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Saw something in the further reading section of Michael Kulikowski’s Imperial Tragedy (Profile, 2019) today:

There are countless books on the fall of the western Roman empire, and more appear annually, with variable scholarly trappings but nearly all quite conventional. Still, ripping yarns and neo-Victorian analyses can be found in any bookshop. So, for those so inclined, can thinly disguised nativist tracts on how immigration (and ‘immigrant violence’) brought down the empire. To name names would be invidious.

I thought this was a dig at Peter Heather, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2005) and Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009), so I looked it up and discovered that not only was I right, but Kulikowski has serious beef with the guy:

Peter Heather has been fiercely criticized by members of the so-called Toronto School of History. Michael Kulikowski, who belongs to this group, has accused Heather of neo-romanticism and of wishing "to revive a biological approach to ethnicity". Kulikowski claims that Heather "manifests a clear methodological affinity" to the 19th-century writer of the Goths Henry Bradley.

But Kulikowki’s beef is nothing next to the righteous fury of Guy Halsall, Professor of History at the University of York:

Guy Halsall has identified Peter Heather as the leader of a "counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking" about the Migration Period. Halsall accuses this group, which is strongly associated with University of Oxford, of "bizarre reasoning" and of purveying a "deeply irresponsible history". Halsall writes that Heather and the Oxford historians have been responsible for "an academic counter-revolution" of wide importance, and accuses them of deliberately contributing to the rise of "far-right extremists".

Halsall got so mad at Heather, first at the 2011 Leeds International Medieval Conference and then online, at his blog, that he threatened to leave academia entirely:

Well, it's more or less a year since I started doing this blogging lark 'seriously' (the inverted commas are obviously necessary). And, as they say, what a roller-coaster of a year it's been. I've shut down the blog twice, brought it back twice, come to the verge of formal complaints being sent to my university twice (once justifiably, once most certainly not), lost at least one friend, lost 99% of the respect I had for someone I had hitherto held in high esteem, quite possibly lost the chance of a job I wanted because of this blog, taken some pretty visceral abuse, and so on. All good fun!

On the other hand I have learnt some lessons. One is that even bastards have feelings. Another is that if you have twenty-odd followers and maybe 100 hits a day, that (allowing for hits from people looking for something else, like Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian or ever-popular balding guitarist The Edge) does not mean that only twenty or thirty people in the whole wide world read your blog. Thus you need to be a bit more careful about what you say and how you say it. I've also learnt that eminent historians don't always read what you write very carefully, and just how deeply-ingrained the elitist culture of the British historical profession is, as well as just how few principles are actually held by the overwhelming majority of the practitioners of said profession. And this in response to something that I actually thought long and hard about how I wrote.

And as a result of all this I have realised that no good is going to come of me continuing to smack my head against the glass ceiling that those of us not from 'a particular socio-educational background' (you know the one) eventually run up against. I have instead come to the decision, essentially, to give up on it and 'seek my fortune' elsewhere than in the confines of the academic career-path, as it is now constructed in the UK at any rate.* I'm actually quite excited about this as I think it offers a lot of possibilities, creatively and ethically. It's been a liberating decision. Those of you who know that I set most store by the writings of those co-opted into the canon of the existentialists (almost none of whom ever called themselves by that name) will appreciate exactly why I am proud of this decision.

To some extent it makes up for the bad faith I showed in backing down and removing my post on why it matters to get angry about the lazy and irresponsible (indeed, yes, just downright knuckle-headed) way in which some historians in and/or produced by our most prestigious Thames Valley-based university write about politically and socially sensitive topics like migrations.

Halsall ultimately sanitized the 2011 IMC paper that started the war with Heather -- the neutered version is still up on his blog -- but the original was apparently quite something:

Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who’ve heard him speak or read him on the Internet, this was the one that really started the war. [Edit: and, indeed, some changes have been made to these paragraphs by request of one of those involved.] The consequences, if not of this actual speech, at least of its subsequent display on the Internet, have been various, unpleasant and generally regrettable, and I don’t want any of them myself.

