"In it, Ferguson presents an apocalyptic prophesy where Europe stands as a new Roman Empire in decay. Europe, as Rome before it, “has allowed its defenses to crumble,” has “grown decadent,” and “has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.” He is abundantly clear who those “outsiders” are: “they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from South Asia … in their millions.”
Looking at the Paris attacks, he intones: “this is exactly how civilizations fall.”
Classical historians are livid. Professor Mark Humphries asserts that Ferguson’s constitutes an “eye-wateringly simplistic distortion” of Roman history. All Ferguson’s arguments spring from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a text which is 200 years out of date and stuffed with British colonial thinking.
No reputable historian today believes the Roman Empire crumbled due to becoming “decadent” (a rotten chestnut invented by Gibbon). Ferguson’s view that Rome’s fall was precipitated by greedy outsiders is a willful misreading of the past."
