Problems of studying the economic collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the scientific heritage of V. G. Vasilevsky and I. M. Grevs

Abstract

The paper examines the process of formulation of the problem of economic collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the main reason for its fall by the Russian researchers V. G. Vasilevsky and his student I. M. Grevs. The aim is to determine which publications and context of their own development as scientists allowed these two historians to highlight such an important topic, which became central to many studies in the XX century. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that the paper considers a topic that, unfortunately, has not been widely touched upon by modern researchers before, despite the available materials: the paper has managed to bring together the ideas and concepts related to the development of the theory of economic causes behind the collapse of the Western Roman Empire scattered in scientific publications, lecture courses and the correspondence of I. M. Grevs and Vyacheslav Ivanov. The paper argues that despite the large number of works by foreign and Russian researchers of the XIX century, only V. G. Vasilevsky and I. M. Grevs managed to single out one topic as the most important one in a huge number of questions about the economic, political and social causes of the fall of the Roman Empire, which is the topic of the collapse of small landownership. As a result, it has been shown that in the XX century, many researchers developed this topic further (unfortunately, without references to these two historians), which indicates the scientific maturity of V. G. Vasilevsky and I. M. Grevs as specialists in the history of the Roman Empire.