Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part II/XII: Economic Background

“But,” argues he, “against our enemies anger is necessary.” In no case is it less necessary; since our attacks ought not to be disorderly, but regulated and under control. What, indeed, is it except anger, so ruinous to itself, that overthrows barbarians, who have so much more bodily strength than we, and are so much better able to endure fatigue? Gladiators, too, protect themselves by skill, but expose themselves to wounds when they are angry. Moreover, of what use is anger, when the same end can be arrived at by reason? Do you suppose that a hunter is angry with the beasts he kills? Yet he meets them when they attack him, and follows them when they flee from him, all of which is managed by reason without anger. When so many thousands of Cimbri and Teutones poured over the Alps, what was it that caused them to perish so completely, that no messenger, only common rumour, carried the news of that great defeat to their homes, except that with them anger stood in the place of courage? And anger, although sometimes it overthrows and breaks to pieces whatever it meets, yet is more often its own destruction. Who can be braver than the Germans? Who charge more boldly? Who have more love of arms, among which they are born and bred, for which alone they care, to the neglect of everything else? Who can be more hardened to undergo every hardship, since a large part of them have no store of clothing for the body, no shelter from the continual rigour of the climate: yet Spaniards and Gauls, and even the unwarlike races of Asia and Syria cut them down before the main legion comes within sight, nothing but their own irascibility exposing them to death. Give but intelligence to those minds, and discipline to those bodies of theirs, which now are ignorant of vicious refinements, luxury, and wealth, —to say nothing more, we should certainly be obliged to go back to the ancient Roman habits of life.

–Seneca, contra Yudkowsky

Table of Roman imperial crises and golden ages. One can quibble with the dates, but not the general pattern. The history of the Roman Empire can be divided into four distinct empires, each distinct empire lasting 350-390 years (mean of 375, if late republican and eleventh century crises are synced) -the Empire of Augustus (schematically 31 BC to 345 AD), the Empire of Constantine (schematically 345 to 720), the Empire of Leo the Isaurian (schematically 720 to 1095), and the Empire of Alexios I Komnenos (schematically 1095 to 1470). In the middle of these empires are always found five good emperors -Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius for the first, Anastasius, Justin I, Justinian, Tiberius II, and Maurice for the second, Theophilos, Basil I, Leo VI, Constantine VII, and Basil II for the third, the Emperors of Nikaia other than John IV Laskaris for the last.

Over the first two and a half centuries of the Roman Empire, the median population center shifted to the North and West, as improved agricultural techniques and increased internal security as a result of the complete absence of Roman civil wars and coups between the years 97 and 175 led to a population boom in Gaul. As Esmonde-Cleary writes in The Roman West (p. 463),

Indeed, in the later first century, the movement of production from the south Gaulish centres on the fringes of the Mediterranean world to the central Gaulish industries can be seen as this substitution process already under way. By the turn of the second and third centuries, the primacy was passing to the east Gaulish centres of the
Rhineland.

Gaul itself -and even Britain- could now produce goods that had previously been only able to have been produced in Italy. Indeed, the late second century, the Rhineland had become just as Roman in character as Italy itself. Much the same process was occurring in the Roman Balkans (Kulikowski, Imperial Triumph, p. 146). Roman theaters were being built along the Rhine, the Danube, in Morocco, and Britain. The Germans, barbaric, divided, and few and facing a united and undamaged Roman army apparatus, required very little commitment to successfully pacify outside the Marcomannic wars -but a great deal of commitment was provided regardless; the Roman army’s reach into West Germany and Great Britain reached its full extent during the reign of Antoninus Pius, the fourth of the Five Good Emperors , who never left Italy throughout his reign, a decision that would have utterly astonished the Romans of the fourth and even third centuries, when the armies had become far too politically unreliable for an actually powerful emperor to give them no personal attention. The Eastern provinces were also benefiting from imperial rule- due to increased settlement of Roman soldiers, theater construction was accelerating in Palestine and the Balkans during the late second and early third centuries. Due to the combined impact of Roman civil wars and the increasing power of the Empire’s enemies, this was no longer true by the mid-fourth century. Despite the decline since the High Empire, the Rhineland of the fourth century, as Peter Heather states, continued to be much more Romanized than in the days of that native of the city of Rome Octavius.

