The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather

Goths) in the 5 th century CE, migration patterns were changing.

(From a motley crew, the Boers united into highly organized military force and quickly beat the Zulus into submission.)Īt the fall of the western Roman empire to Germanic tribes (i.e. This paragraph cannot do justice to the subtlety and cogency of Heather's arguments, which are assessed against primary sources, archeological evidence, and socio-historic examples such as the experience of the Boers as they migrated North to avoid British colonial rule. Language and ethnicity were far more fluid than assumed, Heather argues, adopting those of the military/economic elite or later perhaps that of the occupied territory. Archaeological findings, however, belay this view, indicating instead that groups were far more amorphous, like coalitions with a charismatic leader at their center that grew like a snowball as it gained politico-military momentum. In the past, he argues, scholars (often backed by iffy primary sources) promoted a 'billiard ball approach', according to which migrating groups knocked others out of the way, perhaps eliminating them by ethnic cleansing or forced absorption as slaves or serfs. Heather begins with an extremely terse discussion of the sociology of migration. Why did one language take hold while another didn’t? What drove the groups to move? This book offers a largely sociological approach to these issues.

I have always been curious about the dynamics of this process. From the immediate aftermath of the fall of the western Roman Empire to about 1000 CE, movements of huge ethnic groups created the ethno-linguistic patchwork that evolved into the modern-day European languages.

The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather