The Big Farce || Avars, Arabs, And History by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman's Avars, Arabs, and History:

The historian David Potter had a great letter published in the Financial Times, correcting the really bad history of the Dutch president, who suggested that migrants brought about the fall of Rome. (Bad history is all the rage these days.) Potter:

The “barbarians” who were “responsible” for the “fall” of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD were not a wave of desperate migrants. They were a collection of disgruntled employees.

Yep — in fact, many of the groups who ended up invading the Roman Empire were originally clients, hired, subsidized, or bribed (hard to tell these apart) to serve the empire at a time when its own military capacity was waning. And this isn’t just a story about the western empire, or about Rome.

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