Gibbon was right: The decline and fall of the roman economy

Abstract

Roman economic history as world historyWhy did the Roman Empire fall?For centuries the question has excited many people, and rightly so.In recent decades, however, the question seems to have lost its legitimacy.Instead, in the work of some of the À nest Roman historians of our time the very notion of decline and fall has been replaced by that of transformation: 'the Roman Empire did not fall, it just transformed into something different.'It was the genius of Peter Brown above all who showed us the continued vitality and originality of late antique culture, and who taught us the inadequacy of traditional chronologies.1 It was a revisionism that À tted perfectly with the cultural and political criticism of the nineteen sixties and after.It questioned the validity and centrality of one of the cultural icons of western civilization: the classical period of classical antiquity.Thus, it was part of a larger revisionism that also included a bigger role for the history of the Roman provinces, or the histories of women and slaves.As economic history it also À tted perfectly with the emerging structural economic history of the longue durée, where change was only superÀ cial, and where the fundamental characteristics of the economic system remained forever the same.Finally, it À tted perfectly with a Finleyan pessimism that treated all of ancient economic history as one static system that never saw any real progress in technology or standard of living. 2 If the ancient economy had never been much of a success, it could not have declined dramatically either.* I should like to thank François de Catalaÿ and JRA for permission to publish graphs 1 and 2, Burghart Schmidt for graphs 3 and 4, and Cambridge University Press for my graphs 5 and 6. 1 P.R.L. Brown, The world of late antiquity: from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammed (London 1971) is seminal.

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