"Over the past year, in all the many parts of the Toozeosphere – the newsletters, the podcasts, the columns – Tooze has diligently tried to make sense of Trump’s second term. He has covered Trump’s tariffs, his Gaza peace plan, his abduction of Venezuela’s president, and his soya bean deal with Xi Jinping. He has also wrestled publicly with one of the central questions that any analyst of this bizarre period in American history must confront: namely, whether the possibility of “making sense of Trump” is its own kind of delusion – sanewashing, as it’s sometimes called. Tooze doesn’t think so. Though Trump himself is “obviously a degenerate buffoon”, Tooze’s analysis goes further. “If it’s true that the key to decoding what’s going on is facelifts and boob jobs at Mar-a-Lago, why? How do we make sense of that?”

Yet in our conversations as well as in his writing, he often seemed less than energised whenever the subject turned to Trump. He acknowledged as much. Though he sees Trump undertaking a “profound reshaping of American society”, Tooze also made it clear that he interprets Trump as a symptom rather than a cause of the US’s decline. And that decline, while consequential, is far less interesting to Tooze than the concomitant rise of China, which has recently become his all-consuming obsession.

Working on Crashed convinced Tooze that China was on a trajectory to overtake the US as the dominant global economic power, but he says there is also a generational component to his interest. While he travelled frequently to the US with his family as a child, “I just wasn’t twigged into the significance of what was going on in China.” He has lately felt himself rushing to catch up."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age

#EconomicHistory #PoliticalEconomy #USA #Trump #China

There Was No Typical Polis

Bret Devereaux recently published a strong post in his series on the hoplite wars. This was an especially strong post because it drew on his research focus. His current book creates financial and demographic models of the Roman Republic, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms and argues that the Romans were able to get citizens and allies to contribute more military service, arms, and armour than their rivals, while some of their rivals had higher incomes in silver. Victor Davis Hanson and Hans van Wees also created detailed models of early Greek farms and how the men with panoplies (hoplites and horsemen) fit into ancient Greek societies: how many of them were there, how wealthy were they, and where did their incomes come from? Even in Athens the sources are not as good as Polybius and Livy on the Roman Republic, but Hans van Wees was able to believe in them because he came from Homeric studies where the evidence is even worse. van Wees has long suspected that there was no hoplite class, but a leisure class who could easily afford a panoply and a group of small farmers and shopkeepers who could afford it at the cost of suffering. This week I will go over some of the ideas in Devereaux’ post from a slightly different perspective and show where they lead me. This post has consumed two days of writing time and is not as polished as I wish it was.

Empires Make Things Simple

Its hard to write history outside the context of an empire or a powerful state. Everything goes in different directions, one story does not have a clear connection to another, and there are so many names and relationships to learn. So since classical antiquity, and again since the nineteenth century, people have tried to simplify early Greek military practices into a single story. Thucydides and Aristotle try to tell the story of how the armies and navies of their times might have developed in the misty past, even though nobody wrote Greek prose at that time so they cannot have known what really happened. This trope is related to another Greek custom of describing foreigners in ethnographic terms. Athenian writers present Spartans as exotic and write more about their customs than they write about other kinds of Hellenes. Macedonians received similar attention during the reign of Philip of Macedon. If you take this approach to history, you can signal out some peoples as exotic and alien, while implying (without actually saying) that everyone you do not describe is like you. Just like histories tend to be about men unless the authors deliberately include women, many introductions to ancient Greece give the impression that ancient Greece was like Athens except for Sparta and Macedon which were different, and they achieve this by not saying much about parts of the Greek world far from Athens.

As Devereaux says, the Roman Republic spent several hundred years engineering Italy to provide the SPQR as many well-equipped infantry as possible. When it conquered nations in Italy, it often confiscated some of their land and divided it into small equal plots for a colony of Roman citizens. When it elbowed them into being ‘allies’ (socii) it demanded that they provide armies similar to a Roman legion. One of the main taxes on citizens, the tributum, was a tax on families who owned property but did not have a man in the army that year. While there are many questions about how exactly this worked (the Romans did not mint coins at all until the third century BCE, and for a long time just minted whenever they ran short rather than every year) the Romans engineered Italy to produce families which could provide a well-equipped man for the army. So we can speak in general about Italian armies and Italian society, even though we know very little about allied forces.

