Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.

"A vivid picture of the clash between ancient civilization and prehistoric cultures." - Kirkus Reviews From 27 B.C. to A.D. 117, the Roman dreams of boundless empire began to falter. The very size of their conquests made them hard to manage, and the caesars also had to accept the scale and intractability of the problems posed by the barbarians. The period covered by the book is one of great change and the opening of a new era. For the once mighty Romans this was a time when power was passing; for the barbarians it was the late Iron Age: a time of transition when internal stresses and fear of Roman aggression were creating dangerous shifts in the tribal equilibrium. Derek Williams's Romans and Barbarians sees the clash of cultures from the standpoint of four individuals whose curious fate it was to venture or be sent beyond the outer watchtowers of the Roman empire. They bore witness from the grassy steppe of Europe's southeastern corner from across the grump Carpathians, towering beyond the Danube; from the fearsome German forest; and from beyond the Firth of Forth in the wilderness of northernmost Britain. Each portrait reveals different aspects of the Sarmatian, German, and Celtic peoples facing the empire's European frontiers. Together these four viewpoints provide a rich portrait of the classical and Iron Age worlds, mutually uncomprehending yet strangely unable to do without each other. The outcome is a skein of violence, tragedy, misadventure, and courage, offering a preview of the cruel but creative forces from whose fusion modern Europe was eventually to emerge.

An exploration of ethnological thought in Greece, Rome, and China and its articulation during 'barbarian' invasion and conquest.

By the year 1000, Mediterranean domination of the European landscape had been destroyed. Europe - from the Atlantic almost to the Urals - was home to an interacting commonwealth of Christian states. This book tells the story of the transformations which changed western Eurasia forever: of the birth of Europe itself.

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.

Shows how Europe's barbarians, strengthened by centuries of contact with Rome on many levels, turned into an enemy capable of overturning and dismantling the mighty Empire.

This collection of twelve essays examines the fall of the Roman Empire in the West from the barbarian perspective and experience.