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Globalizing the Mediterranean Economy in the seventh century

Applicant Dr. Paolo Tedesco
Subject Area Medieval History
Ancient History
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 446316191
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

Up until now, modern discussions about the post-Roman Mediterranean have been mostly promoting the idea that trade and commerce could keep functioning only if a centralized state held enough control over its territories: it is like states shaped after the late-imperial model were the only ones that could ensure economic prosperity and political stability. According to this view, studying the economy of these centuries firstly consists in assessing whether or not the Romans’ successors were able to collect Roman-like taxes (particularly the land tax) from the local landowners. Where these taxes were indeed collected, then we should consider those kingdoms as successful regional continuations of the late Roman empire. If, on the other hand, royal authority could not gather Roman-like tributes, central governments did not wield any real power: as a result, these kingdoms were ultimately destined to fall because they lacked the economic (and hence political) structures to ensure their survival in the post 600 age. This project makes a different claim: there is no reason to tightly bind the thriving of western post-imperial kingdoms to their overall capacity of reproducing the late-Roman state system. Indeed, post-Roman societies sustained themselves by other means of surplus extraction, as in the case of Africa, Italy, or the Iberian Peninsula. Evidently, people inhabiting these regions could mobilize enough resources to nourish quite lively local and regional markets. Of course, the relationships between central authorities and the producing population had profoundly changed, causing an equally deep transformation in the economy of these new states. All these changes happened gradually: from the second half of the fifth century and continuing through the seventh, the property relations in western Mediterranean societies shifted from a system that partly relied on taxes to one mostly based on the direct appropriation of land and labor. This process was not linear, as it occurred at different times and at different rates in response to the varying contexts at local, regional, and kingdom-wide level. Whatever the specific timing of this change, the diminishing political value of taxation across the seventh century did not necessarily weaken agrarian production. However, the nature and the scale of goods circulation ‒ in northern Africa, Spain as elsewhere in the western Mediterranean ‒ had already transformed well before the seventh-century Islamic expansion.

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