Long history of Roman economic prosperity short, the Roman economy was well-developed enough that it experienced growth unheard of before, and would remain unheard of until the 16th century AD. While the rich reaped most of these rewards, as per usual in world history, the structure of the economy meant that a significant amount of benefit still reached the exploited poor, peasants and urban laborers alike.
In the mid-late 3rd century AD, Roman Emperors ruled over an increasingly fragmented empire. Constant civil wars meant that every individual emperor was in a precarious position - and thus had to tread carefully when doing anything that might upset powerful men - such as the army or the aristocracy. The army and aristocracy, realizing their leverage, both used this to intensify their own benefits at the expense of everyone else.
The Emperors Diocletian and Constantine both embarked on massive reform programs over the course of some ~50 years to remove the power of the army, as constant civil wars were immensely costly and destabilizing. They did so by magnifying the power of their own family and clients, and that of… the aristocracy.
For example, one of the reforms of the late 3rd century AD was to bind ultra-poor rural peasants and all of their descendants to their land as coloni, a kind of proto-serfdom. Coloni were not nearly as productive as previous agricultural systems, for the obvious reason that they benefitted very little from their work. Citizenship had been reduced to mean nothing at this time, so the erosion of traditional legal protections did not raise an outcry. This was to make finding conscripts easier (as the army, with the decline of the Roman economy in the 3rd century AD, had become increasingly reliant on forced service instead of volunteers) and making taxation of the peasantry more reliable. Taxing the rich was a non-starter, as internal politics meant that Emperors, in a very unstable position, were very vulnerable to influential men deciding to coup the Emperor - they could not afford to upset men who could have their head put on a stake.
However, as the Empire traditionally did not have a massive bureaucracy, they could collect neither conscripts nor taxes on such a scale on their own - as such, the landowners, local wealthy magnates, were given ever-increasing power over these coloni. As they were given ever-more power over the coloni, they used that power to enhance their own wealth and resources, and cheated the central government - which was reliant on their cooperation - as much as they could. To the point where calls for conscripts often resulted in the landowners sending the least suitable and healthy men to the army, and simple, outright non-payment of taxes.
More beholden to the aristocracy than ever, increasing tax evasion and outright defrauding of the government became more and more difficult to punish. Rather than reverse this, it was decided to intensify it by creating a massive bureaucracy - a step late, one might think - to oversee the land magnates and make sure they did their duty. Of course, this created a massive amount of people who needed to be paid by the central government - and who did they staff the offices with, but scions of the aristocracy? Foxes guarding the henhouse. This also led local authorities to support members of the Imperial family in attempts to seize the position of Emperor or make demands of the central government - as they now had sufficient power to support such coup attempts; whereas previously the risk was from a much smaller pool of Senators and other such high-ranking officials.
Obviously, this solved very little, except creating a massive swathe of men who were beholden to the central government for their sinecures, which more cynical types might suspect was the real intention all along.
These dual burdens of increased taxation/conscription and decreasing rights led many peasants to abandon their loyalty to the Empire entirely - while the disinterest of the poorer classes in the central polity they live in is not abnormal in world history, the Roman Empire traditionally could rely on a great deal of civic loyalty even amongst the relatively poor to bolster its efforts in times of crisis. Instead, now, many peasants became runaways from their position as coloni, paying no taxes and offering no service to the Empire’s armies. Many even became bandits en masse - bagaudae. This turned a military manpower crisis into a military and economic manpower crisis.
But what could they do to stem this? Why, increase punishments for peasants fleeing their duties, of course! And who was to be entrusted with the power to punish these peasants? The men closest, the men who could keep an eye on them - the wealthy landowners they were bound to. Increasing both the dissatisfaction of the peasantry and the ability of the wealthy to resist contributing to the centralized state - as powerful classes act according to what they are capable of doing for their own benefit, not out of gratitude or loyalty or even long-term self-interest.
This ended up creating a massive economic crisis which almost totally demonetized the Roman economy. We take monetization for granted, but it’s really a massive and complex and helpful instrument for transferring resources. Dead. That doesn’t mean “The rich aren’t around anymore”, but rather “Land ownership and personal connections amongst the rich mean more than anything, and the poor find it very difficult to transfer any personal surplus into lasting material gain for themselves”. Price chaos led to similar problems amongst urban laborers, with urban workers scattering from the towns into the countryside to seek work or sustenance; artisans were then bound in a manner similar to coloni to their jobs, which… well, had the same effect as binding coloni to the land. Dissatisfaction, low efficiency, increased power of local authorities, and economic stagnation.
As all of this happened, the central government, unable to meet financial or security obligations, did the only thing it could - reduced spending.
No, wait, sorry, what I meant was “Increased spending on luxuries for the Imperial family and gave massive amounts of wealth and resources to the Christian Church”.
Which, in turn, again, increased the power of local authorities (religious ones, in this case) to resist the central government, and intensified the crisis as a whole. Now barbarians overwhelmed the borders of the weakened Empire, bandits looted the interior, and landlords created private pseudo-armies to protect themselves and loan out to the centralized government when it suited them. All of this made everyone less secure and less prosperous, and ultimately would lead to the total destruction of the Empire in the West.
In the end, many of the wealthy lost everything in the chaos of the Empire’s fall - including their lives. Those who survived did so as minor landowning nobility under barbarian kingdoms which did not have the centralization or experience to maintain the luxuries that the Roman nobility - or probably more accurately, the Roman nobility’s forefathers - had enjoyed. Trade routes dissolved across the Mediterranean, everyday architecture declined drastically, public goods and services once considered normal disappeared; even consumer goods like pottery had massive and centuries-long reversions to pre-Iron Age quality in places. The nobility of this post-Roman world lived like prosperous peasants did in the Empire, and prosperous peasants lived like slaves.
But hey, at least they could maintain private bodyguards to play coup politics in the new kingdoms they lived in, and bully the poors. That’s what matters the most, in the end. I guess.
the structure of the economy meant that a significant amount of benefit still reached the exploited poor, peasants and urban laborers alike.
Can you explain how exactly that worked? How would an average Roman peasant benefit from Roman conquests or trade?
Coloni were not nearly as productive as previous agricultural systems, for the obvious reason that they benefitted very little from their work.
If they were less productive, then why did the aristocracy accept this system? Or did the ability to exploit their coloni more make up the difference? Did this make them meaningfully richer?
More generally, from what I understood it seems the Western Empire went through a cycle of giving more power to the aristocracy and everything getting worse. Was this avoidable or would it be accurate to think of the late Western Empire as an anachronism giving more and more power over to the aristocracy in to temporarily sustain itself until it eventually collapsed? Why did this happen in the West while the East managed to survive?
Can you explain how exactly that worked? How would an average Roman peasant benefit from Roman conquests or trade?
From conquests not so much, except insofar as conquests, in the long-term, integrated new areas into the Roman market(s). Most Roman peasants who heard about the latest general killing a bunch of foreigners would have no other effect. If you were near the area, you might benefit from a sudden influx of land or goods, but that would be very temporary as the merchants who followed the Roman armies offloaded their goods and the central government redistributed the lands of the dead/enslaved/otherwise unlucky.
Trade, on the other hand, was highly refined and a massive contributor to the improvement of living standards of the Roman poor. And much of that trade relates to Roman systems of organization.
Before I get into this, I would like to emphasize that this is all relative - a poor Roman peasant was living materially better than a poor pre-or-post-Roman peasant, but the difference was not of “A decent life” vs. “A shit life” so much as “A shit life” vs. “A more shit life”. The core functions remained the same - working all day, accumulating very little capital, and not eating enough meat and dairy products to remain healthy by a modern standard. But man, European material goods utterly collapsed as the Empire declined and fell.
First and foremost, Roman roads. Perhaps surprisingly, the major contribution here isn’t of the distinctive and long-lasting highways (though those were doubtlessly useful), but from the fact that the Romans had an entire system of grading and assigning responsibility for road upkeep. Simply having roads of packed earth (as many poorer and less-travelled areas of the Empire had) where everyone knew who was supposed to keep it maintained, and how, was a contributor to reliable trade.
Not so much because of the locals, who generally knew the area well-enough to navigate it even without roads, so much as poorer itinerant merchants, who become much less reluctant to come to an area if there’s a clear road they can drag their (literal) ass down. It takes some of the uncertainty of both navigation and rough terrain away, both of which are more concerning to someone who only comes to the area once a year than someone who lives there year-round. Gravel roads are also underappreciated for this, and were widely used by the Romans in less-travelled areas.
Second, unity. In the pre-Roman world, cultural and political barriers were substantial. Rome, in its early days, was no different - a city-state in loose confederation with a surrounding area of rural farmland, surrounded by city-states of similar design. You might make two days travel and pass through three polities in that time - all of whom would likely have different standards for who is allowed to trade, when they are allowed to trade, where they are allowed to go, etc etc etc.