Thankfully, the purged parts of the original were reproduced by some noble soul on the Civilization Fanatics forums before they were lost to the ages:

Thus we can have Ward-Perkins’ sneering parody of late antiquity studies and Peter Heather’s distortions of counter-arguments. In many people’s minds the choices before us are evidently, either, that nothing happened, or, that there was a huge catastrophe caused entirely by invading barbarians. Obviously this is not the case. Plenty of people other than me -- most famously, Walter Pohl -- have written about serious, dramatic change happening in the fifth century without blaming it on the barbarians and without denying that there were migrations in the fifth century. Yet this -- if I dare call it such -- third way seems nevertheless to be very much a minority position.

But I am not convinced that a simple lack of exposure to sensible alternatives really explains the continuing, fanatical devotion to the idea of the barbarian migrations, especially outside the academy.

I have recently said that:

“When a British historian places an argument that the Roman Empire fell because of the immigration of large numbers of barbarians next to arguments that the end of Rome was the end of civilisation and that we need to take care to preserve our own civilisation, when another British historian writes sentences saying “the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct” [a direct quote from Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009)], and especially when the arguments of both involve considerable distortions of the evidence to fit their theories, one cannot help but wonder whether these authors are wicked, irresponsible or merely stupid.”

Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.

Are these writers setting themselves up as ideologues of the xenophobic Right or have they simply not realised the uses to which such careless thinking and phrasing can be put? You can draw your own conclusions, although it is worth noting that Ward-Perkins has been happy enough to write on this subject for the neo-liberal magazine Standpoint, which regularly publishes pieces attacking multiculturalism. There comes a point when one has to admit that actually the most charitable explanation for all this really is that these writers are simply a bit dim.

Outside academic circles, it is certainly the case that the adhesion to the idea of barbarian invasion has a heavily right-wing political dimension. Apart from the barbarians’ role as metaphor, already discussed, it is worth, very briefly, thinking about the other reasons why people are so ready to pin the blame on the barbarians. Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of antisemitism provides some valuable ways forward. Essentially, the barbarian, like the figure of the Jew, acts as a screen between the subject and a confrontation with the Real, which Zizek sees, slightly differently from Lacan, as the pre-symbolised; things that haven’t been or can’t or won’t be encompassed in a world view. Zizek showed that arguments that “the Jews aren’t like that” are almost never effective against anti-Semites because what real Jews (or actual immigrants, one might say) are like is not the point. Similarly, arguments about the empirical reality of the fifth-century cut little weight with those wedded to the idea of Barbarian Invasion. Just as the anti-Semite takes factual evidence as more proof of the existence of the international Zionist conspiracy, the right-wing devotee of the Barbarian Invasions sees factual counter-arguments as manifestations of the liberal, left-wing academy peddling its dangerous multicultural political correctness. I have read a great deal of this on internet discussion lists -- including a review of my own book, and one of James O’Donnell’s! Michael Kulikowski received a similarly-phrased review from a right-wing academic ancient historian.

The barbarian is the classic “subject presumed to”. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. “He” is not like “us”, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians -- and you only need to read Peter Heather to see this -- are peoples with “coherent aims” (a quote), which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well -- none other than the barbarians anyway.

Halsall has never resiled from his belief that Heather was essentially a fascist, nor backed away from his commitment to resign from his post in righteous indignation -- maybe not in 2011, or 2019, but certainly by 2023 at the very latest:

My anger about all this is justly infamous but has been badly misrepresented. I do think that some things are worth getting angry about, and the misuse of the Barbarian Migrations and the End of the Roman Empire to fuel xenophobia and racism, and the way some modern authors pander to this, is one such. However, to look at the origins of this ire and animus, I invite you to compare my engagement with Peter Heather’s work in Barbarian Migrations, and its tone, with Heather’s engagement – if you can call it that – with my work, and its tone, in Empires and Barbarians. I never expect to be agreed with; I do expect basic academic courtesy to be reciprocated. If people see fit to treat me intellectually as a second-class citizen, the gloves will come off. That may stem from my own biography as (unlike so many) a first-generation academic not educated at the 'right' schools and universities, but there we are. I will be leaving the profession within the next four years (well done, guys) so I have nothing to lose by not apologising for that.

Kulikowski might have gotten in a good dig, but Halsall will always be a true master of the art of Being Mad Online.

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