Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

population change and economic change 389
producers and fewer consumers around. But qualitatively the economy may
even have improved, since individual peasants were able to produce greater
surpluses and to convert them into more coins and into more specialized
products. 77
Precise circumstances in late antiquity were certainly different to those
current in fourteenth-century England: for instance, the densely-settled
marginal lands of the fifth- and sixth-century near east appear, at least from
the archaeological record, to be characterized by prosperity rather than by
the misery documented on marginal land in pre-plague England. However,
if there was a marked fall in population in the sixth century (as there may
have been in the plague of 541–3), whatever the detailed local circumstances,
it should have been a relief to abandon some of the harsher lands
(like the wadis of the Negev) and to concentrate on more productive and
less difficult cultivation elsewhere. A substantial fall in population would
certainly have led to a shrinkage of the total scale of the economy, and
hence, for instance, to a fall in the profits of both the state and of landlords;
but it should not have affected the base of the economy, except
perhaps positively.
Another major problem in assuming that population growth caused economic
growth (and, similarly, that population decline caused economic
decline) is the probability that the causal relationship was often the other
way round. Some population changes – in particular, the universal plague
of 541–3 – cannot readily be related to specific economic circumstances,
and were perhaps truly random acts of God. However, what seems to have
been a much more gradual decline in the population of the west and north
through the centuries of late antiquity is most simply explained as a consequence
of the economic decline of these areas, just as the apparent rise in
rural settlement and population through the fourth and fifth century in the
east was perhaps the result of economic prosperity.
As argued earlier, some areas of the ancient world seem, in particular
centuries, to have been much more prosperous and more commercialized
than other areas. These same areas also produce evidence of both intensive
and extensive settlement in the countryside. Conversely, periods of
economic simplification correspond to periods of declining evidence of
rural settlement. Prosperity and a rising population (and poverty and a
falling population) do seem to have been related in our period; but it also
seems likely that it was fluctuations in prosperity that were the prime
movers in the relationship. 78
77 Hatcher (1977).
78 Since, as I argued in ch. 12 (pp. 324,7 above), it is at present almost impossible to disentangle evidence
for rural population numbers from evidence for changing rural prosperity, the apparently tight
connection between the two may, however, be deceptive.
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