The Neo-Babylonian kings, Teispids, and Achaemenids had a policy of expanding irrigation in Babylonia. While no source tells us why they did this, the obvious answer was that large numbers of people clustered along canals provided more labour and taxes than small numbers of people drifting across the steppes of Iraq. We can also speak in general about armed force in Neo-Babylonian, Teispid, and Achaemenid Babylonia although we have no solid numbers for population and income.

The Greek World was Anarchic

However, Archaic and Classical Greece had no Roman Republic and no Great King who forced them to contribute to a single military system. They were a glorious anarchy of independent communities and clans which were sometimes organized into a league or under a hegemon. I have written before about how in some Iron Age Greek cemeteries, early steel swords are daggers 40 cm long, while in other cemeteries they are great slashing things a meter long. The first Greeks to use steel swords did not all want them for the same purpose. By the fifth and fourth century BCE, when we have written sources, we see that different Greek societies had very different armed forces.

Thessaly had many serfs, an elite of horseowners, and a modest number of light-armed peltasts with spears and cheap shields. Crete was divided into many little feuding cities whose men used distinctive bows and arrows and small bronze-faced shields. Laconia had an elite of leisured Spartiates who fought as spearmen on foot and bossed around their neighbours and helot serfs. Their city of Sparta was proudly unwalled and lacked the impressive monuments of cities like Athens or Corinth. Thessalians, Cretans, and Laconians were all Greeks (Hellenes), but they did not fight the same way. The wider Greek world from Massilia among the Celts, Sicily facing Punic Africa, Cyrene in North Africa with its charioteers, and the cities of Crimea and Scythia must have been even more diverse.

We would not have to worry about all this diversity if the Greek world had been a nice simple empire. But since it was not, trying to generalize about the social structure of Archaic Greece or the class basis of the hoplite phalanx will only lead to half-truths. Even the focus on hoplites can be a way of not talking about the many different ways that Greeks fought, or that some of the men with bronze breastplates rode into battle on chariots or galloped into the fray on horseback, jumped off to fight on food, and let their squires lead the horse out of the hail of spears and stones (hippobatai and hippostrophoi).1 Italian hoplites may have never given up their second spear like Athenian hoplites eventually did. Most of these studies stick to Boeotia, Attica, and Laconia because we have the best evidence for how armies fit into Boeotian, Athenian, and Spartan society. There was a vast Greek world which we cannot study this way, and we have hints from the swords in early cemeteries to the Corinthian pots with knights and squires that those other Greeks did things differently. If we had the collection of constitutions compiled by Aristotle and his students, we might be able to say more about the range of variations, but almost all of those have been lost.

We can survey the physical remains of cities and speak of a statistical Normalpolis (one with a few thousand inhabitants under constant threat from neighbours or under the thumb of a major power like the Persian King or the city of Thebes). But social structures are not something like “how many children do people have?” which varies through a small range with a simple statistical distribution. They are much wilder, and much harder to understand without detailed written sources. As scholars realized that the men with panoplies fought in many different ways and had many different class backgrounds and could even be barbarians, sometimes they question whether these are really hoplites rather than expand their mental model to include more of the ancient reality. Models should serve data not pretend to be its master.

Devereaux argued that early Greece could not have many small equal farms because it did not have a Roman Republic to redistribute the land and tax large holdings and pay the money back to small farmers in the form of military pay. I argue that for the same reason, the Greek world could not have a single relationship between fighting and land ownership. It had too many different regimes with too many different ideas about the ideal society, and too many accidents of history like a colony which gave every settler the same amount of land, or the Spartan inheritance laws which let wealth become more and more concentrated and caused the number of Spartiates to shrink. The Boeotians let their population explode in the fourth century BCE, the time they were briefly one of the greatest powers in mainland Greece, and it may have reached an all-time high before collapsing and never recovering.2

Three Generalizations

Rather than narratives about hoplites, I think it would be possible to start a history from three generaizations about early Greek warfare. The first is as certain as anything can be in ancient history, the second is controversial, and the third is speculative.