The Gate of Mars, Reims, northern Gaul, early third century

In those days, civilization, including the existence of great cities, a high degree of economic complexity, and great scholarship did not depend on the quality of the people, but on the quality of the land sustaining them. Adam Smith, when he thought of the “wealth of nations” was not thinking of “per capita wealth” but “per acre wealth” (thus low-wage China, due to having a high population density, was considered by him rich, but stagnant, while high-wage America, due to having a low population density, was considered by him poor, but rapidly increasing in wealth). The most civilized areas were still those that, like Egypt, southern Iraq, or the well-watered parts of Central Asia, could provide a combination of extreme, constant energy for plants by the scorching, unclouded light of the sun and, due either to rivers or aquifers, consistent access to water. Even in regards to dry farming, the hot-summer Mediterranean climate best fit the wheat strains of the day, while the hot-summer humid continental climate was then still then a preserve of barbarians, especially as one moved further North, toward the lands of the Picts, Scots, and Finns. The African continent’s low share of the Empire’s population masks its substantially higher share of the Empire’s food production and, consequently, tax revenue, especially outside the less populous provinces. Tunisia, Sicily, and Sardinia were the most important extrapeninsular sources of wheat for urban Italy. This is all the more impressive given these lands’ paucity of navigable rivers. The rich soils of the lowlands of Jutland and the pasturelands of Scythia were just beginning to be exploited with the heavy plow, and it was not Romans who were farming these soils. Probably over a fifth of central Italy’s food came from Tunisia; at least a third of Greece’s came from Egypt. Little wonder, then, that Tunisia was such a major center of monumental erection in Late Antiquity (map from The statues of Late Antiquity). Outside the Nile valley, the entirety of the agricultural core of the Roman Empire was Olive Country inhabited by Olive People. Sicily, Tunisia, and Sardinia exported urbanization to peninsular Italy, just as Egypt exported urbanization to peninsular Greece and much like England would export urbanization to the Continent between the late seventeenth century and c. 1760. Gaul and Britain were entirely self-sufficient in food at the time, but were certainly not major exporters. The Germans had barely lower per capita food production than the Romans (thus their famously greater stature than the Romans of the Empire’s Northeast and Near West), but also had far lower population density, and, due to this, much lower per capita production of luxuries, much lower consumption inequality, and much less developed institutions -extremely limited literacy (runes were invented at some point during the Early Empire; they first appear in Denmark during the High Empire), no coin-minting. Engel’s law was one of the most important laws of the premodern economy; the lower the share of output devoted to food, the more developed the economy was. The most barbarous peoples within the Empire lived off mountainous areas in Basque Country, Armorica, Highland Britain, inland Sardinia, the highlands of Isauria, parts of the West Balkans, the highlands of the Moors, etc., where land productivity is famously low, but not so low as to be unable to sustain a non-negligible human population. Food security as a key military consideration in Europe and Latin America would only cease to be of importance c. 1960 and in Asia c. 1990. The fact that it was Britain in the seventeenth century that would first reduce the agricultural share of employment to below 50% and increase the share of the top four largest cities to above a tenth of the population would have astounded the observers of antiquity. In the Roman Empire, only Italy met even so much as the second criterion, but unlike the Britain of 1700, it was a major net importer of foodstuffs from Tunisia and Egypt.

Prior to the invention of the printed book, due to fairly stagnant technology and human capital, the economic complexity of any long-settled society depended solely on the quality of its institutions. Roman institutions between the third century BC and seventh century AD were, outside the Empire’s political crises, highly conducive to large-scale industry. The first century AD Roman pottery industry in Southern Gaul was more developed than that of England in the eighteenth. As evidenced by the remarkable extent of Medieval Arab civilization at Cordoba and Grenada, there is strong evidence the institutions of the Caliphate, which borrowed substantially from Roman institutions after the Arab conquest of the Levant and Egypt, were not substantially inferior to those of the Empire. Unfortunately for the Arabs and Romans, their societies had no means whatsoever of progressively improving technology on a scale seen in Europe in Middle and Late Modern times. Agricultural technology, which, though it did not completely stagnate, increased land yields over the course of centuries (if at all), and increased per capita yields by only a very moderate amount (again, if at all; as a rule, lower population given the same technology, institutions, and land meant higher per capita output, but this rule did not always hold -e.g., in plague era Egypt). Neither the Middle Modern Ottoman urbanization rate nor population was higher than that under the emperor Justin over a thousand years before Turkish domination of the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was unlikely to have been too different from that under the Severan emperors more than thirteen hundred years before them. Very far away was the tendency that when northwestern European land yields could compare to Egyptian, northwestern Europeans would be on top in both the arts of war and peace.

