Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

390 13. specialized production and exchange
xiii. economic decline: some conclusions
I hope I have shown that ‘the decline of the Roman economy’ was a very
long process that took place with marked differences of effect and chronology
between regions, and was, in fact, never ‘completed’. Even during the
post-Roman period of decline in the northern provinces, there are signs of
growth just beyond the old frontiers; and long before the ‘ancient
economy’ of the near east disappeared in the eighth century (if it did, since
even this is controversial), there are clear signs of economic growth in the
northern world and in the western Mediterranean.
But I hope I have also shown that economic decline, when it happened,
was dramatic, leading to a drastic simplification in production and
exchange, and to a remarkable regression in material culture. The large
Roman middle and lower market for high-quality basic goods was substantially
destroyed, and with it went most commercial activity and specialization.
No process so remarkable and so variegated can possibly be fully
explained, let alone on the basis of the scanty evidence available to us. And
certainly no simple monocausal explanations will ever do. Such explanations
are intrinsically implausible, and, as I hope I have shown, they cannot
be made to fit the varied and different histories of every region.
For myself, in order to begin to understand its decline,Ifind it necessary
to believe, first, that the Roman economy (through both commerce and the
state) linked local, regional and overseas networks of specialization and distribution
into impressive but fragile overall structures. It is then possible to
investigate a number of different factors that may have weakened these
structures.
Individual ‘causes’ of economic decline were, probably, themselves
closely interlinked. For example, the decline of state spending in Noricum
was caused in the end by failure in war; but this military failure was itself
perhaps caused in part by economic decline in the west (which made the
taxation needed to support the soldiery more difficult to raise). The abandonment
of state spending in Noricum then went on to cause further
problems along the line, both in Noricum itself (which was devastated) and
in other regions (because Noricum was no longer an attractive market for
their goods). If we see both regions of the empire and causes of decline as
closely interlinked, it becomes much easier to see how the Roman economy
could have become caught in a general spiral of decay.
There are good reasons to continue to investigate the ‘decline of the
Roman economy’. It is a fascinating intellectual process, because we are
much more used to looking at economic development and at the ways that
different strands feed into growth than we are to investigating the progressive
unravelling of such systems. It was also a dramatic change that had a
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