Yet, the fact that this particular story of the later Roman Empire—its supposed demise at the hands of environmental agents and forces—has reached the general public should prompt professional scholars to look closely at its claims and analytic framework.
Presented as a fresh approach to the old declensionist narrative, these new studies cast the physical environment and non-human agents as the stars in the story of Rome’s decline and fall. To be clear, the idea that environmental factors were the root causes of Rome’s imperial demise is itself not entirely novel. Ellsworth Huntington argued in 1917 that the Empire’s decline was due to climate change, specifically to drought, agricultural “exhaustion,” and to the subsequent demise of Roman racial purity (too much mixing with barbarians).2 But monumental advances in environmental science, genetics, and big data over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have provided historians with evidence and hypotheses that Huntington could only have dreamed of. Moreover, the burgeoning field of environmental studies has developed some of the critical tools needed to avoid Huntington’s most egregious sins, namely a race-based analysis of material decline and an explicit framework of environmental determinism.
Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of Empire is the most recent and complete study of environmental factors and the fall of Rome, and it is part of a larger body of scholarship produced over the last two decades which seeks to rewrite the history of the...