CONCLUSIONtraditional since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne denied the idea that the
Roman empire ended with the barbarian invasions, and argued that the real
break in Mediterranean culture, or as we would now say, the end of antiquity,
came only with the Arab conquests in the seventh century; this, he argued,
brought an end to long-distance trade as previously known, and transformed
the Mediterranean into an ‘Arab lake’.^6 In the 1970s and even into the 1980s,
the ‘Pirenne thesis’ was still the basis of intense debate, and while the substance
of the argument was transformed by the turn of the century in the scholarship
towards the utilization of newly available ceramic and other archaeological
evidence and the progressive refinement of dating techniques, the underly-
ing agenda remained that of investigating the extent of cross-Mediterranean
exchange.
Against this preoccupation with rupture and concentration on what they
call ‘high commerce’ and its shipping lanes, Horden and Purcell introduced a
sceptical note, pointing out that the Arab conquests in fact opened new net-
works; the notion of rupture is too simplistic.^7 A division has also opened up
among historians of late antiquity between those who emphasize continuity
and others, such as Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, who vigorously
re-emphasize the traditional ‘fall’ of the western empire in the fifth century,
reintroduce the idea of barbarian invasion, and already think in term of a sepa-
rated western Europe, two groups labelled by Ward-Perkins as ‘continuists’
and ‘catastrophists’. The former look more to the east, and take a longer view
of late antiquity, seeing it as embracing the emergence of Islam. That has been
the thrust of the last two chapters. The emphasis on the continuity of late
antiquity into the early Islamic period also has implications for the application
of the Mediterranean model to the later Roman empire: after all, the Roman
empire in this period was not limited to those provinces that bordered the
Mediterranean, and the eastward emphasis adopted here and in much other
recent work changes the focus even more. That tendency is carried further by
historians who prefer to see the Roman empire in the context not of the Med-
iterranean alone, but of the whole of Eurasia.^8 In contrast, the ‘catastrophist’
view belongs within a scenario whose actual focus is on the origins of western
Europe rather than the Mediterranean world.^9
Meanwhile the end of empires has also re-emerged as a key topic for all
periods, with the Roman empire as the paradigm by which others are judged.
The comparator now is usually the ‘American empire’, as in Cullen Murphy’s
book, Are we Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America, published
in the United Kingdom with the uncompromising title, The New Rome.^10 A
further way of approaching the issue is through explicit attention to compara-
tive history, in particular through a comparison between Rome and China;^11
comparative history of this kind may be difficult, but it avoids the over-con-
centration on Europe (Euro-centrism) which has been criticized by many.
Nevertheless, the problem of the end of the ancient world raises issues about
east and west – where does the eastern empire fit, and does it belong with
Europe? The question is more acute for the later Byzantine period,^12 but as