History has lots of definitions, but if you ask your teacher what it means to study history, they’ll probably say something about continuity and change over time. Human societies change, but not everything changes all the time. Some things exhibit continuity, which means that they stay the same even when other things change. You can think about continuity and change in your own history, too. You’re not the exact same person you were five years ago, but you probably still have some of the same mannerisms or likes and dislikes. But as with your personal history, human history is usually more about the changes than the continuities.

Collapse and restructuring

When we look at the history of the world, one of the big changes has been in the scale of communities, networks, and systems of production and distribution. Everything just seems to get bigger as time moves forward. By the time we reach the period covered in this unit (200–1500 CE), for example, human societies have gone from small extended families to large states and vast empires. Where once trade between neighbors was a big deal, now networks of commerce might extend thousands of miles. Where once belief systems were tied to a local shrine or mountain, now people might share a religion across distances so big that they will never meet each other!

Yet, although change happens, it doesn’t always happen in one direction. This is true of changes of scale. Sometimes, networks and communities get smaller for a while, instead of getting bigger. In fact, during the period covered by this unit, there were several great examples of scales getting smaller. We call these periods collapse. But periods of collapse don’t last forever. They’re usually followed by another period of growth. We call those eras restructuring.

Systems collapse

The biggest collapse and restructuring we look at in this unit features Eurasia. In the year 200 CE, two very large states—the Roman Empire and China under the Han Dynasty—each anchored one end of a long-distance trade route reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Then, independently, those two states collapsed. As a result, the system that connected them broke down as well, at least for a while.

Collapse can describe a lot of different situations. It might mean the total destruction of a society and all of its institutions—the burning of cities, the decline of population, the loss of knowledge. It might, in some cases, be used to describe little more than a change of government or ruler. The collapse of the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China are not alone in this category, either! Even within Eurasia, several other states, including the Gupta Empire in South Asia, experienced collapse in this period. Indeed, it seems that the collapse of large empires often affected other states beyond their borders. So, for example, while overall human population grew during this period, in large areas of Eurasia, the population sharply declined between 300 and 600 CE.

A dark age?

Sounds pretty terrible, right? In fact, so terrible that we might call this era, at least for Eurasia, a “dark age.”

Or should we?

There’s plenty of evidence that, for some people, the collapse of the empire in which they lived was a terrible thing. Trade diminished, making it harder to get goods. Law and order broke down, making everything less safe. Wars increased while learning decreased. But the evidence for just how much the period covered in this unit was a “dark age” is mixed. English-speaking scholars have long written about just how terrible it was. In the territory that is now England, for example, people suffered from a long series of invasions and raids in the period after Roman rule collapsed. Yet, other parts of the world, even nearby Ireland, didn’t suffer as much. And recovery in Asia—even the Asian portions of the Roman Empire—was more rapid.

One important way to look at this question of a “dark age” is to look at the lives of women, which changed dramatically in both China and western Europe in this period. That’s one perspective we’ll investigate in this unit.

Systems restructure

Whether rapidly or slowly, Eurasia recovered in the centuries that followed the decline of the ancient world system. But this process happened with huge regional variation. China alternated between times of unity and division. Much of the eastern Roman Empire lived on as the Byzantine Empire. In southwestern Asia and North Africa, Roman rule was replaced by a political infrastructure built around an emerging and rapidly expanding religion known as Islam. In western Europe, societies restructured around the Catholic Church, but the Roman Empire’s infrastructure disappeared. Roads and city walls crumbled, its system of authority—including courts of law and soldiers—recovered unevenly, slowly in some places and more quickly in others.

The new system looked quite different from what had existed before the collapse of the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty. Instead of two great powers on either end of a long trade route, the reorganization featured a strong center. The religion of Islam emerged in the seventh century. It helped to provide trading links, a shared moral compass, and political stability. Islam also politically united several large empires that emerged in Southwest Asia, and assumed a key role in facilitating trade between east and west. The Indian Ocean also became, more than ever, an important trading circuit. Rising trade created new possibilities for taxation. Governments became stronger on the back of these commercial opportunities. Sometimes, as in the Crusades, political clashes were provoked and intensified by conflict between religious communities.

Other regions of the world experienced their own patterns of growth and decline in this period. In East Africa, the once-powerful state of Aksum declined rapidly, but Swahili-speaking city-states arose on the coast and came to play a big role in global production and distribution. For a time, they dominated trade between the Indian Ocean and the African interior. In West Africa, large states began to emerge for the first time as well. Mali, a unique kind of political community with a vast reach, was one of those new large states. In Mesoamerica as well, states and systems grew and collapsed. This included the network of small states that we know as the Maya. Many of these reached their heights, and then seemingly disintegrated in the ninth century.

Conclusion

If we were to look at the end of this unit, we would again see a major long-distance trade route across Eurasia—the Silk Road. By this point, it was even thicker than it had been before the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty, with more people and products moving east and west across this vast land mass. And it was wider as well, connected to trade routes reaching out from East and West Africa and into more regions of Asia. Other large, long-distance trade networks had also developed in the Americas.

Religion played an important role in the recovery and reorganization of the Afro-Eurasian system in the period of restructuring. For example, Europeans lacked a strong, central government, but Christianity provided a sense of unity. In Southeast Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism acted as networks to support traders. They also offered ideologies and organizing principles for states. But the relationship between the state and religion was not exact or perfect. In western Europe, the Christian (Catholic) Pope wielded great authority. But he did not generally rule over vast territory. Moreover, the Christian world was divided. The Orthodox Church based in Byzantium was at times friendly to and at other times enemies with Catholic powers. The Muslim world was also frequently divided among large and small states. Moreover, some stateless peoples could survive and thrive as part of a reorganized system. This was true in particular of the Jewish community.

All this evidence about recovery leads us to ask more questions about collapse—both the idea of collapse as well as specific historical events. What do historians mean when they say that some societies collapse or fall? What actually changed? Who was affected by those changes? How did things either change back, or start growing again, if differently? Finding some answers to these questions about the past might help us to look at our own society in the present, and maybe even to plan for the future.