Randolph B. Ford, State University of New York, Albany

RANDOLPH B. FORD currently teaches Roman history at the State University of New York at Albany. He has previously taught courses on Roman history, Rome-China comparative history, and Latin language as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. He obtained his doctorate at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where his dissertation received the Dean's Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities Award. His research has concentrated on comparative study of the Greco-Roman world and ancient China.

https://www.cambridge.org/cn/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/rome-china-and-barbarians-ethnographic-traditions-and-transformation-empires?format=HB

This book addresses a largely untouched historical problem: the fourth to fifth centuries AD witnessed remarkably similar patterns of foreign invasion, conquest, and political fragmentation in Rome and China. Yet while the western Roman empire was never re-established, China was reunified at the end of the sixth century. Taking a comparative approach to the study of the broader historiographical and ethnographic traditions in the classical Greco-Roman and Chinese worlds, the book turns to the late antique/early medieval period, when the western Roman Empire 'fell' and China was re-constituted as a united empire after centuries of foreign conquest and political division. Analyzing the discourse of ethnic identity in the original texts, with translations by Dr Ford, it explores the extent to which notions of Self and Other, of 'barbarian' and 'civilized', help us understand both the transformation of the Roman world as well as the restoration of a unified imperial China.

Gives a comparative reassessment of ethnographic practices and world views in these ancient civilizations and their reception in late antiquity

Puts forward an original theory for the understanding of the critical, yet unexplored, divergence in ancient imperial trajectories

Makes use of primary texts in all of the original languages, with translations by the author