This book consists of republished papers, mostly written between 2006 and 2015, with one new chapter (‘Mass Production, Monetary Economy and the Commercial Vitality of the Mediterranean’, pp. 1–34). The most valuable chapters are the most recent: ‘Late Antique Aristocracies: the Case of Iran’ (Chapter 8, pp. 178–204, first published in 2013) and ‘“Regions that Look Seaward”: Changing Fortunes, Submerged Histories and the Slow Capitalism of the Sea’ (Chapter 10, pp. 222–36, first published in 2015). These chapters offer a geographical scope encompassing Persia and the Indian Ocean. The former examines the nature, prosopography and impact of the Iranian aristocracy in the period from the fifth to the seventh centuries. The latter traces the geography of sea ports and the identity of traders in the Indian Ocean from the fourth to the tenth centuries. Both of these contributions reflect B.’s role as Research Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and enhance late-antique studies by extending its range beyond the confines of Europe and the Mediterranean.
As is typical of B.’s work, the articles are written in a highly polemical style, including constant use of italics to emphasise points. B. enters into battle with what he terms the ‘minimalist’ view of ancient history, more usually referred to as ‘primitivist’, and focuses strongly on the early to mid twentieth-century theories of Weber, Rostovtzeff, Mickwitz and Finley. In this, he is rather tilting at windmills. Late-antique historiography had already moved well beyond these views more than a decade ago.Footnote 1 I find little trace of much key turn-of-the-millennium scholarship which has explored the commercial, monetary and trade-oriented nature of the late-antique Mediterranean. Chapter 3, ‘State and Aristocracy in the Economic Evolution of the Late Empire’ (pp. 52–60, originally published in 2000) extraordinarily contains only one reference to any work published since 1989, with the exception of two works of B.’s own – his 1992 DPhil and one 1996 article.
Most scholars of late antiquity would agree with some of the central tenets of his arguments, if not his ideological standpoint. He emphasises the commercial involvement of the late-antique elite and the intensive profit-oriented production on their agricultural estates; the existence of large-scale proto-industrial production, for example of export pottery; the renewed economic vitality of the Eastern Mediterranean from the fifth to the seventh centuries, and its economic prosperity into the Islamic period. All these viewpoints would be widely shared, mostly based on archaeological investigations over the last three decades,Footnote 2 to which B. occasionally refers (particularly in Chapter 4, ‘The Economic Trajectories of Late Antiquity’, pp. 61–88, which draws briefly on recent archaeological work in Spain/Portugal and France; and in Chapter 9, ‘Late Antique Legacies and Muslim Economic Expansion’, pp. 207–21).
B. argues that a great proportion of economic activity was independent of state influence, a more controversial view, since the state and army are still considered by most as a major (although not sole) driver of the late Roman economy.Footnote 3 His argument rests partly on the belief that historical focus on taxation and army supply has been distorted by the disproportionate survival of documentary evidence such as law codes and papyri (p. xv), but does not acknowledge archaeological evidence for annona transport to cities and troops.Footnote 4 Another central and more novel argument, continued from B.’s previous publications, is that the late-antique economy was more monetised than earlier periods, based on the introduction of a stable gold coinage by Constantine, driven by the class interests of the new late-antique elite.
Most of the evidence and discussion presented in various chapters is based on the Eastern Mediterranean, especially papyrological data from Egypt. While in Chapter 7, ‘Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages’ (pp. 143–77), B. correctly states that ‘we have to think of the peasantry in the Middle East in very different terms from the situation in the West’ (p. 169), and he acknowledges the very different structures of village and villa in the two regions, he himself in fact largely extrapolates from Eastern evidence to general arguments about the ‘Late Empire’ and ‘Late Antiquity’, ignoring the fundamentally different trajectories of West and East from the fifth century. For the West, he makes sweeping claims that ‘the key fact is that there was no demographic contraction in southern France in late antiquity’ (p. 75), ‘in Francia … the seventh century was a period of agrarian and demographic expansion’ (p. 86), and ‘[t]his process must have thrown up hundreds of new settlements' (pp. 152–3). While recent archaeological study suggests that from the eighth century, and possibly as early as the late seventh century, a process of investment by elites, intensification and specialisation in land use commenced,Footnote 5 B. does not refer to this kind of evidence, but rather extrapolates from a very limited range of sources, seldom archaeological, including the 1966 work of Verhulst and a 1989 study of watermills by Lohrmann.Footnote 6 At times, dates and geographic parameters are elastic: from a description of the now well-attested monumentalisation of Mediterranean Hispanic, Gaulish and Italian villas in the fourth century, he jumps to ‘there is no compelling reason to see the countryside of the west enduring a loss of dynamism in the fifth and sixth centuries' (p. 71); in contesting the existence of widespread tenancy (pp. 72–3), he conflates textual evidence for the fifth to the eleventh century in the Welsh Lalndaff charters, second- and third-century epigraphic evidence from Libya, evidence for sixth-century Sicily, the Oxyrhynchus papyri and place name evidence from Visigothic Spain. Most scholars would rather point to the overwhelming evidence for disintegration of the European villa system by the end of the fifth century, and to divergences in settlement, economic and political patterns, and land use between regions and micro-regions.Footnote 7
This book will be of interest to those who wish to explore geographic regions beyond the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. Its emphasis on the importance of large estates, hugely rich land owners, commercial enterprise to aristocratic wealth, and the complexities of the transition to the Middle Ages in opposition to a simplistic catastrophist model are all themes with which current scholars of Late Antiquity will be familiar and largely in agreement. The bibliography and theoretical frameworks are, however, largely superseded by recent work.