The Romans, eventually, did away with all of this. Other empires of the period often did not, not because they weren’t ‘forward-thinking’ or any such nonsense - the Romans themselves really only stumbled upon it by being arrogant and stubborn bastards. Generally, pre-modern states enforce a loose hegemony over their vassals: “Don’t cause trouble for us, and we’ll let you be.” Some are more meddlesome than others, but generally, ancient and (to a lesser degree) medieval polities tend towards the ‘hands-off’ approach. They let people continue in their own ways, no matter how strange or arbitrary, keep to their own norms, their own days of market, etc etc.
The Romans, likewise, followed this trend… except insofar as Roman law always applied to Roman citizens. This meant that there was a universal standard that could be applied - the Romans were very ‘touchy’ about “Civis Romanus Sum” - “I am a Roman citizen” - shielding a man against locals. While this was often abused, traveling merchants with Roman citizenship would find it not only life-saving (often literally), but also greatly simplifying their transactions. The mid-level itinerant merchant doesn’t have to worry about Chief Silius Italicus seizing his goods and ruining his business for the rest of his life because he ‘charged too much’ or ‘the village is starving’ - the merchant is a ROMAN CITIZEN! No one wants to bring THAT fucking wrath down on their heads.
Actually, I just realized I could talk about this hours, so I’ll cut this down a bit: Roman-era peasantry, in the core, Italy, in the inner provinces, like Gaul and Spain, and especially in the frontier, like Britain, lived better by acquisition of cheap goods acquired by comparative advantage and economies of scale allowing distant workshops to get consumer goods from one end of the empire to the next.
For example, unglazed African pottery was commonly found all the way up in Britain - unglazed pottery was unlikely to be used at the tables of the wealthy or even of the middle class, but it was a working class ‘luxury’, a sort of “Get the fine earthenware out, the in-laws are coming by”. For that kind of low-value low-profit margin good to be worth shipping - without any centralized authority directing it - necessarily implies that shipping it was inexpensive and viable enough to be profitable. The Empire falls, those trade routes fall. Those trade routes fall, suddenly not only is your next tableware purchase not the fancy African stuff that makes you feel like a shiny new denarius, but it’s also more expensive - as the local production is both smaller scale and no longer has to compete with distant manufacturers increasing the local supply.
This happens for both raw resources and consumer goods. Though the latter are much more important in this discussion, cheaper raw material, naturally, also affects living standards by making production of all sorts (slightly) cheaper.
I’m most familiar with the process in Italy and Britain, but effectively, what ends up happening is you have a working-class peasantry with access to mobile skilled labor and planning which allows them to create sturdier housing, have more furniture, and own more tools compared to later and previous peasants.
Of especial note in this are cooking tools - you see a collapse of metal cooking utensils in post-Roman (and very Late Roman) peasant households, for example, something to the tune of 1/10 of what they were at the height of the Empire. And while that might seem like a small thing to miss, the difference between having nothing but a cauldron; and having a cauldron, a grilling rack, a shallow pan, a frying pan, a strainer, a kettle, a washbasin, and a ladle, ain’t nothing. Between cleaning/sanitation, the increased variety of food preparation available, and labor-saving, that is a legitimate improvement in the quality of life. Repeat that for furniture, tooling, etc, and you do end up with something that is a substantial improvement in how one lives.
But also smaller luxuries, like spices and perfumes, were noted to trickle down into poorer rural areas - while the pre-modern cost of even common spices like pepper is legendary, the economy of scale meant that, despite the Roman Empire producing no more black pepper than late medieval Europe, the price (in silver) of black pepper was under half of what it would be ~1300 AD. And not for lack of love of black pepper - the Romans used and referenced it constantly!
As one more thing before moving on to your next question, because I’m sure I’ve overanswered this one already and overstayed my welcome… XD
The high level of integration of the market into rural areas also meant that the peasantry found it easier to convert surplus into capital. While the rate of conversion was low - and the surplus produced also low - it’s a recurring problem in pre-modern economies that peasantry struggles to benefit from any windfalls, because it can only be ‘stored’ in the form of grain or food, which has a definite storage life. Being able to convert a good harvest of grain into goods or silver is a substantial improvement to the relative wealth of the peasantry - even if they remain dirt-fucking poor to the actually wealthy.
Increased consumer base, increased purchasing power, increased demand leading to economies of scale, all of that jazz.
Okay, okay, that’s it, I promise, before I get on another 30 minute detail-examination. XD
If they were less productive, then why did the aristocracy accept this system? Or did the ability to exploit their coloni more make up the difference?
