A very interesting article as usual from this source. I particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards without the technological advancement which created the modern world.
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.
> I particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards without the technological advancement which created the modern world.
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.
I agree. The thing defining modern nation-states is the use of accounting methodology(quantities of ships, bars of iron, population demographics etc.) to define power in terms of assets on hand and gains from trade, which gradually recast military forces into the previously unrecognized role of "defending property" and therefore enforcing rules of trade. Likewise, early-modern chattel slaves were different from Roman-era slaves precisely because of the heavy influence of market coordination forces: they had fewer rights, were freed less frequently, and were conveniently redefined from "human" to "product" through the development of racism. These things made the early-modern version of the institution easier to coordinate and therefore (speculatively - not that I've seen a formal advancement of this theory) more productive. But it would take the Industrial Revolution for labor efficiency to become recognized in earnest.
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.
> the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards
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.
Considering one of the biggest issues that plagued the Later Roman empire was the inability to pay it's legionnaires either via coin or freshly conquered land, it's a substantial factor to it's rise and decline.
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?
One thing people don't really have an intuition for is just how chaotic the ancient world generally was. Banditry was basically normal, murder was a 'personal matter', civic infrastructure investment was generally not a thing, etc.
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.
Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.
'Personal' is probably too far, 'private', as in, not the business of the state, is more where I was going with it.
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.
In some culture and religion it's even written in books. Under some circumstances and granted the insulted peer followed a few steps, right to murder was granted.
> do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'?
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.
I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim.
In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
> Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?
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.
Yes. It had a much, much better system of military organization than any rivals in the legion. It was radically better at incorporating its conquests politically. That’s what “friends and allies of Rome” was. Its system of laws was probably also a real source of comparative advantage or there wouldn’t still be many countries using direct lineal descendants of it.
In the end, it's all about sun-provided energy input. Coins or treasury, or freshly plundered lands really represent the means by which to convert energy into goods that can be consumed whether that's food.
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.
Comparative advantage isn't necessarily the cause for Rome's largeness. If society size follows a log-normal distribution, or perhaps a power law, due to the effects of preferential attachment (using a network metaphor), then the difference between Rome and other societies could be entirely random error.
Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time.
BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.
Building something meaningful doesn't absolve the sins of its construction.
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.
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."
The qualifier is "during the Roman Empire". The height of power of the publicani, and the period when they did most of their excesses as tax farmers, was essentially the end of of the Republic (and a few years in the beginning of the Empire). As the Caesars consolidated power and established a centralized buraucracy, they restricted the authority of the publicani.
There is, naturally, a Roman proverb along the same lines:
qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatebur. It translate s as "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so."
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.
By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population, and that was done yesterday.
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.
> By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population
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?
If you read the three articles it appears when the Roman Empire was strongest it was more peaceful for those within its borders (50 million people stretching from North Africa up through Europe and East through the Balkans) than it was before the empire (endemic warfare) or after the start of its decline (smaller, more frequent conflicts).
"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.
I think the author fails to adequately discuss the impact of climate change on the economy. We know from modern history that recessions lead to political change. It's not implausible that an agrarian economy like that of Rome would be greatly impacted by climate change reducing crop yields, causing political upheaval. Those actors in the political system didn't just decide one day to depart from 200 years of stability to overthrow the government, there had to be some motivating factor.
Not just climate - their poor farming practices created deserts in North Africa!
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.
I think the shifts in agriculture could definitely spark something, but robust political institutions and state capacity would have allowed them to weather the issues and adapt. Instead political fractures grew into much bigger problems bringing instability causing a downward spiral.
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.
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?
I'm not sure that's the lesson, based on this post, it sounds like the institutions were vital to the prosperity more than the growth. In a sense, growth is prosperity, but both were the result of institutions, and I'm not sure that growth was necessary for the maintenance of the institutions. I think the big takeaway is that people thought of the institutions are sort of an immutable fact of the world, when in reality, they were very break-able. Though that is also a sobering thought exercise as well.
On the contrary, we have an embarrassment of riches along with severe misallocation of resources. We could even be richer than our forebearers ever dreamed of.
Hahaha, I’ve been slipping “embarrassment of riches” into conversations ever since I first saw it on my favorite band’s forum. The boys would definitely approve
A minor nitpick from the article as the author writes that amphorae were used only for liquids like wine.
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.
Amphorae were widespread and commonly used for all sorts of things, so much in fact that it seems there was a "standard" set of sizes and manufacturing processes, and there's one notable mound in Rome [0] made primarily with one type of amphora that, the theory goes on to explain, was too burdensome to recycle, so it was simply discarded in an orderly manner. This is pretty much in line with the standardization that happened with modern freight containers and allowed a substancial economic benefit, so the comparison is really on point.
There is simply no way the author doesn't know of the multiple functional uses of amphora. Either you've misconstrued the meaning, driven a long bow from the meaning, or the author made a typo or edited a sentence too hard. They are a professional historian of the period. They know what the jars are used for.
"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.
I've always been irked by the "continuity" argument. The collapse of the Roman imperial system must have had a massive effect on the way of life of normal people. The archaeological evidence presented in this article backs that up.
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.
> A system like that, where the gains in per-capita production were the product of trade networks leveraging competitive advantage and the accumulation of agricultural capital (animals, but also potentially mills, olive presses, that sort of thing) could potentially be very fragile. Disruptions to trade or a failure to maintain that agricultural capital through a crisis could lead a society to fall back down to a lower equilibrium.
The parallels to what we're experiencing right now due to COVID affecting trade and supply chains are uncanny and worrisome.
I think COVID disruptions are recoverable. However, rising international tensions and a move away from globalization will at least result in a readjustment; managed poorly, it could lead to longer-term decreases in quality of life.
I'm thinking that the de-globalization we're already experiencing is at least partly responsible for some of the inflation we're seeing (the pandemic itself is the big cause, but I suspect we would've started seeing inflation increase even if the pandemic hadn't happened). Inflation is already leading to some decreases in quality of life.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia page on the Antonine plague (165-180 AD) [1]:
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."
That's admittedly a vague quote. But it suggests that Roman civilisation made life shittier than either before or after. Is there a genuine inconsistency with the submission?
I remember reading about a similar dynamic in Harari's 'Sapiens'... the shift to from hunter/gatherer to agriculture being better for 'society' (more people) but worse for the average individual within the society, at least in terms of health (poorer/narrower diet, increased disease, shorter lifespan.)
If I understand correctly, the main point is that the destruction of institutions lowers the quality and quantity of life that can be supported.
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?
> . 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 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.
A theory proposed by a professor at my school was:
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.
> The black death killed a lot of the people who grouped in churches and ignored the common sense precautions of staying away from people.
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.
I don't know about the Medieval period, but reading a book about Galileo, I noted that his communications with the officials in Rome was hampered by the fact that the cities along the mail route would close their gates and impose a quarantine whenever a plague went through the region. So at least they had a hunch that the disease could be carried from A to B, even if they didn't know by what.
> plague doctors who made efforts to protect themselves.
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?
That theory presumes a correlation between the behaviors that lead to contracting the plague, and a general foolishness/uselessness to society overall. Sounds like a stretch to me, but I'm no expert.
I just want to re-plug the Mike Duncan “The History of Rome” podcast that I heard about in one of the comment sections for previous parts of this series here on HN. I’m on episode 103!
There’s nothing new or novel here—except of course that’s it’s told in blog posts. Much of what I read there is paraphrases of well-known knowledge about Rome.
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.