Economy and society in the age of Justinian

Abstract

Egypt and the political economy of empire egypt within empireThe centrality of Egypt to the wider political economy of the Eastern Roman Empire in the early sixth century cannot be overstated. 1 On one level, the significance of the region can be gauged in straightforwardly demographic terms. The cultural and administrative focal point of Egypt in late antiquity was the city of Alexandria, which, with Constantinople and Antioch, was one of the great metropoleis of the eastern Mediterranean, with a population of perhaps some 200,000-300,000. 2 The lands of the Nile Valley beyond Alexandria may have supported a further five million souls, up to one third of whom, it has been estimated, may have lived in urban centres, a density of population which was not to be seen again in the Mediterranean world until the early modern period. 3 While such figures can never be anything more than rough estimates, to suggest that perhaps one-quarter of the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire in about 500 lived in Egypt would not be wildly misleading. 4 The demographic contribution of Egypt to the Eastern Roman Empire was as nothing, however, in comparison to its economic significance. Egypt was the economic powerhouse of the late antique Mediterranean. 5 On a recent analysis, it has been postulated that the 'gross provincial product' of

Forces and Relations of Production in Early Medieval England

“…It is when it comes to the question of elites that England seems at its most remote from the rest of the post‐Roman world. To take the most striking contrast, from Peter Sarris’ Egyptian plutocratic landowners with their direct line to the finances of the State, their workforces of free but tied coloni and their plentiful dependent peasants working their highly capitalized aristocratic demesnes (Sarris 2006). It is not that elites did not exist in England.…”

“…Peter Sarris's recent Society and Economy in the Age of Justinian gives an example of an extreme case of this: a vast aristocratic estate, belonging to a family hand‐in‐glove with the state, whose laws obligingly tended to tie their peasant tenants to them. These worked on tightly organised demesnes run by a highly literate bureaucracy that profited from the labour, not just of the workers allotted tenements on the ‘in‐hand’, or ‘inland’, but from the peasants of the villages of the surrounding countryside as well (Sarris 2006). For a post‐Roman landowner (although, of course, as this was still the Eastern empire it wasn't post‐Roman at all), this was surely as good as it gets.…”

Introduction: Aristocrats, Peasants and the Transformation of Rural Society, c.400–800

“…It is perhaps worth noting in this context the very major role played in the collection of taxes by the Coptic or Miaphysite Church in the years following the Arab conquest (Frantz‐Murphy 2007, 103). It is possible that the Church picked up much of the administrative slack left behind by the disappearance of the magnate great estates, by whom so much fiscal responsibility had been appropriated in the late Roman period (Banaji 2007; Sarris 2006b, 149–76). Significantly, Egypt can be seen to have conformed to the situation prevalent until the end of the eighth century in many of the other territories conquered by the Arabs, with taxes being collected in a traditional manner by members of the established indigenous or local elites, but with those taxes then finding their way into the tribute‐hungry hands of an Arab military supra‐elite concentrated in centres of power such as Fustat or Damascus, rather than ending up in the coffers of the Praetorian Prefecture in Constantinople (see, for example, Hoyland 2006 and Robinson 2000).…”

“…The reason? For Whittow, it was because the state had come to depend upon the economic resources of the Byzantine peasantry in order to finance its struggle for survival against an expansionist Islamic foe, just as, in the sixth century, military effectiveness had come to depend upon the state's ability to tap the resources of a tax‐shy landed aristocracy (Sarris 2006b, 200–27).…”

Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages

“…Both Peter Sarris and I have described the main features of estate organization characteristic of this late antique aristocracy, viz. the direct management of substantial estates which grouped their workers into settlements that were both structurally and topographically sharply demarcated from the villages ( kōmai ) (Sarris 2006, esp. ch.…”