2 results
16 - Post-Roman economies
- from Part V - Outcomes
- Edited by Walter Scheidel, Stanford University, California
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 08 November 2012, pp 334-360
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Any attempt at providing a synthesis of the salient characteristics and chronological development of ‘post-Roman’ economies, which will be taken here to begin from the fifth century ce, is complicated by the extent to which change varied across space and time. The most meaningful and revealing approach to this infinite variety lies in extended and comparative regional study, as has recently been magisterially demonstrated. Within the confines of an overview, however, one can only try to encapsulate this general pattern of fragmentation within a unitary framework of analysis, notwithstanding the schematic superficiality that this inevitably involves. In outline, a familiar distinction between the political destinies of the two halves of the empire, the fragmented, newly-barbarian West and the integrated and lately-flourishing East, can readily be carried over into the economic sphere because of the importance of the fiscal interests of the Roman state in shaping the dynamics of production and exchange. In neither case, however, was any radical economic transformation immediately and generally triggered by ‘the fall of Rome.’ In the East, the late antique boom encouraged by the foundation of Constantinople, and implicit in the expansion of the extent and intensity of rural settlement in several regions, continued unabated. In the West, with the notable exception of Britain, where the involution of the Roman system was complete within little more than a generation, the various successor-states entered upon a species of economic half-life, in the sense that they emitted Roman-ness in various aspects of their fiscal organization and patterns of exchange until the later seventh century, but in steadily diminishing quantities. This fading but still recognizably post-Roman pattern would be significantly complicated, but not fundamentally altered, by the absorption of Africa and parts of Italy back into the imperial orbit as a result of Justinian's reconquests. In the seventh century, however, the eastern empire underwent a military-political crisis of its own, at once more concise in its nature and less decisive in its outcomes. The Byzantine state survived, in shrunken form, and a variant of fiscal organization was maintained by the Umayads in the territories over which they had assumed control.
22 - The Mediterranean economy
- from PART III - THEMES AND PROBLEMS
-
- By Simon Loseby
- Edited by Paul Fouracre, University of Manchester
-
- Book:
- The New Cambridge Medieval History
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 08 December 2005, pp 605-638
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The biggest player in the sixth- and seventh-century Mediterranean economy was obviously the Byzantine Empire, which alone maintained the means and the motive routinely to encourage the bulk transportation of staple items between regions. Part of the agricultural surplus from the wealthiest of all the lands around the Mediterranean, Egypt, had long been diverted to assure supplies of grain for the imperial capital at Constantinople. The Mediterranean afforded wider opportunities for coastal producers to market their surplus, whether in dealings with the state or independently of it. The annona system may have tied shippers into the regular transport of Egyptian grain to the imperial capital, but not so tightly as to preclude them from the simultaneous pursuit of private profit. At privileged western sites like Rome and Marseilles, or Carthage and Naples, the archaeological evidence suggests that the late antique exchange-network persisted in an etiolated form through to the close of the seventh century.