Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

388 13. specialized production and exchange
earthquakes or great fires), and would perhaps even have improved their
circumstances by draining the new alluvial plains for agriculture.
Attractive though it is at first sight, environmental disaster is also implausible
as an explanation for the shifting prosperity, from region to region, of
Roman agriculture. It is hard to envisage, in a period before mechanization,
environmental devastation on a scale sufficient to destroy a province’s
entire agricultural prosperity – and certainly difficult to see how it could
have extended into areas of activity (such as potting and marble-quarrying)
which are only indirectly linked to agriculture, but which seem to have
shared the same patterns of prosperity and decline as the countryside.
To argue against environmental decay as a simple and global explanation
for late Roman economic decline is not to deny it any importance in the
transformation of the economy in the fourth to the seventh century. The
Romans made a dramatic impact on the landscape, and it is therefore likely
that environmental changes ensued. When human resources were weakened
for other reasons, many of these changes may well have had a marked
negative effect. 75
xii. population change and economic change
A major fall in population is often considered an important cause of economic
decline in the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. Since rises and
falls in population have an obvious effect on the availability of labour and
on the size of overall demand, there is indeed little doubt that the number
of people living within the empire would affect the economy. However, the
relationship between population growth and economic growth, on the one
hand, and population decline and economic decline, on the other, is not in
fact as straightforward as is often suggested. 76
Firstly, in certain circumstances, a fall in population, far from being a disaster,
can even be an economic boon. In later medieval England the population
may have been reduced by as much as a half between the outbreak
of the Black Death in 1348 and the end of the century. But this does not
seem to have brought about economic regression. Before 1348, high overall
demand may have been diverted into producing miserable quantities of the
most basic foodstuffs in order to feed a large population, and much of the
labour force may have been tied down to extracting appalling returns from
unsuitable land. After the period of mortality, the surviving peasants were
almost certainly individually better off than before, since they were now
able to abandon the cultivation of less productive land. In these circumstances,
the overall scale of the economy shrank, since there were fewer
75 See Hendy, Studies 58–68. 76 For example, in Hodges and Whitehouse (1983) 20–53.
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