The Fall of the West

This nonfiction account examines how the western half of the Roman Empire lost the ability to maintain central authority, taxation and effective military control. It follows the pressures of civil war, frontier crisis, usurpation and reliance on powerful military leaders.

The book rejects a simple single-cause explanation for Rome’s collapse. Instead, it shows how repeated internal conflict weakened the state’s capacity to respond to external threats, culminating in the fifth-century loss of western imperial rule.