The latter. The aristocracy accepted this system because they captured more of the wealth produced from the coloni. Previously, the relationship between free Roman peasants and local magnates had an (asymmetrical) mutually beneficial relationship. Ultimately, free Roman tenant-farmers and smallholders controlled most of their produce or income, and only relied on wealthy patrons for business or legal connections and the like. As they were reduced to coloni, the landlords then got to claim more of the wealth these poorer farmers produced by being legally empowered to extract it. The long-term, the economy gets fucked, but the short-term, the aristocratic family’s balance books look fantastic.
Did this make them meaningfully richer?
Funny enough? Not really. While one can have arguments about the exact level of cause-and-effect going on here, it pretty indisputably was damaging to the Roman economy, and the rich ended up with a lower material standard of life by the mid-late 4th century AD. But hey, wealth inequality skyrocketed, even by the already-low standards of ancient polities! That’s…
… that’s something.
More dispassionately, while the reduction in material living standards was substantial, it was also over a prolonged period of time, so many of the aristocracy likely would not have much noticed it. It is occasionally commented on by Roman aristocratic writers, but with that grating, ever-present “Things were better in the past!” tone, only except instead of “WHEN MEN WERE POOR HONEST PEASANTS” that the tone took in the Empire, it was “WHEN THINGS WERE GREAT AND GLORIOUS AND WE SIPPED INDIAN-SPICED WINE FROM EAST AFRICAN TORTOISESHELLS.”
In addition, people often love power more than luxury, and a reduction in material luxury but increase in wealth inequality shakes out to an increase in one’s relative wealth. Disturbingly and disgustingly, in the Late Empire, there are accounts of ‘lesser’ members of the upper class owning vast amounts of land that would make even magnates of the Principate-era blush.
They may not have the same amount of fine silks or fancy fountains of their forefathers… but their clients beg and scrape more than ever, they can demand whatever they want from the locals, and no one (except their fellow, even wealthier peers) can make demands of them. One imagines that even if they were given the choice, a not-insubstantial number of aristocrats would prefer the power over others to material luxury. People are petty as fuck.
More generally, from what I understood it seems the Western Empire went through a cycle of giving more power to the aristocracy and everything getting worse. Was this avoidable or would it be accurate to think of the late Western Empire as an anachronism giving more and more power over to the aristocracy in to temporarily sustain itself until it eventually collapsed?
Counterfactuals are always hard, but collapse probably was unavoidable. The Empire accumulated unaddressed problems like they were going out of style. By the Crisis of the Third Century, the only ‘real’ solution would have been to reinvent the Empire itself from the ground up. Which, tbf, Diocletian and Constantine tried, but, uh, in the wrong direction.
Any REAL solution, I think, would have required a much greater understanding of political theory and society than the Romans had. We really stand on the shoulders of giants in our thinking in the modern day.
Why did this happen in the West while the East managed to survive?
Part of it is circumstance/geography, but honestly, part of it is that the West was so thoroughly Latinized - as the Late Empire begins to impose all these new rules and institutions, they ‘smoothly’ replace the institutions of the Latinized peoples of the Western Empire - their whole connection to the institutions that make up their ordinary lives is rooted in imperial authority. The Eastern half of the empire accepted the legal supremacy of Latins, but always maintained much more cultural independence - when the new, ultra-fucked institutions of the Late Empire were introduced in the East, they also had to compete with traditional power structures of localities. Which, generally speaking, outlasted the “imperial sinecure until the next Emperor gets a new, ‘brilliant’ organizational idea” type institutions of the Late Empire.
Related, Gaul became Gallo-Roman - Syria never really became Syrio-Roman. Roman Egypt never really adopted Roman norms wholesale the same way Western provinces did; it was a much lighter admixture with Roman culture. They accepted Roman rule and Roman laws, but largely continued in their own ways of thinking and operating, adopting Roman culture only when the practice benefitted them to an extraordinary degree.
Part of it is also that the East controlled the main income stream for the central government - foreign tariffs. The most valuable trade passed through Egypt and Arabia (and Persia, when they weren’t at war), and foreign tariffs from eastern trade made up an estimated majority of the government’s income. During the Principate, for example, revenues from Egypt brought more money to the treasury than every Western province combined. Much of the valuable imperial estates were also located in the East, which generally produced more valuable trade goods, like perfumes.
Since the Late Empire, East and West both, constantly struggled with money… well, one can see why having a less-fucked financial situation can be the difference between life and death.
The Byzantines, funny (or ‘funny’) enough, would struggle with the problem of local aristocratic magnates resisting and crippling the central authority for the next thousand years, so they never really solved the core issue. They just kind of limped along, too sturdy to die at one stroke, too diseased to revitalize itself.
This is a really wonderful write-up. Informative, but with a conversational tone that’s easy to follow and doesn’t become dry. If you wrote a book, I would read it.
