9 See Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), preface. For the deceptive-
ness of a concentration on cities, especially evident in the bibliography on medieval Europe,
but as we have seen also a central theme for the late antique east, see Horden and Purcell,
The Corrupting Sea, chap. 4, with 533–54.
10 See Cullen Murphy, Are we Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston:
Houghton Miffl in Co., 2007) (= The New Rome. The End of an Empire and the Fate of America
(Thriplow: Icon, 2008)); cf. e.g. Niall Ferguson, Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American
Empire (London: Allen Lane 2004).
11 See Morris and Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires; Scheidel, Rome and China. The
comparison itself is not new: it was pursued in the 1970s for the high Roman empire by
Keith Hopkins, and is a feature of an infl uential work of the 1980s, Michael Mann’s Sources
of Social Power 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), where, however, China is compared unfavourably with Rome (for
Mann’s Eurocentric approach see Chris Wickham, ‘Historical materialism, historical soci-
ology’, New Left Review 171 (1988), 63–78.
12 See Averil Cameron, ‘The Absence of Byzantium’, Nea Hestia, Jan., 2008, 4–59 (English
and Greek).
13 James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (London: Profi le, 2009).
14 See e.g. Glen Bowersock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to the
Post-Classical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), and cf. the series
Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, published by the Darwin Press, Princeton since
- See also Aziz al-Azmeh, The History of Allah: Islam in Late Antiquity (forthcoming),
with id., Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London
1997); Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity. Militant Devotion in Christianity
and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
15 For further discussion of the range of views and the various answers given by scholars of
the period, see Averil Cameron, ‘A.H.M. Jones and the end of the ancient world’, in D.H.
Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle
Ages 15 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 231–49; ead., ‘Thoughts on the Introduction
to The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, in Peter Brown, Rita
Lizzi Testa, eds., Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. The Breaking of a Dialogue
(IVth–VIth century A.D.), Proceedings of the International Conference at the Monastery of
Bose (October 2008) (LIT Verlag: Münster, 2011), 39–54.
16 Despite G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duck-
worth, 1981).
17 Jones, Later Roman Empire, I, 304–7.
18 See Theophylact, Hist.,VII.7.6.ff., with Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Histo-
rian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 315–17; F. Curta, with the assistance of R.
Kavalev, ed., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazaras and Cumans (Leiden:
Brill, 2007).
19 To quote one recent scholar: ‘one must accept that the term “decline” should be abandoned,
along with its correlate, “prosperity”, and other emotionally laden terms such as “con-
quest”, “desolation”, “nomad invasion”, or even the more benign “squatters”’ (Donald
Whitcomb, Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009), 827–31, at 831).
20 Cf. Greg Woolf, ‘World-systems analysis and the Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Archaeol-
ogy 3 (1990), 44–58; cf. the related idea of ‘overstretch’ (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Confl ict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random
House, 1987).
21 For the latter, see e.g. R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Black-
well, 2000).
22 Though contemporaries who experienced the strains in the seventh-century east also
searched for causes, as is emphasized by Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in
the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850. A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
18–22.
NOTES TO CONCLUSION