Of the seven great problems any society had to overcome to originate modern economic growth -

1. innate human capital conducive to large-scale private enterprise and innovation,

2. institutions conducive to large-scale dynamic enterprise and education,

3. sufficient human fertility and population density,

4. a means for massive information transfer,

5. sufficient per capita food production for farmers to be a minority of the population,

6. a large quantity of usable energy,

7. and speedy transportation

   – the Romans and their great Empire’s successors, the Arabs, only undeniably succeeded in the second and third. They succeeded in first, fourth, and seventh only very incompletely, the fifth only to the extent they had notable important breadbaskets, the sixth not at all. Britain, on the other hand, had solved all seven problems by 1820 (though it had to rely on imports to meet the fifth criterion by that point); the Netherlands had by this point solved all but the last two. After this point, there were certainly more innovations in regards to communications, agriculture, energy, and transporation technology, making it substantially easier for modern economic growth to spread to more regions. Today, all societies face only the first, second, and third constraints to modern economic growth; all others have been solved for them by Euro-American innovation. The East Asians had made inroads into resolving the second, fourth, and even sixth problems prior to the Western Europeans, but they did so rather fleetingly and incompletely, though there is no doubt they would have eventually resolved the fourth, then the sixth, then slowly the fifth and seventh problems all on their own over the pace of several centuries, though it is certain imperial interventions could have delayed this process. As for when the Roman Empire would have started on this process had it continued in its Antonine or Severine form without political interruption, I don’t know. It would definitely have required higher land yields in Britain, Gaul, and, yes, Western Greater Germany, as happened in real life over the course of the Middle Ages. Perhaps this process of rising land yields would have happened faster under the Romans had they not succumbed to their own political troubles; it was already happening at an astonishing speed under the High Empire. The glaring gap between the lands ruled by the Romans and those still ruled by the barbarians in present-day Germany during the later High Empire testifies to the marvellous ability of Roman institutions to boost agricultural production.

The history of civilization may be divided into six periods: an astonishing urban efflorescence between Egypt and India in the third millennium BC, a period of stagnation (with the exception of the invention of the alphabet in Egypt and Lebanon and the invention of writing in China) until the beginning of the first millennium BC as Indo-Europeans established control over South Asia and Iran, astonishing expansion during the first millennium BC, a peak under the Romans and Han Dynasty and a collapse during Late Antiquity, a Southern European/Song Chinese revival to new heights during the Middle Ages, then Southern Europe and China thrusting back into Malthusianism over the next five hundred years as Japan and the European North continued their ascent (the so-called “little divergence” between c. 1300 and 1820 and so-called “great divergence” between 1820 and 1951), then a sudden reversal of the divergence starting in Italy in 1951 when the effects of improving transportation technology at last began to kick in (in the most developed countries this naturally began slightly earlier; around 1932-4 in America and around 1935 in Britain, but the global application of the phenomenon was naturally delayed by the war). Vast positive changes occured in the Mediterranean, both West and East, over the course of the first millennium BC; no doubt this was due to the voyages of the Lebanese, the revival of the Anatolian trade with Assyria, and the Aryans’ invention of horseback riding. The second half of the first millennium BC naturally raised world civilization to new heights with the spread of Hellenism and the rise of Rome and Chang’an. In the first millennium AD, on the other hand, while everyone in the Roman Empire region suffered, other than perhaps the Egyptians, the pace of recovery from the Late Antique crisis (certainly much more severe than the Late Bronze collapse in purely economic terms, except in Syria and Egypt) was, very much unlike in the first millennium BC, when every region benefited, extremely uneven across the Mediterranean; in the lands near the shores of that lake, only Morocco, Italy (especially the Italian North) and to some extent Hispania and southern France saw any obvious improvement in urbanization and population between the years 400 and 1700. The two-millennia (at least, in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece)-long stagnation in urbanization and population from the days of the Ptolemies to the days of the Sultans was very unlikely to have been compensated by lower famine risk, suggesting extremely stagnant agricultural technology, or that any increase in agricultural technology was compensated for by a reduction in soil fertility. Long-civilized regions such as Egypt, parts of Central Asia, and Iraq could still produce interesting intellectual innovations in the first and even much of the second millenniums AD, and were without doubt the leading economies of the time until about the thirteenth century, when Paris, Milan, and Florence could at last seriously compare in accomplishment to Cairo, Baghdad, and Alexandria. But until these long stagnant regions had learned enough to get out of their <15 million population/under 35% urbanization trap (which may have taken thousands of years, given that Iraq, due to suboptimal institutions, was no more populous or urbanized in 1800 than in 3000 BC, and Egypt, as mentioned above, stagnated for two millennia), they could create nothing like the Anglo-American industrial revolution, which would, even given equivalent levels of urbanization, have been a lot more difficult for the long-civilized peoples than it was for the English and Americans due to the Egyptians’ and Iraqis’ lower natural human capital. Indeed, the Iraqis, Central Asians, and Egyptians greatly struggled to adapt to new circumstances created by the rapid rise of English and French civilizational complexity during the Middle and Late Modern eras until the television age.