![[sweating]](https://media.piefed.social/posts/dz/iA/dziA9Sq2Q1MQ8YU.webp){kind=link}
Long history of Roman economic prosperity short, the Roman economy was well-developed enough that it experienced growth unheard of before, and would remain unheard of until the 16th century AD. While the rich reaped most of these rewards, as per usual in world history, the structure of the economy meant that a significant amount of benefit still reached the exploited poor, peasants and urban laborers alike.
In the mid-late 3rd century AD, Roman Emperors ruled over an increasingly fragmented empire. Constant civil wars meant that every individual emperor was in a precarious position - and thus had to tread carefully when doing anything that might upset powerful men - such as the army or the aristocracy. The army and aristocracy, realizing their leverage, both used this to intensify their own benefits at the expense of everyone else.
The Emperors Diocletian and Constantine both embarked on massive reform programs over the course of some ~50 years to remove the power of the army, as constant civil wars were immensely costly and destabilizing. They did so by magnifying the power of their own family and clients, and that of… the aristocracy.
For example, one of the reforms of the late 3rd century AD was to bind ultra-poor rural peasants and all of their descendants to their land as coloni, a kind of proto-serfdom. Coloni were not nearly as productive as previous agricultural systems, for the obvious reason that they benefitted very little from their work. Citizenship had been reduced to mean nothing at this time, so the erosion of traditional legal protections did not raise an outcry. This was to make finding conscripts easier (as the army, with the decline of the Roman economy in the 3rd century AD, had become increasingly reliant on forced service instead of volunteers) and making taxation of the peasantry more reliable. Taxing the rich was a non-starter, as internal politics meant that Emperors, in a very unstable position, were very vulnerable to influential men deciding to coup the Emperor - they could not afford to upset men who could have their head put on a stake.
However, as the Empire traditionally did not have a massive bureaucracy, they could collect neither conscripts nor taxes on such a scale on their own - as such, the landowners, local wealthy magnates, were given ever-increasing power over these coloni. As they were given ever-more power over the coloni, they used that power to enhance their own wealth and resources, and cheated the central government - which was reliant on their cooperation - as much as they could. To the point where calls for conscripts often resulted in the landowners sending the least suitable and healthy men to the army, and simple, outright non-payment of taxes.
More beholden to the aristocracy than ever, increasing tax evasion and outright defrauding of the government became more and more difficult to punish. Rather than reverse this, it was decided to intensify it by creating a massive bureaucracy - a step late, one might think - to oversee the land magnates and make sure they did their duty. Of course, this created a massive amount of people who needed to be paid by the central government - and who did they staff the offices with, but scions of the aristocracy? Foxes guarding the henhouse. This also led local authorities to support members of the Imperial family in attempts to seize the position of Emperor or make demands of the central government - as they now had sufficient power to support such coup attempts; whereas previously the risk was from a much smaller pool of Senators and other such high-ranking officials.
Obviously, this solved very little, except creating a massive swathe of men who were beholden to the central government for their sinecures, which more cynical types might suspect was the real intention all along.
These dual burdens of increased taxation/conscription and decreasing rights led many peasants to abandon their loyalty to the Empire entirely - while the disinterest of the poorer classes in the central polity they live in is not abnormal in world history, the Roman Empire traditionally could rely on a great deal of civic loyalty even amongst the relatively poor to bolster its efforts in times of crisis. Instead, now, many peasants became runaways from their position as coloni, paying no taxes and offering no service to the Empire’s armies. Many even became bandits en masse - bagaudae. This turned a military manpower crisis into a military and economic manpower crisis.
But what could they do to stem this? Why, increase punishments for peasants fleeing their duties, of course! And who was to be entrusted with the power to punish these peasants? The men closest, the men who could keep an eye on them - the wealthy landowners they were bound to. Increasing both the dissatisfaction of the peasantry and the ability of the wealthy to resist contributing to the centralized state - as powerful classes act according to what they are capable of doing for their own benefit, not out of gratitude or loyalty or even long-term self-interest.
This ended up creating a massive economic crisis which almost totally demonetized the Roman economy. We take monetization for granted, but it’s really a massive and complex and helpful instrument for transferring resources. Dead. That doesn’t mean “The rich aren’t around anymore”, but rather “Land ownership and personal connections amongst the rich mean more than anything, and the poor find it very difficult to transfer any personal surplus into lasting material gain for themselves”. Price chaos led to similar problems amongst urban laborers, with urban workers scattering from the towns into the countryside to seek work or sustenance; artisans were then bound in a manner similar to coloni to their jobs, which… well, had the same effect as binding coloni to the land. Dissatisfaction, low efficiency, increased power of local authorities, and economic stagnation.
