The Inheritance of Rome is one of those magisterial books that I almost regret reading. Wickham is a senior historian, and he covers 600 years across Europe and the Near East with deliberative detail. His goal is to cast aside the standard view of the period, that they were a Dark Ages where hairy barbarians destroyed the great culture of Rome, and a combination of brutish strongmen and close-minded priests ruled over impoverished dirt farmers for millenia. Contrary to all that, there was a lot going on in this period. The Eastern Roman Empire out of Constantinople survived for centuries. The Umayyad Caliphate maintained a military aristocracy on top of a complex multi-faith society across North Africa and the Near East. The Carolingians embarked on a massive moral-political reform that set the pattern for future developments in Europe.

Yet, there are the ugly facts of the period. The population of major cities declined drastically, especially Rome and Constantinople, which as ex-imperial capitals lost their public grain subsidies from agricultural provinces. Other cities suffered similar declines in population. And it's not like the countryside was doing better, as land fell out of cultivation. Material culture fell back almost everywhere to relatively crude local production, with the fine craft centuries of antiquity forgotten. 476 and the replacement of the last Western Roman Emperor with an Ostrogothic rex Odoacer is as a good as date as any for the end, but the classically educated civilian elite of the Roman Empire continued to write to each other in sophisticated Latin for decades. But by 600 or so, this was all gone in the West, as economies devolved into little regional self-sufficiencies.

Wickham's thesis about the inheritance of Rome is one of the public square, a line from the processions and games at Imperial height, the continuation of these traditions in the East, the Islamic public gathering of faith, and the Western idea of the juridical assembly, but it strikes me that these connections are somewhat ad hoc, aside from the idea that a public space exists. Rather, a better measure that Wickham uses is one of political protagonism. A few exceptional states and individuals had the ability to make sweeping conquests and reforms. But mostly, it seems like struggles became ever smaller, over specific locals, the loyalties of a few hundred warriors, wooden huts rather than marble cities.

So far, very good. I am currently obsessed with the Dark Ages and am curious if they were as bad as reported by 18th and 19th c historians who may have liked the idea of Western empires.
After reading:

It seems, no. And that the rise of localized economies and living apart from the vestiges of Roman culture gave us new cultural strengths in many places and new artisans seems a good thing.
The fact that the eastern empires thrived is often underplayed in earlier histories is something that this author does his best to remind us.
The chapters are well laid out and moving from state histories to chapters like "Wealth, Exchange and Peasant Society" allows different facets of the same ideas to get the information in to your brain.
On top of that, the author's belief that the Vandals takeover of the Roman trade routes from Northern Africa as a possible reason for the great city's final fall seems logical to me.

I will remain grateful to have some perspective of global economies and their flaws.

In other words, let's learn from the past and worry less.
Update:

LOVE love this book. written for a layperson (which always irritates me as a descriptor, as if the others were annointed!) but still, if you want to revisit the Dark Ages (or let's call them the Early Middle Ages to follow the theory presented here) get this. It describes how more recent archaeological work has unveiled some discrepancies in those Reformation/ Early Industrial historians account of this time: that the time which is best understood as being between two Empires (Rome and Catholicism) was defined more by local artisanal trade and lack of military might than by any plague or lack of structure or huddling around small fires. This and Murray Bookchin's work on cities in the mIddle ages are necessary reads for anyone that is struggling with the lessons here at the end of our empire.

LOVE love this book. written for a layperson (which always irritates me as a descriptor, as if the others were annointed!) but still, if you want to revisit the Dark Ages (or let's call them the Early Middle Ages to follow the theory presented here) get this. It describes how more recent archaeological work has unveiled some discrepancies in those Reformation/ Early Industrial historians account of this time: that the time which is best understood as being between two Empires (Rome and Catholicism) was defined more by local artisanal trade and lack of military might than by any plague or lack of structure or huddling around small fires. This and Murray Bookchin's work on cities in the mIddle ages are necessary reads for anyone that is struggling with the lessons here at the end of our empire.