The population of the whole Roman Empire c. 100 and c. 350 (it is widely accepted to have peaked just before the Antonine plague, as that is when famine complaints reach their peak and is just before one hears of land abandonment) was about the same as that of Italy today. That on the African continent was around twelve million, that on the Asian continent around fifteen million, and that on the European continent just over thirty million. Some four fifths of the Empire’s population worked in agriculture; about a sixth of the Empire’s population lived in cities. These ratios are not substantially different from those in eighteenth century Japan, most of eighteenth century Europe, or the Empire’s most direct successor, both geographically and politically (though not culturally)- the Ottoman Sultanate. The share of tax revenue from agriculture was even larger (~90%?), as a smaller portion of non-agricultural activity was taxed than agricultural. What little evidence we have suggests about a quarter of the Empire’s agricultural product went to taxes in the more strategic areas (Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 64) and there isn’t any strong evidence this changed much outside the third (due to currency devaluation) and (in the West only) fifth centuries throughout the six and a half centuries of the Empire’s history as the sole great power in the Eastern Mediterranean. About a quarter of the cost of taxation was spent just on tax collection; a great deal was wasted on corruption. Unlike for the Ottomans, at no point is there any evidence (other than perhaps in Western Europe after the loss of Tunisia and, more plausibly, in Italy and Tunisia after the sixth century Roman reconquest) to suggest the Roman rate of taxation was on the bad side of the Laffer Curve, though it probably was not too far from its peak.

The world of the High and Late Empires and was, especially in the West, primarily one of tenant farmers: most agricultural workers rented their land and paid a part of their output (generally between one and two fifths) to their landlord, in addition to that part paid in taxes. This is in sharp contrast to the world of today, in which farm workers do not pay rent, but are paid wages. Yeoman cultivation and wage labor was substantially more prevalent in the East than in the West. Greece was the most Westernized part of the East; Apulia was the most Easternized part of the West. Slaves (servi) continued to constitute about a tenth of the population of the Empire, higher in the West than in the East. Harper (Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 p. 59) estimates “the wealthiest 1.365% of Roman society owned 49% of slaves”. They continued to work the fields, generally along the tenant farmer model. Slavery as a social institution would only experience a major crisis during the beginning of the Dark Ages, which, despite every Roman effort, resulted in a much greater degree of economic equality than before.

The Empire’s four largest cities were, in order, Rome (population some half a million), Alexandria (population some 300 thousand), Carthage (population some 100 thousand), and Antioch (population some 90 thousand), these four cities combined containing about a sixtieth of the Empire’s population (the equivalent statistic for the USA, counting MSA’s instead of cities, is one seventh; the number for the less suburbanized Russia is also one seventh).