Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
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It is fascinating as well to compare to the fundamental problem of coordination and defections. The accumulated damage to Roman society by selfish actors eventually destroyed the institutions which produced such wealth.
How much of it was conquest and slavery? Certainly not all of it, but I feel like a lot of it was conquest and slavery and we should control for that sort of thing when singing praise.
The Romans were very good at conquering people and levying brutal taxes, but that doesn't add value and we shouldn't pretend that it does. They were also good at civil engineering, keeping the peace, and other economic activities which do add value and we should give them credit for it. I'd love to see a historical economic discussion that tries to tease apart these factors and weigh them against each other.
One of the reasons why Roman empire was so stable was that Roman taxes were actually lower and simpler than whatever taxes the local kings imposed previously. This makes sense if you think about it: Romans only really cared about Italy, and they didn't have to extract much resources from all the provinces to enrich Italy significantly. Previous rulers typically had only their small kingdom to tax, so they taxed it heavily.
> Romans only really cared about Italy
Yeah, so they famously instituted for-profit tax collection: "we'll auction off the right to collect what you can!" Are you telling me that the competing individuals who were willing to bid the highest amount for this privilege were less effective at it than the kings who had preceded them?
Historians often talk about Rome's "tenacity" -- the fraction of their male population they were willing to throw into the meat grinder of a failing war machine, the number of people they were willing to nail to trees when they risked their lives to complain about taxes, the lengths they were willing to go to in order to put down a tax rebellion (see: the giant earthen ramp up the walls of Masada) and so on. Rome is often credited with being more tenacious than their adversaries.
It's not impossible that taxes were generally lower, but I tend to suspect there are some serious qualifiers, like "in Italy," or "during peacetime," or "for those who the Romans were trying to make a positive example of."
Rome tried many different kinds of tax policies in it's territories. The relatively light touch they finally ended up was essentially a reaction of first trying a policy so maximally extractive that it could be described as genocidal.
How do you think the nice things you seem to enjoy about Rome spread around?
The biggest country in the World, Russia did that expansion in 1500, and Germany wanted to replicate the Americans in WWII.
Is the prosperity of the US independent from having a virgin country with bast resources and no population?
Certainly it is not, (North)Americans could have a big number of children to replace the exterminated native population and exploit its bast resources and automate everything because there were few workers to do the job. In other places of the world automation was more expensive(China, India) than just using workers, so it did not happen.
Population skyrocketing meant a healthy young population and economy to prosper. People got rich killing buffaloes or cutting down millennial forrest or gold(that had been extracted and depleted on other parts of the world for milenia) and not to talk about Industry being financed by(very expensive at the time) sugar and cotton cultivated by slaves in the South.
There have been large movements in the USA directed exactly at this multiple times over the last 3 decades. How would this be remarkable at all if the grandparent felt that way?
But to me it feels orthogonal to the benefits of increased state capacity, trade, and standardized coinage that helped provide the Roman Empire it's economic benefits. Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?
Rome was in fact special.
But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands, but more lands means administration difficulty increases, which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are not directly producing food.
Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement for everybody.
I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person.
This is very much not true across societies, or historically.
In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.
I think in general, for antique societies, they don't have detectives - if a crime is committed, the first problem is, there's no state agency interested in investigating the matter.
The claim that murder was a 'private matter' is from Emma Southon, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-modern history is rife with blood feuds that are basically the 'private' way of preventing murder. The state typically wouldn't have the resources to get involved, even if they did have the interest.
If you imagine the chain of somebody_is_murdered to somebody_is_punished there are questions like: 'who reports the crime, and to whom?' and 'how do you establish the crime actually happened, in the way it was reported?' that are just really hard to answer unless you have a big state organization dedicated to managing stuff like that.
Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.
Note that this was not at all unique to the Romans. People in the Bronze Age were able to use bronze because they had a well-functioning system of international trade. The Late Bronze Age Collapse disrupted that system and essentially eliminated the bronze industry, requiring iron to be used instead. (Iron is hard but otherwise not especially desirable. It's also more difficult to work. But it has the significant advantage over bronze of being available everywhere in the world, where copper and tin both require long-distance international trade.)
And a similar thing happened again in the late Middle Ages when Genghis Khan more or less unified the Asian land mass. This was not great for China, but Europe benefited immensely from his suppression of highwaymen in overland trade. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica )
The more trade is possible within a region (or across a region's borders), the richer everyone in that region is.
