A Real Economic Meltdown: The End of Roman Britain

Could there be a collapse of a civilization?

It sounds slightly ridiculous to even type the words. Everyone knows how pointless it is to sit around and wait for the collapse. Liberals also know that civilization only progresses and history goes straight forward.

Civilization has collapsed before though. In the span of a generation from 370 to 430 AD, we know from the archaeological record that civilization collapsed in Roman Britain. Cities and a monetary economy disappeared there in St. Augustine’s lifetime. The collapse was so severe that it set civilization back about 500 years. Technology became less sophisticated than it had been in pre-Roman Britain in both British and English areas. Roman Londinium had a population of about 60,000 people at its height and it took a millennium to reach that level again.

Note: I’m not advocating “waiting for the collapse” as a strategy. I am just currently studying Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxon England and Viking Era England.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

12 Comments

  1. I have also read that from 1200 B.C. to around 1000 B.C. is considered to be the Dark Ages of the Ancient World. At least in the Near East/Mediterranean part of the world anyway. More is known before that time as well as afterwards than is known during those years.

    So things have collapsed before and could do so in the near future.

    According to Wikipedia article The Late Bronze Age Collapse–the Historian Robert Drews says—–

    ” Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.[5]

    Only a few powerful states, particularly Assyria, Egypt (albeit badly weakened), and Elam, survived the Bronze Age collapse – but by the end of the 12th century BC, Elam waned ”

    The reason for the Ancient World collapes—-Invasions, destruction and possible population movements during the collapse of the Bronze Age, c.? 1200 BC.

    • It is widely believed that an asteroid passed very close to Earth around 1200 BC, something which caused devastating fires, earthquakes, etc to destroy ancient civilizations throughout the Levant / Near East, miss. Civilization then resumed around 500 years later with the appearance of Homer and Norman Lear.

      • Spahnranch1969,

        An asteroid would explain a lot.

        I did not know who Norman Lear was so I looked him up since his name sounded strange for an ancient man. So——–you got me! He was a producer for television. He is 97 years old. That is pretty ancient.

        • The West has been shackled to two jews. Jesus and Karl Marx. Isn’t it about time for us to revere one of our own. Or more than one. We have many to pick from, but Western civilization dies always boil down to Greek philosophy, Roman statesmanship, and German engineering.

          • November,

            The Romans did get a lot of their beliefs from the Greeks but in some important matters like in Law they were superior to the Greeks. The Romans believed you were innocent until proven guilty. I believe the Greeks believed the opposite once arrested and charged.

            I also like the idea of the People’s Tribune being able to veto what the Senate decided on. I do not like Republics in general but if you are going to have one then modeling part of it after Rome’s seems reasonable.

            My knowledge of these issues is incomplete. I just wrote what I remembered from a course in Ancient History and reading such information in our Family library.

          • Christina,

            I meant as the cornerstone of Western civilization. Of course, all European ethnicities and nations have contributed to the overall mosaic. That what I call multiculturalism.

      • I’m still scanning the skies for the overdue “Nemesis” comet. Together with another Yucatan Mexico type impact along our current human driven Sixth Extinction Event; all that would be left was for Porky Pig to say, “That’s all folks.”

        • November,

          I do not know if comets are coming but it seems there are more earthquakes now than there were a few years ago.

          My family rented an old American movie called Krakatoa East of Java. The special effects were amazing for the 1960’s. Brian Keith, Maximillian Schell were in it. The earthquake/volcano was in the 1880’s I think.

          Have you seen/heard of the movie?

          • Christina,

            If it wasn’t for Jupiter and Saturn’s gravitational pull, many more comets, meteors, and asteroids would make into the orbital trajectories of the four inner planets of the solar system,

            No. I have not heard of this movie, but I am familiar with the story of Krakatoa.

            Supposedly, (because recording devices and seismographs weren’t invented yet) it has been estimated that the immense volcanic eruption that destroyed the island was the loudest sound in human history.

            Mexico does get a lot of earthquakes, as do just about every nation on both sides of the Pacific Rim.

            With California being what it is, many of us can’t wait for the San Andreas Fault to finally make it an island.

  2. The Western world has been manipulated to be completely dependent on micro circuits and chipsets, and that dependency is deepening and widening its net to the whole planet. A series of big enough EMP’s would starve 3/4 or more of the worlds population and leave the other 1/4 stripped of 1000’s of years of accumulated knowledge, perhaps another civilizational collapse has been the plan all along.
    “…The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.

    If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”

  3. I own Ward Perkins book. It’s a good read, and his comments on how quickly civilization collapsed after 476 AD are interesting, and, documented by real archeological field work.

    The disappearance of roofing tiles and amorpha for carrying olive oil are things most historians would not think of in terms of a collapse of a civilization. But, these things happened. He also looks into coinage as mentioned in the video, and even the disappearance of farms in the countryside around cities including Rome.

    I would like to read his take on Roman Catholicism, and how a religious cult drove the West into a 1000 years of dark ages, ignorance, and crazy cult beliefs of which many persist to this day.

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