A contract with the Barbarians? Economics and the fall of Rome

Abstract

Gerald Gunderson has challenged a number of conventional interpretations of the dissolution of the Roman empire. He argues that historians untrained in economic theory have misinterpreted economic development in the Roman economy as decline. This revision is rejected here on the grounds that it lacks sound evidential foundations and it depends upon an ingenious but unproven propostion about productivity, a misleading view of the pattern of technological diffusion, and a contractual interpretation of conquest which ignores the realities of military power. © 1992.