Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

‘prosperity’ and ‘sophistication’ 367
In order to imagine them more vividly, the complexity and sophistication
of the Roman economy need to be placed in a very broad and comparative
historical framework. In comparison to many other ancient and
medieval economies, the Roman economy was highly developed. Highquality
and exotic goods are probably available in all societies, as we have
seen from the example of Sutton Hoo, but only for rulers and the very
highest in the land. What is striking about the Roman period is the largescale
availability of standardized high-quality goods, many of them
imported from afar, for a substantial middle and lower market well below
this extreme upper-crust. The African pottery industry, for instance, produced
literally millions of pots to a uniform high quality and to a range of
standardized designs, and somehow distributed them to households of all
sorts within much of the Mediterranean region and beyond. Such bulk and
breadth of operation was characteristic of the Roman period, and not to
be seen again for very many centuries.
However, it is also important to realize that, despite its undoubted
sophistication, the Roman economy remained, from the perspective of
modern prosperous nations, highly underdeveloped and very precarious.
This is best seen by looking at agricultural production and at the agricultural
labour needed to sustain it.
Mechanization of agriculture in the Roman and medieval worlds was
extremely limited, and crops had, for the most part, to be laboriously
coaxed from the soil by massive armies of agricultural labourers. For the
Roman period there is no way of telling accurately what proportion of the
population worked in the fields, but the overall balance between agriculture
and ‘industry’ was probably not dissimilar to that of later medieval Europe.
And, in later medieval Europe, figures from England (where we are fortunate
to have the returns of both the 1086 Domesday and the 1377 poll-tax
surveys) suggest that nine-tenths of the population lived in the countryside,
of whom almost all were primarily engaged in agricultural work.
It is necessary to appreciate this basic economic pattern in order to
understand the underlying nature of the Roman (and late medieval) economies.
Their considerable sophistications, in terms of trade, specialization
of artisan production and use of coin, which impress us when we visit
museums, Roman sites and medieval cathedrals, were all achieved on the
back of immensely laborious agricultural production which tied the vast
majority of the population to the land. The agricultural surpluses that were
needed to sustain the craftsmen, the aristocrats, the state and all the other
sophistications that we associate with ‘Rome’ were only produced by enormous
numbers of people working the land for returns that would seem
paltry in a modern prosperous economy.
Furthermore, when we talk of Roman ‘industries’, such as those of the
later Roman period that produced African red-slip ware or, on a much
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