The pre-modern states, including Rome, had much more haphazard accounts and focused on tributary economics(how to extract more from the population or continue adding to conquests). Defense of property was strictly a thing for nobles or local militia, thus invaders looting cities was a normal occurrence through the medieval period. The Roman state was above the rest in applying a bureaucracy to the task of being the best at managing conquests - and it shows in the quality of Roman engineering, city planning and record keeping. Ghengis Khan achieved a similar, if short-lived, degree of coordination during the conquests, but lacked follow-up institutions that would have turned it into a longer-lived empire like Rome.
"Instead, I think the stronger point here ... is that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West – while it was a catastrophe for those people living at the time – was less a product of ‘hoards of barbarians’ coming over the frontier ... and instead a product of actors within the political system, within the empire, tearing it apart out of the pursuit of their own interests, deceived by the assumption that something so old could never simply vanish…until it did. The consequences of their decisions and of their failure to recognize the fragility of the clockwork machine that suspended them above the poverty to come (and that it was already damaged) were great and terrible."
But I highly recommend walking through all the data and discussion of exactly what that clockwork machine was. And then think about if/how today's society is different.
Not to mention some of the biggest political shifts that happen around that era. The shift to the Late Roman empire is marked with a series of assassinations of the Emperor. Partially because of consolidation of the position's power and prestige. And in contrast other empires to the East and West organized and grew in power.
As a young student I always was impressed by and admired Rome. I think a big part of that was because much of the history came from British Imperial types seeking to link to past greatness. As I’ve aged and thought about it though, Rome seems like a real horror.
The need for growth was important because Roman growth led to “civilizing” creative activity and exchange. Growth stopped and the activity stopped. The institutions of government/power couldn’t adapt.
There’s alot of parallels. How much economic growth now is really squeezing more blood from the rock?
That's incorrect, it was used for all kinds of unpackaged bulk good like grains, seeds (say olives), even sea shells. If you're transporting goods, you want it in containers; and amphorae were the shipping containers (quite literally) of that time. They were even used as toilets on ships.
"Incorrect" is "schooling " language. I think you could find a nicer way to put this. "Surely the authors shorthand for wine is an expediency here since they undoubtedly know amphora had many purposes" or something.
I might add I corrected the author on twitter for a misread one article prior and he very charitably pointed out how I hadn't read properly, unlike my uncharitable tweet so I write from experience.
The chart of average femur length over time is really interesting - especially the fact that it tracks the ups and downs of Roman political stability. However, I wish that there were error bars on the plot. The plot tells a nice story and matches what one would expect, but without error bars, I'm not sure whether to believe it.
The parallels to what we're experiencing right now due to COVID affecting trade and supply chains are uncanny and worrisome.
A good indicator of nutrition and the disease burden is the average height of the population. The conclusion of the study of thousands of skeletons is that the average Roman was shorter in stature than the people of pre-Roman societies of Italy and the post-Roman societies of the Middle Ages. The view of historian Kyle Harper is that "not for the last time in history, a precocious leap forward in social development brought biological reverses."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague
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The Wikipedia article has a reference to this article about skeleton height: https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article-abstract/9/1/61/457455... - It apparently improved after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire!
I'll leave a link to the playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9qlNBBoFG4&list=PLODnBH8ken...
I highly suggest taking a look at the episode that covers the battle of Alesia for example.
That makes sense. The bigger surprise to me was that after the Black Death, quality of life for the survivors improved. I suppose that's because there was less dependence on institutions, or maybe the Black Death caused less damage to institutions than to people?
The black death killed a lot of the people who grouped in churches and ignored the common sense precautions of staying away from people. This could be seen as a culling of what was largely the weak and foolish third of society.
Coincidentally, with fewer people to do the labor around and a generally smarter stock of people remaining, the upper classes were forced to pay more for services that keep the world running. There was a huge impact on labor markets, claimed the professor.
Thirdly, and likely related to all of this, the renaissance began.
Was that really considered common sense before we knew about germ theory? I'm not asking rhetorically; I'm legitimately curious about whether the average medieval peasant had any intuition about the fact that disease was communicable.
People knew there was something going on between infections that spread them even before the more advanced germ theories of Pasteur.
Indeed - the figure of Il Dottore from the Commedia Del Arte wears a mask with a long "beak". The beak was stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs; in those days, they thought that it was bad smells that spread disease.
Perhaps people gathered in churches because they burned sweet-smelling incence in churches?
The article had some specific ideas on that; e.g. after 1/3 of all farmers died, the ones that were left abandoned the least efficient land and concentrated on the best land, which made them more efficient. Also being in demand, they made a better living.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-rome/id...