disanalogy
(ˌdɪsəˈnælədʒɪ)
NOUN
rare
a lack of analogy
The period from the late-4th century to the mid-6th is frequently even termed “the Migration Period” or, in the more thunderous German, the Völkerwanderung. That long century was shaped the new ethnic groups that moved into the Empire from central and eastern Europe, spurred on by an initial exodus of population from the Eurasian steppe. The exact causes of this exodus — climate change, overpopulation, the building of the Great Wall of China — are ceaselessly debated by historians. But by 500 AD, with Anglo-Saxons north of the Channel, and Vandals, Franks, Goths further south, the vast majority of the ex-imperial landmass was ruled by newly arrived dynasts and warrior groupings.
For some modern commentators, however — from Boris Johnson to Pat Buchanan — the history does not stop there, and there is an immediate modern parallel. If, they argue, the United States and its Western allies represent something like a new empire, it too is threatened with invasion by incoming migrant hordes. And they see these hordes most visibly in the vast migration of peoples currently taking place across America’s southern border with Mexico, and through the Mediterranean world from North Africa.
But, while the historical comparison between Rome and the West has an attractive simplicity, there are fundamental disanalogies. Rome’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, and steady-state. Its GDP could not increase in anything but the very long term, since the stock of good land was fixed and farming methods slow to improve. Therefore the establishment of the Western successor states necessitated the partial or sometimes total (as in southern Britain) confiscations of wealth-generating agricultural assets from their existing owners to support their new rulers. In other words, migrants did literally and materially displace the Romans.
| Peter Heather, The most important immigration story of all