Several problems are raised by the economic/political paradigm. As indicated last time, my aim here is not to replace them but to add a new level more concerned with ideas, attitudes or culture. To this end it’s important to note that the broad outlines of economic development sketched in Part 3 match, in general, those of the shifts in culture mapped out in Part 2, of the gradual turning away from each other of west and east (especially of east).
One difficulty is the lack of fit between the political
change and the archaeologically-revealed patterns of exchange. The alleged end
of the western ‘tax spine’, after the Vandal conquest of Africa, does not seem
to me to fit the data very well. One issue is what exactly the Vandal conquest
of Byzacena/Proconsularis and the 442 treaty with the imperial court actually
meant. This is really for another time, but it seems to me that the treaty is
generally reconstructed in terms of a ‘barbarian invaders/conquests’ paradigm
that relies on a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily supported by the
evidence itself. More importantly for current purposes, though, the patterns of
African trade don’t really change after c.440. As we have seen, African traders
if anything found new markets after that date and continued to trade with Italy
and the south of Gaul as before, even if quantities might have declined. These
issues also affect the argument that claims that the end of the western
imperial command economy produced a dramatic shift in interregional
connections. Logically, this ought to have happened but it does not seem to me
to be readily visible in the archaeological data, in which pre-existing
patterns continue, even if along (similarly pre-existing) trajectories of
reduction in scale. You might not find much ARS or many African amphorae in
northern Gaul in the fifth century but then you wouldn’t in the fourth either.
Most of the northern Gaulish landscape was harnessed to the provisioning and
remuneration of the Rhine army and it seems likely to me that, as James Harland
has suggested, Britain might have also played a major role in the supply of the
frontier garrisons. Consequently, the breakdown of regular government and the
end of the imperial command economy is seen in the well-attested crisis in
those areas, not in the patterns of Mediterranean trade.
We might also ask whether the reimposition of imperial rule
is in itself sufficient to explain the startling shift in the direction of
African trade in the sixth century. This seems superficially attractive as an
explanation but closer reflection raises some important problems. One might,
first of all, ask why the government would redirect the African annonae
to Constantinople, which was amply supplied from Egypt and elsewhere already.
Would/should we not see a decline in the market share of Egyptian exports if
that were the case? More importantly, why would the imperial government not
have reestablished the supposedly-ended (and supposedly crucial) ‘tax-spine’ to
the newly reconquered city of Rome, and Byzantine Italian territories? African
exports continue to reach Italy, albeit mostly (and increasingly to the
detriment of other areas) Rome and in gradually decreasing numbers, until the
end of the seventh century.
We might also think more closely about the ways in which
wars affect long-distance exchange. Pirenne and others ascribed the breaking of
long-distance Mediterranean trade to seaborne piracy, whether Arab or Vandal,
but this is an implausible mechanism. Even if one were to assume that no one
ever thought to provide merchant vessels with armed escorts, the relationship
between piracy and seaborne commerce resembles that – in that early computer
programming exercise – between foxes and chickens. If the chicken population [or
seaborne merchant traffic] grows, the fox population [or profitable pirate
activity] grows with it, because of the increased availability of food [loot];
there comes a point though where the fox population is so great that it is
killing chickens faster than the chicken population can reproduce itself; at
that point the lack of food leads to a decline, through starvation, in the fox
population; eventually, however, the low numbers of predatory foxes allows the
chicken population to grow again; and so on. Put more simply, you can’t have
pirates without merchant ships for them to prey on. Pirenne’s thesis creates an
image of a period during which Arab pirates wearily put to sea in spite of
there being no shipping to attack. ‘Well, me hearties, none of us has seen a
merchantman for ten years but here we go again; another day another dollar.’
The other strange point about Pirenne’s thesis is that although he thought –
correctly – that long-distance trade flowed mostly from east to west, and
although he thought this on the basis of texts describing imports from
Palestine and Egypt, he still thought that the decisive blow to Mediterranean
trade was dealt by the Arab conquests and/or by Arab fleets – creating the
image of Arab pirates attacking ships that had sailed from their own ports [‘pirates
on the starboard bow, cap’n!’ ‘Don’t worry lad, their ours.’]…
Be all that as it may, we might wonder how warfare affects
trade. The key point I want to make is that for it to have seriously
detrimental effects it needs to be ongoing for a long time. Even heavy fighting
for a year or two, or a few years, is unlikely to bring about any serious
shifts in trading patterns. Such events can be factored in to the usual
response strategies. Campaigning by even small armies (as were the norm in late
antiquity and the early Middle Ages) could produce famine but such could be responded
to within the normal patterns of redistribution and relief, where they
functioned. They might even produce windfalls for merchants able to sell at
famine prices. More serious contenders as causal factors in long-term change
are long periods of warfare such as the Gothic wars in Italy, or the wars with
the Moors after the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, or, especially, the
long war between the Empire and Persia, and then with the Arabs. Such warfare
is important not (or not just, or principally) for disrupting commerce, though
it probably did so (though we might also remember that armies need provisioning
and can act as markets) but through the disruption of production/supply and
demand. Displacement of population or disruption of seasonal agricultural
activities through the movement (year in, year out) of armies, associated
famine and disease (plague especially from the mid-sixth century) dislocates or
prevents the production of the surplus that in some way or other acts as the
basis for commerce, as well as (partly in consequence) the ability for
craftsmen to make the products that are traded, or the ability for markets to
be held regularly with the usual security. It might be that twenty years of
insecurity after Belisarius’ conquest had serious effects on some African
production, but clearly it didn’t kill it off entirely. Similarly, the Gothic
wars didn’t entirely end the market for African products in Italy. The wars in
the east from 610 to mid-century do seem to have been fatal for the old eastern
Mediterranean complex of commercial networks, production, and distribution,
etc. Once again, though, we’re entitled to ask why, when the dust settled, they
didn’t reemerge even if the materials being produced took different forms.