As all of this happened, the central government, unable to meet financial or security obligations, did the only thing it could - reduced spending.
No, wait, sorry, what I meant was “Increased spending on luxuries for the Imperial family and gave massive amounts of wealth and resources to the Christian Church”.
Which, in turn, again, increased the power of local authorities (religious ones, in this case) to resist the central government, and intensified the crisis as a whole. Now barbarians overwhelmed the borders of the weakened Empire, bandits looted the interior, and landlords created private pseudo-armies to protect themselves and loan out to the centralized government when it suited them. All of this made everyone less secure and less prosperous, and ultimately would lead to the total destruction of the Empire in the West.
In the end, many of the wealthy lost everything in the chaos of the Empire’s fall - including their lives. Those who survived did so as minor landowning nobility under barbarian kingdoms which did not have the centralization or experience to maintain the luxuries that the Roman nobility - or probably more accurately, the Roman nobility’s forefathers - had enjoyed. Trade routes dissolved across the Mediterranean, everyday architecture declined drastically, public goods and services once considered normal disappeared; even consumer goods like pottery had massive and centuries-long reversions to pre-Iron Age quality in places. The nobility of this post-Roman world lived like prosperous peasants did in the Empire, and prosperous peasants lived like slaves.
But hey, at least they could maintain private bodyguards to play coup politics in the new kingdoms they lived in, and bully the poors. That’s what matters the most, in the end. I guess.
I always look forward to your write ups, but you’ve outdone yourself here, thanks for the detail as well as the context.
So I’ve got a few questions if you don’t mind.
Can you explain how exactly that worked? How would an average Roman peasant benefit from Roman conquests or trade?
If they were less productive, then why did the aristocracy accept this system? Or did the ability to exploit their coloni more make up the difference? Did this make them meaningfully richer?
More generally, from what I understood it seems the Western Empire went through a cycle of giving more power to the aristocracy and everything getting worse. Was this avoidable or would it be accurate to think of the late Western Empire as an anachronism giving more and more power over to the aristocracy in to temporarily sustain itself until it eventually collapsed? Why did this happen in the West while the East managed to survive?
Of course! I love discussing the period!
From conquests not so much, except insofar as conquests, in the long-term, integrated new areas into the Roman market(s). Most Roman peasants who heard about the latest general killing a bunch of foreigners would have no other effect. If you were near the area, you might benefit from a sudden influx of land or goods, but that would be very temporary as the merchants who followed the Roman armies offloaded their goods and the central government redistributed the lands of the dead/enslaved/otherwise unlucky.
Trade, on the other hand, was highly refined and a massive contributor to the improvement of living standards of the Roman poor. And much of that trade relates to Roman systems of organization.
Before I get into this, I would like to emphasize that this is all relative - a poor Roman peasant was living materially better than a poor pre-or-post-Roman peasant, but the difference was not of “A decent life” vs. “A shit life” so much as “A shit life” vs. “A more shit life”. The core functions remained the same - working all day, accumulating very little capital, and not eating enough meat and dairy products to remain healthy by a modern standard. But man, European material goods utterly collapsed as the Empire declined and fell.
First and foremost, Roman roads. Perhaps surprisingly, the major contribution here isn’t of the distinctive and long-lasting highways (though those were doubtlessly useful), but from the fact that the Romans had an entire system of grading and assigning responsibility for road upkeep. Simply having roads of packed earth (as many poorer and less-travelled areas of the Empire had) where everyone knew who was supposed to keep it maintained, and how, was a contributor to reliable trade.
Not so much because of the locals, who generally knew the area well-enough to navigate it even without roads, so much as poorer itinerant merchants, who become much less reluctant to come to an area if there’s a clear road they can drag their (literal) ass down. It takes some of the uncertainty of both navigation and rough terrain away, both of which are more concerning to someone who only comes to the area once a year than someone who lives there year-round. Gravel roads are also underappreciated for this, and were widely used by the Romans in less-travelled areas.
Second, unity. In the pre-Roman world, cultural and political barriers were substantial. Rome, in its early days, was no different - a city-state in loose confederation with a surrounding area of rural farmland, surrounded by city-states of similar design. You might make two days travel and pass through three polities in that time - all of whom would likely have different standards for who is allowed to trade, when they are allowed to trade, where they are allowed to go, etc etc etc.
