The Economic Consequences of the Romans, Part 1: Where Did Feudalism Come From?

Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, Perry Anderson, 1974.

Of all the books I could have started off with, Perry Anderson’s 1974 classic Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism seems a pretty good choice. Sure, Anderson is not an economic historian, and the book is perhaps better described as a Marxist political history than an economic one. But Passages weighs in on some important questions of ancient economic history, such as…

What did the Roman economy look like?

Why did it collapse?

Why did that collapse matter?

I will be tackling these questions across my first three posts, as the books I will consider speak to all of them. But this is not the only reason why Passages felt an ideal starting point. Ancient economic history is not just interesting in its own right, but is also essential for our understanding of where the modern world came from. It lurks behind all further questions of economic history.

For Anderson, slavery is the dominating characteristic of the Roman political economy. In classic Marxist fashion, he describes a “slave mode of production”, characterised by unproductive towns, latifundist agriculture, and technological stagnation. It is important to note that all of these characteristics were exaggerated in the Western Empire, especially Italy, Spain and Gaul, and much less pronounced in the Hellenistic East.

Roman towns were not the economically vibrant urban spaces we might expect. Rather, they were agglomerations of landowners, servicing their needs, and supported by the profits of agricultural production. The productive core of the Roman economy was agriculture, dominated by the enormous estates of absentee landlords, and accompanied by the relative scarcity of free or tenant peasants. Low in labour productivity, but extremely labour intensive, they were dependent upon the continuous stream of artificially cheap labour in the form of conquest slaves. This contributed to a near technological stagnation - unlike feudal or capitalist formations, this mode of production inspires no labour-saving innovation. The water-mill - so synonymous with medieval technology - was invented in Palestine in the early 1st century AD, but only saw limited adoption in the Western empire for centuries. Why? With conquest slaves keeping labour factor costs so low, there was little incentive to invest in these capital-intensive technologies.

These claims are pretty strong, and are vulnerable to some pretty significant criticism, which I will go into when I consider Peter Temin’s The Roman Market Economy in my next post. From an empirical perspective, it is certainly the weakest section of the book, as perhaps is to be expected. But I think the central thrust of the argument is sound enough to make it worthwhile following where Anderson goes with it.

After the Empire ceased expanding after 14 AD, supplying sufficient slave labour, especially to the West, became increasingly difficult. The crisis of 235-284 AD, during which the empire was wracked by invasions, and no less than twenty emperors sat on the throne, should be seen as the culmination of these difficulties. While the empire resolved its political difficulties with autocratic consolidation, taxation reforms, and administrative and military expansion, the unresolved crisis of slave production served to diverge the trajectory of the West (where it was more acute) from the more prosperous East, which boasted a more balanced agricultural system, more vibrant towns, and a thicker freeholder/tenant peasant population.

It is thus this unresolved crisis of slave production in the Western Empire where Anderson finds the Roman origins of feudalism; of what can meaningfully be called Medieval Europe. The third century saw the creation of a new mass of increasingly dependent tenant farmers, and gradually bound them to their villages and lands. In the chaos of invasion and agricultural crisis, cities dwindled and the remaining free tenants and artisans retreated to the estates of agricultural magnates for protection, who themselves increasingly preferred to remain on their lands rather than live in cities. This Roman social formation would, eventually and gradually, collapse into the social structures of the Germanic invaders. It is from them that village communes, warrior aristocracies, and reciprocal tribal hierarchies were transmitted, received and integrated. This process, whereby two social structures dissolved into each other, would, by the twelfth century, culminate into what we would recognise as the bedrock of European feudalism, and hence of Europe itself.

This thesis laid out, Anderson spends the rest of the book presenting a brilliant comparative account of the different trajectories taken by this process in Western and later in Eastern Europe. They are extremely well researched given the breadth of the task, and thoroughly recommended reading if one is interested. However, I would like to finish here considering why this  - the transition from antiquity to feudalism in first millennium Europe - matters. As a Marxist, Anderson cannot consider this transition without that other, later transition in mind - that of feudalism into capitalism. For Anderson, feudalism - a distinctly European phenomenon, as we have seen - enabled the mercantile city-state to flourish in the power vacuum of a fragmented Europe, gradually bringing with it commercial agriculture, sophisticated financial infrastructure, and even proto-industry. A direct line can be drawn from the crisis of the third century all the way to the Dutch Republic, even to the textile mills of Yorkshire. Admittedly, what Anderson argues is a bit more complex than that - I’ll tackle that if I talk about Lineages of the Absolutist State (the ‘sequel’ to Passages, so to speak) later on. But fundamentally, this is what matters. Capitalism had to have been proceeded by feudalism, and could only have emerged in its historical form in Europe, the only place where such a social formation had ever existed. This is, I believe, the essential argument behind Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, and one that must be taken seriously. In a few weeks I will discuss Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome, a book which drops the trappings of 1970’s English Marxism for more modern, less stadial, more quantitatively-curious clothes. Although operating under different frameworks with different vocabularies, I believe that, in the final analysis, both writers perceive essentially the same historical logic.

By way of conclusion, I would like to quote the introduction to Passages. Anderson writes that “the analyses found below, for reasons of both competence and space, are rudimentary diagrams: no more”. In a way, I would like to think I am doing a similar thing, just much, much, much more badly.