Reconsidering the Roman Empire falling after talking to my neighbor at a garage sale

I've always held the line that the Roman Empire collapsing was net positive. Like, you get the dark ages, but you also get the renaissance later and nobody has to deal with lead pipes and emperor nonsense. But last Saturday I'm at this garage sale in Cleveland and my neighbor Dave, who's a retired history teacher, overhears me complaining about a busted toaster and we get to talking. He said something like 'Rome falling was like pulling the plug on the electric grid. Sure the lights went out, but the real loss was that nobody remembered how to build the grid for 800 years. All that concrete, aqueducts, even basic city planning just vanished.' He pointed out that Constantinople held on for another thousand years, so it wasn't like the knowledge survived everywhere either. That hit different because I never thought about the loss of practical skills. I always imagined people just carried on with farming and trade, but he explained how the whole supply chain for things like glass and iron just collapsed since Rome was the buyer for everything. It's like if Amazon disappeared tomorrow and nobody knew how to run a warehouse, but also nobody kept the manuals. Now I'm wondering, what if Rome fell but some random province kept the engineering textbooks going? Like a backwater Britain or Gaul that just kept making decent roads and concrete. Would the middle ages have been shorter or would it just be a weird isolated tech bubble? Has anyone else had a conversation that made you flip on a big historical what if?

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dakota4153d ago

Dig into that Britain idea cause its actually the wildest part. If some random province kept the aqueduct tech alive youd probably get a slower but steadier recovery, like the dark ages being more of a dim ages with fewer plagues and famines. But honestly the knowledge alone wouldnt matter cause Rome dying killed the trade networks that made that stuff worth building, so even a tech bubble province would eventually just start making basic crap like everyone else.