The Romans, eventually, did away with all of this. Other empires of the period often did not, not because they weren’t ‘forward-thinking’ or any such nonsense - the Romans themselves really only stumbled upon it by being arrogant and stubborn bastards. Generally, pre-modern states enforce a loose hegemony over their vassals: “Don’t cause trouble for us, and we’ll let you be.” Some are more meddlesome than others, but generally, ancient and (to a lesser degree) medieval polities tend towards the ‘hands-off’ approach. They let people continue in their own ways, no matter how strange or arbitrary, keep to their own norms, their own days of market, etc etc.
The Romans, likewise, followed this trend… except insofar as Roman law always applied to Roman citizens. This meant that there was a universal standard that could be applied - the Romans were very ‘touchy’ about “Civis Romanus Sum” - “I am a Roman citizen” - shielding a man against locals. While this was often abused, traveling merchants with Roman citizenship would find it not only life-saving (often literally), but also greatly simplifying their transactions. The mid-level itinerant merchant doesn’t have to worry about Chief Silius Italicus seizing his goods and ruining his business for the rest of his life because he ‘charged too much’ or ‘the village is starving’ - the merchant is a ROMAN CITIZEN! No one wants to bring THAT fucking wrath down on their heads.
Actually, I just realized I could talk about this hours, so I’ll cut this down a bit: Roman-era peasantry, in the core, Italy, in the inner provinces, like Gaul and Spain, and especially in the frontier, like Britain, lived better by acquisition of cheap goods acquired by comparative advantage and economies of scale allowing distant workshops to get consumer goods from one end of the empire to the next.
For example, unglazed African pottery was commonly found all the way up in Britain - unglazed pottery was unlikely to be used at the tables of the wealthy or even of the middle class, but it was a working class ‘luxury’, a sort of “Get the fine earthenware out, the in-laws are coming by”. For that kind of low-value low-profit margin good to be worth shipping - without any centralized authority directing it - necessarily implies that shipping it was inexpensive and viable enough to be profitable. The Empire falls, those trade routes fall. Those trade routes fall, suddenly not only is your next tableware purchase not the fancy African stuff that makes you feel like a shiny new denarius, but it’s also more expensive - as the local production is both smaller scale and no longer has to compete with distant manufacturers increasing the local supply.
This happens for both raw resources and consumer goods. Though the latter are much more important in this discussion, cheaper raw material, naturally, also affects living standards by making production of all sorts (slightly) cheaper.
I’m most familiar with the process in Italy and Britain, but effectively, what ends up happening is you have a working-class peasantry with access to mobile skilled labor and planning which allows them to create sturdier housing, have more furniture, and own more tools compared to later and previous peasants.
Of especial note in this are cooking tools - you see a collapse of metal cooking utensils in post-Roman (and very Late Roman) peasant households, for example, something to the tune of 1/10 of what they were at the height of the Empire. And while that might seem like a small thing to miss, the difference between having nothing but a cauldron; and having a cauldron, a grilling rack, a shallow pan, a frying pan, a strainer, a kettle, a washbasin, and a ladle, ain’t nothing. Between cleaning/sanitation, the increased variety of food preparation available, and labor-saving, that is a legitimate improvement in the quality of life. Repeat that for furniture, tooling, etc, and you do end up with something that is a substantial improvement in how one lives.
But also smaller luxuries, like spices and perfumes, were noted to trickle down into poorer rural areas - while the pre-modern cost of even common spices like pepper is legendary, the economy of scale meant that, despite the Roman Empire producing no more black pepper than late medieval Europe, the price (in silver) of black pepper was under half of what it would be ~1300 AD. And not for lack of love of black pepper - the Romans used and referenced it constantly!
As one more thing before moving on to your next question, because I’m sure I’ve overanswered this one already and overstayed my welcome… XD
The high level of integration of the market into rural areas also meant that the peasantry found it easier to convert surplus into capital. While the rate of conversion was low - and the surplus produced also low - it’s a recurring problem in pre-modern economies that peasantry struggles to benefit from any windfalls, because it can only be ‘stored’ in the form of grain or food, which has a definite storage life. Being able to convert a good harvest of grain into goods or silver is a substantial improvement to the relative wealth of the peasantry - even if they remain dirt-fucking poor to the actually wealthy.
Increased consumer base, increased purchasing power, increased demand leading to economies of scale, all of that jazz.
Okay, okay, that’s it, I promise, before I get on another 30 minute detail-examination. XD
The latter. The aristocracy accepted this system because they captured more of the wealth produced from the coloni. Previously, the relationship between free Roman peasants and local magnates had an (asymmetrical) mutually beneficial relationship. Ultimately, free Roman tenant-farmers and smallholders controlled most of their produce or income, and only relied on wealthy patrons for business or legal connections and the like. As they were reduced to coloni, the landlords then got to claim more of the wealth these poorer farmers produced by being legally empowered to extract it. The long-term, the economy gets fucked, but the short-term, the aristocratic family’s balance books look fantastic.