• By about 650 BCE, Greeks shared some common military equipment and practices such as bronze helmets, round shields shaped like a soup-plate, riding horses into battle, and landing from the sea in long galleys with bronze rams. This equipment was very expensive, and early on armourers and bladesmiths competed to show off wealth with intricate embossed designs, long cutting swords, and beautiful castings. They were nothing at all like the arms and arms of the Hjortspring people with their simple affordable materials, minimalist design, and lack of decoration. They were also unlike the simple Montefortino helmets and pila of Middle and Late Republican Italy.
• Most early Greek societies were minoritarian regimes where a minority of the free male population (and an even smaller minority of the free and slave population) had political rights and was expected to provide itself with arms and fight when called upon. Hanson and van Wees agreed about this, they just disagreed whether up to 50% or up to 25% of Athenian men were obliged to fight as hoplites. The Iliad has a wealthy class who fight in armour and a vaguely described world of spinners and farmhands in the similes.
• Over time, kit got simpler, durable goods became more common, and the share of the population with a long spear and a strong shield ready to fight in a line increased. Aristotle thinks that in the best polis, those who keep arms and have political rights should barely outnumber those who lack both (Politics 1297b). Neither Hanson not van Wees thinks that this describes most cities in the fifth century BCE or earlier. Note that this is a narrative of progress and increased inclusion, whereas Hanson tells a narrative of a golden age before the Persian Wars and a fall from grace afterwards.

Within these three general constraints, there was vast variation. While many Greeks used shields with rims, Boeotians, Illyrians, and Macedonians sometimes used smaller round shields without rims. Some men with panoplies fought from horseback or rode into battle, hopped off, and let a squire lead the horse to safety. Some Greek societies had serfs and others did not. Some had many slaves and others had few. Some had many warships who needed rowers and others had few. A Cretan with a beautiful feathered helmet, a bronze-faced shield, a well-balanced spear, and a horn bow with a quiver of heavy bronze-tipped arrows might wear as much wealth as a Corinthian hoplite without fighting the same way. Since 2013, our task has been finding ways to think and write about all this wonderful contradictory diversity in the wider Greek world which are not so complicated that only a few dozen specialists can use them. I think the contrast between the Roman republic’s engineering all of Italy, and thousands of Greek cities and confederations engineering their small parts of the Greek world, might be one place to start.

Keep reading for a bonus thought on the estimates of ancient Greek incomes in comparison with another society.

Although I’m not weighed down by armour, I can’t keep dodging my other responsibilities forever while I am paid CAD $30/mo for my writing. If you can, please support this site.

Back in 2020, Jonathan Dean noted that ancient historians think you needed much less land to be a well-armed infantryman than medieval historians think. I would like to lay out some of those contrasting figures for your consideration, using a book I have on my shelves and an article I have on my laptop.

People who believe in the Solonic wealth classes think that the zeugitai of Athens had to own a panoply and fight as hoplites and had a minimum income of 200 medimnoi of produce (a volumetric measure different for grain and liquids)3. Hans van Wees estimated that a mixed farm with wheat, barley, olives, and grapes could produce that much on 7.5 hectares (18 acres).4 Its traditional to compare peasant incomes in terms of volumes of grain so lets estimate how big 200 measures of wheat is (there were all kinds of ways to cheat, such as piling your bushel high to make it big, or including inedible waste such as the chaff and husks).

