Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

382 13. specialized production and exchange
regions to compete commercially); in the next few pages we shall meet
some more. However, before we look further at individual causes, an
important general point needs to be made. A central and essential prerequisite
for understanding the decline of the Roman economy is, I believe,
the acceptance that it was a closely interlocked structure in which commerce
and regional specialization, as well as the redistributive power of the
state, all had an important part to play. If we see the Roman economy in
the way that, for instance, Finley did, as a series of essentially autonomous,
very local economies, then it is extremely hard to understand the broad
trends that seem to have swept through whole regions. But, if we accept
that regional and overseas contacts mattered, it is then much easier to see
how this complex network might slowly unravel. 65
For instance, if Italy was important to Africa as a market for some of its
oil and some of its pottery, then the impoverishment of Italy in the fifth
century, through the loss of the revenues of empire and through the
ravages of war (and perhaps also in part through its own failure to compete
successfully in the Mediterranean market), will have markedly reduced
demand for Africa’s produce. This reduction would adversely affect both
the direct producers of oil and African red-slip ware, and those Africans
whose wealth depended, within the regional and local economies, on supplying
these producers with African products, like grain, chickens, building-materials,
etc.
This argument for interdependence does not necessarily require us to
see the economic fortunes of all parts of the Mediterranean, let alone all
parts of the empire, as tightly interlinked. As we have seen, the fifth century
is a period of growing prosperity in the east and of marked economic
decline in the west. Western proserity was clearly not an essential prerequisite
for eastern growth. Rather, it looks as if one half of the Mediterranean
could exist in great and growing prosperity, largely independently of the
other. The Mediterranean in about a.d. 600 is indeed strikingly similar to
the pre-Roman world of around 300 b.c. – with a highly evolved and commercial
economy in the east that extended westwards into southern Italy,
Sicily and the Carthage region, and which coexisted with a much more
backwards north-west. The comparison even extends to the existence in
both periods of important gateway communities (like Marseilles) between
the two economic zones.
Though not quite on a Mediterranean-wide scale, multifarious but necessarily
fragile links between different peoples and different economies were
almost certainly very important in encouraging specialized production and
in sustaining the great achievements of the Roman world. As we have seen
earlier, there was no major technological, industrial or agricultural revolution
65 See p. 369 above, n. 38.
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