Funny enough? Not really. While one can have arguments about the exact level of cause-and-effect going on here, it pretty indisputably was damaging to the Roman economy, and the rich ended up with a lower material standard of life by the mid-late 4th century AD. But hey, wealth inequality skyrocketed, even by the already-low standards of ancient polities! That’s…
… that’s something.
More dispassionately, while the reduction in material living standards was substantial, it was also over a prolonged period of time, so many of the aristocracy likely would not have much noticed it. It is occasionally commented on by Roman aristocratic writers, but with that grating, ever-present “Things were better in the past!” tone, only except instead of “WHEN MEN WERE POOR HONEST PEASANTS” that the tone took in the Empire, it was “WHEN THINGS WERE GREAT AND GLORIOUS AND WE SIPPED INDIAN-SPICED WINE FROM EAST AFRICAN TORTOISESHELLS.”
In addition, people often love power more than luxury, and a reduction in material luxury but increase in wealth inequality shakes out to an increase in one’s relative wealth. Disturbingly and disgustingly, in the Late Empire, there are accounts of ‘lesser’ members of the upper class owning vast amounts of land that would make even magnates of the Principate-era blush.
They may not have the same amount of fine silks or fancy fountains of their forefathers… but their clients beg and scrape more than ever, they can demand whatever they want from the locals, and no one (except their fellow, even wealthier peers) can make demands of them. One imagines that even if they were given the choice, a not-insubstantial number of aristocrats would prefer the power over others to material luxury. People are petty as fuck.
Counterfactuals are always hard, but collapse probably was unavoidable. The Empire accumulated unaddressed problems like they were going out of style. By the Crisis of the Third Century, the only ‘real’ solution would have been to reinvent the Empire itself from the ground up. Which, tbf, Diocletian and Constantine tried, but, uh, in the wrong direction.
Any REAL solution, I think, would have required a much greater understanding of political theory and society than the Romans had. We really stand on the shoulders of giants in our thinking in the modern day.
Part of it is circumstance/geography, but honestly, part of it is that the West was so thoroughly Latinized - as the Late Empire begins to impose all these new rules and institutions, they ‘smoothly’ replace the institutions of the Latinized peoples of the Western Empire - their whole connection to the institutions that make up their ordinary lives is rooted in imperial authority. The Eastern half of the empire accepted the legal supremacy of Latins, but always maintained much more cultural independence - when the new, ultra-fucked institutions of the Late Empire were introduced in the East, they also had to compete with traditional power structures of localities. Which, generally speaking, outlasted the “imperial sinecure until the next Emperor gets a new, ‘brilliant’ organizational idea” type institutions of the Late Empire.
Related, Gaul became Gallo-Roman - Syria never really became Syrio-Roman. Roman Egypt never really adopted Roman norms wholesale the same way Western provinces did; it was a much lighter admixture with Roman culture. They accepted Roman rule and Roman laws, but largely continued in their own ways of thinking and operating, adopting Roman culture only when the practice benefitted them to an extraordinary degree.
Part of it is also that the East controlled the main income stream for the central government - foreign tariffs. The most valuable trade passed through Egypt and Arabia (and Persia, when they weren’t at war), and foreign tariffs from eastern trade made up an estimated majority of the government’s income. During the Principate, for example, revenues from Egypt brought more money to the treasury than every Western province combined. Much of the valuable imperial estates were also located in the East, which generally produced more valuable trade goods, like perfumes.
Since the Late Empire, East and West both, constantly struggled with money… well, one can see why having a less-fucked financial situation can be the difference between life and death.
The Byzantines, funny (or ‘funny’) enough, would struggle with the problem of local aristocratic magnates resisting and crippling the central authority for the next thousand years, so they never really solved the core issue. They just kind of limped along, too sturdy to die at one stroke, too diseased to revitalize itself.
TIL that different Fediverse clients have different character limits. Now I’m starting to feel like my 5000-character limit is a scam.
I wonder why this sounds familiar. Must be the wind. That aside thanks for the excellent write up. I’m kinda starting to get Romaboos.
Those who study the past are doomed to watch others repeat it…
Always happy to share! For all of Rome’s many flaws, the system they eventually cobbled together really was a marvel for its time.
This is a really wonderful write-up. Informative, but with a conversational tone that’s easy to follow and doesn’t become dry. If you wrote a book, I would read it.