200 medimnoi of wheat @ 51.84 L per medimnos (Devereaux) = 10,368 L of wheat

In 1299, Robert le Kyng was a serf with a yard of land (as much land as two oxen could plough in a season) at Bishop’s Cleeve in Gloucestershire. We will assume 30 acres of arable land and a three-field system to get his production as high as possible, although yards varied in area and some farmers used a two-field system (half the land fallow to kill weeds and feed livestock, half cropped to feed people). Medievalist Christopher Dyer estimated his productivity as follows:5

28 quarters 3 bushels of wheat, barley, peas, and oats @ 8 bushels per quarter = 227 bushels @ 35.24 L per bushel (Wikipedia old or US bushel) = 7999 L of wheat, barley, peas, and oats

Oats and barley are not as nutritious per volume as wheat. The Romans punished soldiers by replacing their wheat rations with barley. These are products before Robert le Kyng has to pay tithes or rent. So Dyer’s comfortable peasant produces about 8,000 L of grain and peas per year, and van Wees’ leisured farmer produces 10,000 L of tasty wheat.

Edit: Dyer estimates that a family of two adults and three minor children would consume 10 quarters (80 bushels) of grain per year plus meat, cheese, and dairy (so the Robert’s farm produced enough for three families before deducting seed grain), while van Wees (p. 48) suggests that a family of five would consume 44 to 58 measures of wheat, oil, and wine a year (so his minimum zeugites farm would support 3 or 4 families before deducting seed grain). Robert’s family drank ale and spread their bread with butter, so didn’t need olives or grapes. A poor family might feed more people by going hungry and eating less nutritious grains, but “how many comfortable families could this farm support?” is not a bad way of comparing these two farms.

Dyer imagines Robert hiring farmhands to help with the harvest or thatch his roofs, not having year-round help or being able to leave most of the work to his farmhands. He certainly could not sublease the land and still live well, and was not a rich peasant (traditionally reckoned at £5 / year in income, whereas Robert’s income was probably closer to £3 or £4). He was in the top quarter of peasants by landholding, but still had to work the fields with his own back and his own oxen.6 Under King Henry’s decree de forma pacis conservande of 1242, he was supposed to equip himself with sword, bow, arrows, and knife if he was not excused for holding land as a serf. Nobody with his income was expected to have a helmet or any sort of armour.

With almost twice the land, Robert is well short of the standard of living that many ancient historians imagine a zeugites had. Edit: Zeugites is usually thought to come from a yoke (zeugos ζεῦγος) of oxen for drawing a plow and a cart, just what a yardlander was able to afford. End Edit. I am not a specialist in ancient agriculture or demographics but I think it would be very useful for ancient historians and medieval historians to have a conversation about why they come to different conclusions.

Edit: Lin Foxhall notes farmers at Methone in the Peloponnese living off mixed farms of around 3.5 hectares (8-9 acres) in the 1970s.7 These farmers aimed to produce some excess grain to sell and used some modern fertilizer but no tractors. So van Wees’ zeugites farm is only about twice as big as fed a family in the 1970s.

(scheduled 11 January 2026)

Edit 2026-01-12: link Arist. Pol. and Arist. Ath. Pol. Include estimates of how many families each farm could support, cite Foxhall.

1. Josho Brouwers, “From Horsemen to Hoplites: Some Remarks on Archaic Greek Warfare,” BABesch 82 (2007, 305-319. doi: 10.2143/BAB.82.2.2020779) or Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares, pp. 76-78 ↩︎
2. Ruben Post, The Military Policy of the Hellenistic Boiotian League (MA thesis, McGill University, 2012) https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/z316q5029 ↩︎
3. Edit: I was wrong! A medimnos is always a dry measure, but Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 7.4) believes that wet measures were also counted, and van Wees followed him. This could be a mistake because markets in Solon’s Attica were probably limited and “how many tenant farmers and servants can you feed from your land?” may have been more important than “how much could you sell your crop for if anyone wanted to buy it?” See Vincent Rosivach, “Notes on the Pentakosiomedimnos‘ Five Hundred Medimnoi,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Dec., 2005), pp. 597-601 ↩︎
4. Hans van Wees, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity (2001) pp. 45-71 ↩︎
5. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989, this printing 2003) pp. 110-116 ↩︎
6. Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 119 has a breakdown of English peasants by the size of their land in 1279/1280 ↩︎
7. Lin Foxhall, “A view from the top: evaluating the Solonian property classes,” in Lynette G. Mitchell and P.J. Rhodes (eds.), The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (Routledge: London and New York, 1997), pp. 61–74 (this passage page 71) ↩︎

