Demystifying Collapse: Climate, environment, and social agency in pre-modern societies

John Haldon et al.  Millennium 17, 1 (2020): 1-33.

Haldon focuses on the term collapse and the ways its narratives can take away human agency and can simplify or ‘mystify’ our understanding of past environmental events and their historical complexities. The article first focuses on perceptions of time in the past and in present studies and looks to the collapse of the Roman empire as an example: the popular narrative of collapse conflates, compresses, and obscures the historical complexities and incremental, regional character of the Roman collapse. Haldon next focuses on human agency and the ways in which human response, resilience, and vulnerability is linked to societal perception. Narratives of ‘collapse’ can speak more to our own judgements and considerations than those of society at the time. Haldon thus advocates ‘rethinking’ collapse as a term and focusing instead on what makes some societies more resilient than others. Haldon takes a systematic approach which acknowledges the multiple aspects and levels of collapse and seeks to explore the interrelations between social, economic, political, and environmental changes. This complex and systematic approach to collapse is then applied to two case studies: Byzantium and Maya. Where Byzantium illustrates its multi-facticity: the potential for a system to collapse spatially but to persist socially, politically, and culturally, the prior resilience of Maya to environmental changes but its disappearance in the 9^th and 10^th century because of averse climate reveals the causal interrelation of climate with other systematic factors. For Haldon this kind of focus on the historical complexities and causal relationships lurking behind simplified collapse narratives in pre-modern societies can contribute to discussions of sustainable responses today.