Mass Production, Monetary Economy and the Commercial Vitality of the Mediterranean

Abstract

It is argued that archaeology and monetary history between them have the potential to project a very different picture of the Roman economy from that suggested by minimalist stereotypes of the latter. It then discusses the implications of this argument for the late antique period in particular, rejecting the catastrophism with which Rostovtzeff famously concluded his own history of the early empire. For the late empire the strength of private interests remained as strong as ever, in an economy characterised more by an integration of private and public business than by any supposed conflict or antagonism between them. The eastern empire encapsulated these tendencies in pure form, with sustained levels of trade and monetary circulation into the main decades of the seventh century. The paper argues that it would be more sensible for historians to think in terms of economic cycles than the conventional pathologies of ‘decline’, ‘decay’, etc. This pattern is strikingly evident in Byzantine economic history, marked as it is by sharp fluctuations between the fifth and twelfth centuries