Heute vor 160 wurde der Vertrag über die Lateinische #Münzunion von Frankreich, Belgien, Italien und der Schweiz unterzeichnet. Die #Währungsunion blieb faktisch bis 1914 bestehen. Mehr dazu:

▶ Guido Thiemeyer, Als die #Diplomatie das #Geld entdeckte. Diskurse über Geld in der Lateinischen Münzunion zwischen 1865 und 1885, #WerkstattGeschichte 88, 2023, S. 43–57, https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-88-guido-thiemeyer/

@histodons

#histodons #EuropeanHistory #EconomicHistory #Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Power is not static.

The first year of the second Trump administration has coincided with an erosion of working-class economic and political influence — with deep historical roots and real consequences. 💼📉

#Brewminate #WorkingClass #EconomicHistory

https://brewminate.com/year-one-of-the-second-trump-administration-and-the-erosion-of-working-class-power/

When the economy collapsed in the 1930s, it was the poorest who bore the hardest blow.

Their survival strategies offer lessons in resilience and community. 📉

#Brewminate #GreatDepression #EconomicHistory

https://brewminate.com/surviving-the-great-depression-how-americas-poorest-endured-economic-collapse/

Job losses don’t happen in a vacuum.

The first year of Trump’s second term is revealing economic patterns that echo earlier periods of disruption — especially for American workers. 📉

#Brewminate #EconomicHistory #LaborHistory

https://brewminate.com/job-losses-mark-the-first-year-of-trumps-second-term/

What was once a necessity became a luxury and what was a luxury became common.
Time quietly redefines status.

#ChangingTimes #WealthPerspective #EconomicHistory #NewsInsight #LuxuryShift #RealityCheck #SocialChange #DailyInsight #MindsetShift #LifeLessons #TruthReport #ModernSociety #WealthGap #ThoughtOfTheDay #WordsThatMatter #StatusSymbols #HistoryRepeats #AwarenessIsPower #DeepThoughts #NewsPage

This 8 minute video chapter has to be one of the simplest and most frank explanations of the post-WWII World geopolitical and economic order that I've ever seen or read.

It's embedded within a doc about the Ride and Fall of the American Motor Industry but it could be it's own must-see video in and of itself.

https://youtu.be/TO-_EmYY6Y8?t=1870&si=PDS0k2iOEl_44IYW

TL;DW: Every time the globe comes to an economic consensus, which the US organized and which made them the centre of, the US managed to squander it then change the rules, all in the pursuit of maintaining the fiction of cheap, limitless energy (dead-dinosaurs) in order to maximize profits.

#USPol #USPoli #USPolitics #USTrade #USEconomy #USA #US #Economics #Economy #History #EconomicHistory #Geopolitics

FEATURED JOB: Koch History Centre Senior Fellowship, University of Oxford - United Kingdom

https://networks.h-net.org/jobs/69586/university-oxford-koch-history-centre-senior-fellowship

#education #academia #businesshistory #business #economichistory #economic #environmentalhistory #environment #humanities #intellectualhistory #religiousstudies #theology #history

FEATURED JOB: Koch History Centre Fellowship, University of Oxford - United Kingdom

https://networks.h-net.org/jobs/69585/university-oxford-koch-history-centre-fellowship

#education #academia #businesshistory #business #economichistory #economic #environmentalhistory #environment #humanities #intellectualhistory #religiousstudies #theology #history

The Key Question in the Fall of the Roman Empire

A conversation with Nathan Ross inspired me to track down two essays by Steve Muhlberger on what I think is the key issue in the fall of the western Roman empire. (The debate “were foreign invasions or civil wars more destructive?” is a bit of a semantic issue, since soldiers tried to be as Germanic as possible and wealthy Germans in the Imperium tried to become as Roman as possible: its never going to be easy to define figures like Stilicho as either Roman or barbarian). It has long been obvious that the fifth century saw light beautiful pottery, stone houses, roofs with leak-proof terracotta tiles, and philosophers who could do original work vanish from Europe north of the Alps, but recently archaeologists have noticed that people buried in Post-Roman Europe seem to be living longer and eating better than their ancestors who bore the Roman yoke.

