No essay this week due to the fact that I was off in the woods.
As a snippet though, I’d recommend checking out Peter Brown’s magisterial work, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550.
Brown is one of those few historians who truly revolutionized the field. Before Brown, the consensus was basically that between the death of Marcus Aurelius and the coronation of Charlemagne, life sucked, civilization declined, and everyone died. Meanwhile, Brown and his acolytes have shown that there was plenty of economic performance and cultural output during these previously considered ‘Dark Ages.’
What’s interesting in Through the Eye of a Needle is that Brown flips the script on how academics talk about taxation in late antiquity. You see, in the post-Constantine era, there was an increased occurrence in the paying of taxes in kind as opposed to in cash. Typically, academics viewed this development as indicative of economic decline and collapse via the hoarding of precious metals and thus a decline in monetary transmission.
For Brown though, this narrative ignores the monetary revolution that the Roman Empire - especially in the West - had undergone in the Constantinian and post-Constantinian eras. The key point is that Constantine instituted an ‘age of gold’ in which gold coinage came to dominate commerce and taxation. The problem with gold coins is that if taxes to the imperial bureaucracy had to be paid in gold, and gold coins constitute rather large denominations, then the average Joe-ius Maximus couldn’t possibly muster up the produce to get gold coinage in any meaningful sense.
Now, we tend to think of tax collection in pre-modern societies as akin to our sense of individuals paying the state directly. However, tax collection was almost - if not always - delegated to tax-collectors and tax-collecting entities. For example, in the late Roman empire, the city of Carthage would be told by the empire that they collectively owed Ravenna, Trier, or Constantinople, X amount. The city council would then have to go out and find that money.
This brings us to the fact that typical rural producers would not send grain to Ravenna et al. Instead, they would pay taxes to the collector/collector-entity, and then those folks would sell the produce on the open market at sufficient scale to gather up gold coinage. The takeaway is that the payment of taxes in kind does not indicate economic collapse or decline but rather the presence of wide-scale markets where good coinage flowed. As a further note, the wealthiest people to have ever lived were likely late Roman empire land magnates who collectively generated revenues equivalent to entire provinces. And this world did not suddenly disappear when the Vandals and Goths showed up, it just changed in ways that modern scholars have discriminated against.
In general, the book is super thick, dense, and fascinating. Go read it. At the very least, if you never read it, it’ll at least look good on the bookshelf.