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Article contents
Writing agrarian histories of the Roman world: seasonality and scale as tools of analysis
Review products
MikeMcCarthy. The Romano-British Peasant: Towards a Study of People, Landscapes and Work During the Roman Occupation of Britain. Oxford: Windgather Press. 2013. xii+164 pp. £29.95.
PaulHalstead. Two Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. 2014. xi+372 pp. $102.95.
KatherineBlouin, Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxv+429 pp. $150.00.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2018
Extract
Agrarian labor history of Greco-Roman antiquity—indeed, labor history of the period more broadly—does not look very much like the agrarian labor histories of other periods. Many explanations might be adduced for why this is so, including the very particular circumstances that led to the development of ancient history as a discipline separate from (yet intimately related to) the humanistic intellectual traditions of classical studies in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But arguably the most fundamental constraining factor is the nature of the available evidence. Simply put, the wealthy, leisured elites responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the written materials available to us from the ancient Mediterranean world were emphatically uninterested in the sector of the population whose labor underpinned and sustained their privileged position.
- Type
- Review Essay
- Information
- International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 93: Workers and Right-Wing Politics , Spring 2018 , pp. 228 - 238
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2018
Footnotes
It is a pleasure to express my deep gratitude to my colleague Kim Bowes, for her generous and thought-provoking comments on an earlier draft of this review. I'm grateful also to Thai Jones for the opportunity to engage closely and synthetically with the various methodologies for undertaking the rural labor history of antiquity represented by the books under review here.
References
Notes
1. Historians of agrarian labor in antiquity continue to pick away at the analytical assumptions underpinning Marxist-inflected evocations of the ancient world as characterized by “slave societies”. Increasingly, the systemic, institutional exploitation of slaves in large numbers on agricultural estates is seen as unusual: See, for example, the comments of Garnsey, P. D. A., Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1998), 94–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also, for further references and fuller discussion, Grey, C., “Slavery in the Late Roman World,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: The Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by Bradley, K. and Cartledge, P. (Cambridge and New York, 2011), 482–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Equally, as has demonstrated, at the level of individual households, small-scale slave owning continued to be widespread into late antiquity and beyond. We must imagine that some, at least, of these slaves worked alongside or on behalf of their masters on small agricultural allotments.
2. Since the publication of this monograph, the archaeological literature has expanded markedly, due in no small part to the collaborative project curated under the direction of Michael Fulford at the University of Reading, entitled The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource (http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/romangl/).
3. Here the concept of the “ecotype” is especially apt, as outlined, for example, in Mitterauer, M., “Peasant and non-peasant family forms in relation to the physical environment and the local economy,” Journal of Family History 17 (2): 139–59 (1992)Google Scholar; Rudolph, R. L., “The European family and economy: central themes and issues,” Journal of Family History 17 (2): 119–38 (1992)Google Scholar. With specific reference to Britain, a comparable example of the move towards beginning with landscapes in the exploration of long-term socio-economic structures and practices is provided now by Williamson, T., Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time and Topography (Woodbridge, 2013)Google Scholar.
4. Especially apt in this context is Jan Harding's detailed exploration of the mutual feedback relationships between events and structures within the analytical framework provided by the Annales problematic: Harding, J., “Rethinking the Great Divide: Long-Term Structural History and the Temporality of Event,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 38 (2): 88–101 (2005)Google Scholar.
5. Thus Scott, J. C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.
6. Increasingly sophisticated histories of the climatic conditions of the Roman, late Roman and immediately post-Roman period have been produced in recent years. Seminal in the project of synthesizing the vast and disparate collection of data and proxy data is McCormick, M. et al. “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2): 169–220 (2012)Google Scholar.