[Cronos]

The upshot is that the “Fall of Rome”, in the west anyway, was a human catastrophe unprecedented in historical times.

well, I would dispute that - in 476 AD, the transition from "we got a Caesar in Rome" to "we owe our allegiance to the Augustus in Constantinople but he don't interfere in our Kynings rule here" was seamless

The loss of Spain and Italy to the Goths was pretty much just the tax collectors giving the taxes to someone else. The culture and material life remained the same

in briton things changed, in Gaul not so much

There was no societal collapse until the gothic wars

Now if you mean the population of ROME the city itself, yes it collapsed, but that was because they basically stopped handing out free food and entertainment. So people went to the countryside. Then the gothic wars (NOBODY expects the Gothic wars!) came

And the fall in the standard of living likewise resulted in a material condition well beneath even the pre-Roman era. -- in which areas??

I've actually got the book, just pulled it off my shelf and here's a rought critique:

• page 1 - when he describes Romulus Augustulus being deposed, he leaves out the fact that the Gothic king sent the purple to Zeno explicitly saying that the Roman empire was now with just one ruler - the emperor in Constantinople --> yes, he got just lip service, but this is no different to the Zhou emperors in China or the Japanese emperors until the Meiji restoration
  
  
• page 2: "the disintegration fo Roman power in the west precipitated the end of a civilization. Ancient sophistication died" - ok, this is a lot of bull. That didn't happen and we have the historical evidence for it. The level of art, governance etc. in Italy and Spain were the same in 400 AD as in 476 AD and in 530 AD -->What HIT the society was the Gothic wars which devastated Italy, killing 1/3rd of the population - mostly due to the Justinian plague
  
  
• pages 3 to 10 -- I agree and the statements are historically and archaeologically verifiable
  
  

Ok, I've gone on my little hobby horse - sorry about that

[buwaya]

I am thinking of a very different book here.

The Fall of Rome, Ward-Perkins
A deep dive into the archeological record, potsherds and middens, postholes and roof slates, that sort of thing.

The collapse of material culture, and broadly speaking, its utter disappearance, point to a massive population collapse across Western Europe. Given what seems to have been a cataclysmic human disaster, its certainly wasnt just a matter of switching tax collectors.