infinite narrative

In the 2017 monograph, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of Civilization, Kyle Harper explains the intersections of the Roman timeline with disease and climate change to illustrate how Rome was brought down by a perfect storm of illness and climate fluctuation patterns.

In contrast, Edward Gibbon wrote one of the most recognizable text on Rome, in which he blamed the fall of the empire on religion and Christianity.

History is a product of the historian’s environment. Harper writes in 2017 when disease and climate change are frequently discussed publicly. Gibbon wrote in the 1770s during Enlightenment, when secularism was rampant, so blaming the fall on Christianity felt like the thing to do. That doesn’t mean that one author’s theory is better than the other, they uphold their claim with evidence, but each of the hundreds of theories about the collapse of the empire has some root in the author’s background, belief, or their environment.

French Salon de Madame Geoffrin

Each of these authors wrote about the past through the lens of their current world.

Back to Harper’s text, one of the climate elements he discusses is ENSO, or El Nino, and its impact on the manifestation of the Justinian Plague in the 6th Century.

Mike Davis, in his 2000 text, also looks to ENSO to help explain a phenomenon, the droughts in India that combined with British politics and economics to quite literally create the Third World. You can see a diagram I made for more about this here.

We have only been tracking ENSO data since about 1950, so we have had to go back to study a lot, such as looking at ice cores and tree rings to learn about climate in Rome.

https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php

But with science, we are now able to make meaningful connections to evidence that has been there for centuries. An example of this is the study of the specific scaring that Tuberculosis (TB) leaves behind on bones. Scientists can now say there was TB in the Roman Empire. New scientific discoveries such as the existence of ENSO and diseases such as TB, malaria, leprosy, and a host of others in Rome allows historians to expand on narratives and gain a more complete picture of the past. But ultimately, they are driven by the science and philosophy of their time.

Scientists can now measure femur lengths that have been dated to Romans to show their low quality of life. A similar thing happened as a result of the Industrial Revolution in the US, where health conditions and average height declined in what is known as the Antebellum Paradox. In the US it was the trains, in Rome it was partly the disease.

Harper p. 77 Kindle Edition

There has long been a divide between the social and hard sciences, but now we have the technology to blur the lines a bit.

Another text adjacent to the connection between social and hard sciences is The Landscape of History, which contains lectures by John Gaddis. Gaddis cites similarities such as having standards for the practice of history, peer-review processes and advancing methodologies and theories through time.