Certainly, the creation of the Caliphate led to a profound rearrangement of
trading networks – greater links between North Africa and the sub-Saharan world
being one of the most important developments – but again, one would have to ask
whether there was anything economically more logical or natural about those
networks than the previously existing ones. Any investigation of that issue
will lead you quite quickly to the role of attitudes, ideas, mentalité in
shaping networks and connections, commercial and otherwise.
Some of the economic explanations adduced (concerning supply
and demand, production costs, etc), while plausible and sophisticated, function
mainly as descriptive extrapolations from data. They don’t necessarily emerge
from the data themselves. Clearly, too, they are teleological extrapolations
backwards from the eventual outcomes. All of this is fair enough, but the issue
does need to be flagged up. And again there are some problems that arise, in my
opinion anyway. One concerns the demise of the Mediterranean commercial links
with the north-west. Some things from the Mediterranean were simply not
available locally – olive oil is the obvious commodity here. Given the
dominance of African oil production in the late imperial west, this ought to
have been an important basis for commerce (and surely was). But what markets
were there for this? Western towns generally contracted in size from the third
century onwards but Mediterranean wares continue to be found in some
north-western regions. The church’s need for oil for lighting and also for
anointing, and the growth of Christianity may have provided new markets as, in
the fifth century, might the new elite in western Britain wanting to show its
prestige and Roman-ness. Alongside the seeming demise of the old Roman elite
further to the east, this might explain the shift in the routes via which
African exports entered Britain. What seems odd to me, though, is that when the
economy in the north-west recovered in the late sixth century (with the revival
of towns, greater aristocratic control of surplus, related increase in church
foundation, increased monetisation of the economy, growing
craft-specialisation, newly established markets, etc) the market share of
Mediterranean products, having managed to persist through over 200 years of
economic change and (especially) decline, suddenly disappeared. Imports found
on sites all around the Irish Sea (east and west, north and south, rather than
principally on its southern and western shores, as hitherto) seem to come
almost entirely from various parts of Gaul. Descriptively one can say that more
local products squeezed out the African imports but one would still need to ask
why. Costs, etc, don’t seem to me to present the whole story. The whole point
of my discussion thus far is, on the one hand, that normative, supposedly
natural, logical, or eternal economic laws of supply and demand are in
themselves inadequate to the task of explaining the changes of the fifth to
seventh centuries. But so too is the notion that trade can just be ‘turned
off’, like a tap, by high-level political events.
It's time, I think, to try to add some elements of ideas and
worldviews to the picture to round it out (rather than replace other
explanations with them). I have already said that the development of western
economic systems runs to some extent parallel to some changes in outlooks and
attitudes (though not necessarily to high politics or governmental shifts).
This is not in itself news. Long ago it was pointed out (maybe by R.S. Lopez –
I will check and correct if necessary when I have my books) that the papacy was
quite happy to import Egyptian papyrus until the rulers of Egypt started
stamping papyri with (to Christians) unacceptable quotations from the Qur’an.
The shifts in trading routes and networks after the creation of the Caliphate
are also clearly about something other than laws of economics. The demand for
Mediterranean goods in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries was
surely in large part because of the cultural cachet of commodities produced in,
or somehow associated with, the Christian, Imperial, Roman World. As has been
mentioned this period represents the high point of Romanitas in the
region. Were easterners simply no longer interested in western trade and
markets? It’s not as if there were no important commodities to be had there,
and – as noted – the market opportunities ought, if anything, to have been improving.
Three letters of Gregory the Great (and I am grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes
for drawing my attention to them) are significant here. Gregory is writing to
the Patriarch of Alexandria who, he has heard, needs large timbers for Alexandrian
vessels. Gregory could, and did, get his hands on just the sort of timber that’s
wanted (in Calabria if memory serves), and get it transported up to Rome, but
the Egyptians didn’t send ships that were big enough to take them, and cutting them
to fit would, obviously, rather defeat the object. Gregory, it seems, is quite
keen to help and to provide this timber, which obviously isn’t available in
Egypt, but the Patriarch, it appears, can’t even be bothered to write back.
Thus, I would propose that an important reason (not, for
clarity the reason, or the most important) for the end of any
significant market share for Mediterranean commodities is that final cultural turning
away of east and west after the mid-sixth century. This is a conclusion that
has some important bearings on the debate upon pre-modern economies, between ‘formalist’
and ‘substantivist’ positions.