Edward Gibbon and the Roman Empire

MARTIN GILBERT. Second World War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Pp. xix, 846.

BARRIE and FRANCIS PITT. The Chronological Atlas of World War II. London: Macmillan, 1989. Pp. xi, 178.

CORRELLI BARNETT, ed. Hitler's Generals. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Pp. xix, 497.

GEOFFREY ROBERTS. The Unholy Alliance: Stalin's Pact with Hitler. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Pp. xviii, 296.

VICTOR SUVOROV. Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, trans. Thomas B. Beattie. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990. Pp. xvii, 364.

ROY DOUGLAS. The World War 1939–1943: The Cartoonists' Vision. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Pp. xii, 300.

PAUL FUSSELL. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. x, 330.     

The Fall of the Empire State

Book reviewed in this article:
B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain's Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945     

The Decline of the Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘goldenage’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popularliving standards. Economic historians have understandably usedthis coincidence to suggest that by this period the BritishEmpire was no longer offering substantial economic benefitsto the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were linksbetween economic performance and the decline of the Empire.First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic‘declinist’ accounts of British society and theeconomy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impacton policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts wasthe ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked withthe loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become acommonplace of discussion of post-war Britain to assume thatreversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economyrequired a re-orientation of policy away from the Empire andCommonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not aconstant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a centralfeature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealthto achieve this objective.     

罗马帝国3世纪危机时期军队蛮族化问题

3世纪是罗马帝国历史上的特殊时期。这一时期,帝国发生了全面的奴隶制危机,其伴生性后果之一便是军队的蛮族化。罗马军队蛮族化由来已久,是一个渐进性、历时性的过程,3世纪罗马军队蛮族化步伐加快是其必然结果。蛮族化改变了军队的构成,军队性质也发生了变化,其消极影响大于积极因素、3世纪危机强化了军队的蛮族化,并加快了这一历史进程。     

“丝绸西销导致罗马帝国经济衰落说”源流辨析

中国丝绸西销导致罗马帝国经济衰落说是学界较为流行的一种观点。梳理这一观点的源流、脉络,分析这一观点所依赖的基础,是探究的重点。研究的最后结论是:进入罗马的中国丝绸不但数量少,而且对帝国经济的影响非常有限,根本无法撼动罗马帝国的根基。