My second reflection is on the current debate about the fall of the Roman Empire (the fifth-century fall) between people who equate it with “the End of Civilization” (Bryan Ward-Perkins) and people who don’t think it was an ending of unprecedented significance (say, Peter Brown and Walter Goffart). I really think that the unresolved and maybe unresolvable debate is about what civilization is. Is it a situation where a leisured minority sit around in the palace library, enjoying bread made from Egyptian wheat and dipping it in Syrian olive oil or Spanish fish sauce, and debating the great ideas of the ages, while other people dig minerals from the earth in dirty, dangerous mines, or harvest cotton in the hot sun, and die young? If that’s it, then there was probably a lot less “civilization” in large parts of the formerly Roman world after AD 400 than there had been for some centuries, in that it was far more difficult to assemble a large variety of enviable luxuries in one spot through the routine operations of centralized imperial power. And there is more civilization now, because here I sit, not even close to being rich by Canadian standards, but able to read, think and then speak to a privileged minority around the world while hundreds of millions sweat profusely (and all too often, die young).

But it might be worth considering whether the height of luxury — whatever luxury you prefer — is the only measure of civilization.

I say, bring on those resilient decentralized networks and extend them as far as we can. The only alternative is slavery for somebody.

Steve Muhlberger, “Brave New War, The Upside of Down, and the fall of the Roman Empire,” 22 April 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/04/brave-new-war-upside-of-down-and-fall.htm

One of the strengths of the Late Republic and early Roman empire was civil engineering projects: roads, aqueducts, baths. Muhlberger has personal experience of how important those are.

For years now I have been taking part in a large medieval re-creation event in August. The event itself features mock medieval combat, archery, singing, dancing and partying, some of it not particularly medieval in inspiration. Most people who take part camp for a week or two at the site, and I have often found that situation inspires interesting thoughts. Living essentially outdoors for two weeks, with little communication with the outside world (though it is available if you need or like) is a fascinating and perspective-restoring exercise. Me, I’m basically illiterate for the whole period.

Since I and my friends camp together every year, we’ve acquired portable versions of what we consider necessities: a back-up water filter, a hot water heater scavenged from an old RV, a camp shower, and a kitchen sink with hot and cold taps. These are set up and taken down every summer.

Note that my necessities all come down to safe, easily available water? The year we got the shower setup my campmates were delirious with joy. I sure appreciated it, too, but the kitchen sink and taps meant more to me. The first time I turned on a kitchen tap and got good water I knew, instantly, that this was the difference between barbarism and civilization. Nice to have a shower. Far more important to be able to clean one’s hands any time, and to be sure that kitchen utensils and dishes were always clean.

That moment of insight was a decade or so ago, and its rightness has become clearer to me as time has passed. Clean water available to everyone in a community is civilization; it means the community has certain technical capabilities, and is devoting its resources to the common good in a basic way. Furthermore, the predators and parasites who in so many places and times have prevented that allocation of resources are not in control.

We human beings of planet Earth have the capability to be civilized now. There can be no doubt that we are smart enough and rich enough. But we have yet to attain civilization.

Steve Muhlberger, “The difference between barbarism and civilization,” 16 August 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/08/difference-between-barbarism-and.htm

About ten years after he wrote that, the Canadian federal government chose to spend about as much money as it would cost to deliver clean water to every First Nations community buying rights to build an oil pipeline just before its price collapsed.

