Kim Bowes: commitment

Transcript context

…There’s very longstanding debates on why Rome declined. You look at Rome from a different perspective, that of the 90 percent using archaeological methods. Does that give you a different view on why Rome declined? I am writing a sequel to the book that you had in your hand a minute ago on exactly this question, or maybe not the question of why Rome declined, but what it was like to live through those years, those centuries of, if not decline, then complete transformation. I think that I will propose ultimately a really different answer than the one that’s been proposed before that is obviously an economic answer. It has to do with the state as well and its ability to collect taxes, but it also has to do with the synergy between ordinary people’s consumption and production and the ability of that state to survive. They both needed each other. Ultimately, a whole series of thing happened that broke that feedback loop. This is what I’m puzzled by. You asked me about that previously. I said money. The second thing I’m really puzzled by is demographics. I’m not going to give you an answer to how many people lived in the Roman Empire, but I can tell you that an awful lot fewer people lived in, say, the fifth century. Population decline sets in Roman Italy almost certainly even by the late second century. Maybe even it’s already starting under the reign of Hadrian. This isn’t true across the empire as a whole, and population numbers are radically different, say, in Britain versus Italy versus Egypt, but it’s clear that the population declines. In some cases, it declines precipitously and stays low. This has an enormous set of knock-on effects for the state and its ability to collect taxes, but also for that cycle of consumption and production that works at a local level. It just falls apart. It worked when population was high and dense, and then it failed to work when that population emptied. Particularly in the countryside. How does the plague hypothesis fit into your view?…

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