Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

The Fall of Roman Britain and Why We Speak English – John Lambshead Pen and Sword Books 2022 https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/foreword

I came across this as a daily deal on Kindle, was intrigues by the title and “about this book” and read it. The  link to the foreword summarizes the academic argument in the book and it is a convincing one. How did Britain alone among the European former provinces of the Roman Empire end up with a language which is not based on vulgar Latin and only imported a latin vocabulary through a late established Cbristian church and from Norman French. Instead we have a language, now a global lingua franca, which emerges with a Germanic vocabulary and what seems to be a celtic grammatical structure.

Why am I talking about this in a blog on complexity? Because his explanation for these developments is deployed in a clear and capable deployment of the complexity frame of reference. For him the emergence of English was a consequence of the interaction – multiple and contingent causation – of the weakness of Roman cultural and economic institutional structures in Britain, the way in which the “barbarian” invaders, unlike those in France, Spain and Italy, did not encounter and embrace Roman land tenure, Roman administrative forms and the Christian religion together, and the ways in which agricultural developments led to a melding of celtic and anglo-saxon experience.  He explicitly uses complexity theory – I as always prefer the complexity frame of reference – to construct and develop his convincing arguments. In the putting of complexity to use, this is a first rate and well done example.