Further Reading:

• Benjamin Isaacs, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East
• James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed
• Rob Wiseman, Benjamin Neil, and Francesca Mazzilli “Extreme Justice: Decapitations and Prone Burials in Three Late Roman Cemeteries at Knobb’s Farm, Cambridgeshire.” Britannia, Volume 52 (November 2021) pp. 119-173 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X21000064 “To flesh out these national figures, we compiled a database of excavated Roman era burials in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, identifying 891 burials from 49 Roman era cemeteries … Approximately 5 per cent of local burials (five of 105 assessable skeletons) dating to the first and second centuries a.d. had been decapitated. This rose to nearly 10 per cent (!) (27 of 288) in cemeteries dating between the third and fifth centuries.“

On the evidence from human bones and teeth, compare papers by Geoffrey Kron and papers by Walter Scheidel such as:

• Geoffrey Kron, “Anthropometry, Physical Anthropology, and the Reconstruction of Ancient Health, Nutrition, and Living Standards,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 54, H. 1 (2005), pp. 68-83 {he thinks that small farms and classical civilization could deliver the good life as long as kings and aristocrats didn’t steal too much of it}
• Walter Scheidel, “Physical wellbeing in the Roman world,” Version 2.0 September 2010. Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/091001.pdf “A recent study of 1,021 skeletons from seventy-four sites in central Italy reveals that mean stature in the Roman period was lower than both before (during the Iron Age) and after (in the Middle Ages). In the same vein, an alternative survey of 2,609 skeletons from twenty-six Italian sites ranging from the Roman period to the late Middle Ages shows a strong increase in body height in the late Roman and early medieval periods. An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule.”
• Nicholas Koepke and Joerg Baten, “The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia,” European Review of Economic History 9 (2005) pp. 61-95 “We find that heights stagnated in Central, Western and Southern Europe during the Roman imperial period, while astonishingly increasing in the fifth and sixth centuries. Noteworthy also is the similarity of height development in the three large regions of Europe.”

Edit 2019-07-06: Tip of the Scythian cap to Brad Delong: Willem Jongman, Jan Jacobs, and Geertje Goldewijk, “Health and wealth in the Roman Empire,” Economics and Human Biology (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005 “Almost all other indicators of standard of living that we have for the Roman world show the opposite pattern from the two health indicators of biological standard of living and life expectancy. … We conclude that Romans paid a health price for their material wealth.” In other words, as the amount and quality of durable goods which the average family had increased, stature and life expectancy decreased, and then as the complex economy which produced and distributed those goods collapsed, stature and health were increasing.

Edit 2020-01-23: And thanks to Alexiares for the response in Supposed Civilization (2019-12-02)

Edit 2022-02-12: fixed formatting broken when WordPress introduced the block editor

Edit 2022-02-13: added the chart from Jongman et al. after reading a blog post by Dr. Bret Devereaux who has a very different understanding of health in late antiquity than the scholars I have talked to. I am an Achaemenid historian not Kristina Killgrove so my authorities could be wrong or I could misunderstand them! Dug around in my folder of articles and found and added article by Koepke and Baten and article by Wiseman et al.

Edit 2022-03-29: See also Josho Brouwers, “Confronting ‘Collapse’: An Anarchist Perspective on the end of the Bronze Age,” Ancient World Magazine, 18 February 2021 https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/confronting-collapse/ (archived on archive.org/)

Edit 2023-07-12: see also Liana Brent’s review of Alexander Smith, Martyn Allen, Tom Brindle, Michael Fulford, Lisa Lodwick, New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain, Volume 3: Life and Death in the Countryside of Roman Britain. Britannia monography series, 31. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2018

Overall, the elevated frequency and variety of pathological lesions suggest that, compared to Iron Age populations, health declined in the countryside of Roman Britain. More surprisingly, Rohnbogner found that populations in the three study regions had higher rates of infections, metabolic disease, and joint degeneration than contemporary urban populations at Lankhills and Winchester.

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2019/2019.08.43/

NB. that the reviewer expects to see health decline during the period of Roman rule in Britain because studies of bones, teeth, and feces show that again and again across the temperate European parts of the Roman empire.

#ancient #economicHistory #LateAntique #response #Roman #slavery #SteveMuhlberger

Capitalism: A Global History

Sven Beckert

(Penguin, 25/11/2025 - 1344 pages)

"No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.

Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators."

https://books.google.pt/books?id=_dRIEQAAQBAJ

#Capitalism #History #EconomicHistory #Markets

"Unlike those who (somewhat wrongly) interpreted Ivan Bloch and Norman Angell to have believed that increasing interaction and economic links between the countries would make the war unthinkable, Offer implicitly argues the very opposite. It is precisely the decision to specialize in the production of manufactures (that is, to produce something for which Britain or Germany possessed comparative advantage) that led to the need to have a war machine and ultimately to the war itself: "the adjustment to economic specialization was the root cause of the war" (p. 327). World War I was in effect the first war of globalization.

While international division of labor makes the costs of wars exorbitant for all participants, it also requires, in order that the system be maintained, a permanent armed underpinning. But that permanent armed underpinning by itself renders the war more likely because it leads more than one power to make the same calculation and come to the same conclusions. If we were to replace Britain and Germany from Offer’s book by US and China today we would not be very much remiss.

More diversified, less autarkic, countries become much more productive but at the cost of being more fragile and brittle to any disruption. Our very sophisticated economic system can be brought to a complete halt by (say) one month breakdown of all electronic communications."

https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/free-trade-and-war

#WWI #WorldWarI #FreeTrade #Economy #EconomicHistory

The Miracle of Wörgl

https://scf.green/story-of-worgl-and-others/

#HackerNews #MiracleOfWörgl #WörglEconomics #AlternativeCurrency #CommunityFinance #EconomicHistory

Andrew Ross Sorkin on The New Yorker Radio Hour: lessons from 1929 remind us that today’s AI-driven borrowing may echo past leverage-fueled crises. History shows debt, not innovation, often magnifies systemic risk.

🔗 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/andrew-ross-sorkin-on-what-1929-teaches-us-about-2025

#Economics #EconomicHistory #Finance #Markets #History #AndrewRossSorkin #Podcast #SystemicRisk

@histodons @historikerinnen @earlymodern

Pühringer highlights the need for more and comparative research on #emdiplomacy’s finances which can reveal completely new connections and networks that could help to explain other ambiguities. (8/8)

#emdiplomacy #economicHistory #earlymodern #history

@histodons @historikerinnen @earlymodern

Often the agreed amounts were only paid out after the mission’s completion, and the travel and subsistence expenses, which were often agreed upon separately, were carefully checked and settled, and in some cases even refused.

For many #emdiplomats, debts were not uncommon at the place of assignment; especially for bourgeois representatives in lower-ranking positions, diplomatic activity could mean financial ruin. (7/8)

#emdiplomacy #EarlyModernEurope #economicHistory

@histodons @historikerinnen @earlymodern

A problem, when it comes to researching the financial side of #emdiplomacy, is that the sources often are distorted as well as incomplete, because of separate budgets or because specific services were not paid for at all or in another way. Account books do not necessarily show the total expenses of a mission, but they do provide information about the daily life of the #emdiplomats. Not only the type and amount of expenses for housing, food, travel and mail are evident, but also how they were handled at court. (6/8)

#emdiplomacy #emdiplomacysSources #economicHistory

@histodons @historikerinnen @earlymodern

Pühringer stresses that it has not only to be asked from which sources diplomatic missions were financed, but also whether one single mission was financed from different sources.

The finances of non-permanent missions consisted of two sides, that of the diplomat & that of the commissioner of the mission. It should be emphasised that other more elusive types of remuneration must also be considered. They were a natural part of the life of an #emdiplomat. (5/8)

#emdiplomacy #economicHistory #earlymodern #history

@histodons @historikerinnen @earlymodern

The concept of finance in the early modern period is a very broad & the transition to gifts, bribery & corruption is rather fluid. So, we also recommend the article by Mark Häberlein on gift-giving. (4/8)

https://hcommons.social/@emdiplomacy/115360255960220982

#EarlyModernEurope #economicHistory #emdiplomacy #giftGiving