Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and Dark Age collapse
How better nutrition can occur in poorer societies and other paradoxes of economic history.
If you teach the long-run patterns of medieval history, you come up against a bit of a paradox. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the C5th clearly meant a collapse of trade.
This is amply confirmed by the archaeology, especially the shrinkage of cities, the level of metal smelting, and the numbers of shipwrecks. (Actually, perhaps not the number of shipwrecks.)
In post-Roman Britain, even the cows got smaller. It was, as historian Ward-Perkins says, “the demise of comfort”.
Yet, the archaeological evidence suggests that people were taller early in the medieval period than later. The period after the collapse Western Empire was followed by a long-term decline in the height of Europeans that did not reverse until the early C20th, even though trade increased markedly from the C11th onwards. Moreover, the status of women generally rose in the Dark Ages: Anglo-Saxon women had social standing, range of social possibilities, and a level of control of property, that was distinctly higher than, for example, the women of C18th Britain.
It turns out to be relatively simple to reconcile these apparently contradictory trends. The explanations are provided by the Rev. Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith.
Malthusian pressures
The populations of cities shrank dramatically after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. This happened relatively simply in pre-modern times: all that had to happen for city populations to shrink is for folk to stop moving to cities from the countryside.
Cities are generally demographic sinks. This is so either because the cities are very unhealthy places—generally, but not always, true of pre-C20th cities—or because the “large family (demographic) tail” needed to generate positive fertility rates disappears.
It is not particularly unusual across history to have women who fail to produce any children that survive to adulthood, or only one, or only two. It is the shrinking—or worse effective disappearance—of the large family (demographic) tail that is fatal to fertility rates.
Cities—especially crowded apartment cities—are antipathetic to large families. This can be more or less true depending on how expensive children are, and how much women are behaviourally committed to motherhood, but the general pattern is quite clear.
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, folk stopped moving to cities as trade had collapsed and populations had fallen generally. The latter reduced Malthusian pressures. There was more land per person, which meant more access to animal meat and fat in particular. Folk consumed more (and better) calories with more nutrition, sustaining historically high average heights.
Lower population density also tends to be good for women, as there is more “all hands on deck” pressures up to, and including, women acting as “home guard”, given that the men are more likely to be away. Armed women naturally tends to raise the status of women. This was particularly notable on the steppes, where women were taught to shoot and owned the dwellings, the yurts or gers. It is a bad idea to annoy a woman who can kill you at 200 paces.
The invasion of Western Europe by physically large and robust Germanic peoples with traditions of shield maidens brought such low population density traditions to lands already suffering population decline from pandemics aggravated by said invasions.
Patterns of immiseration across history are usually set by population/land ratios. Post-Roman Dark Age Europe had more positive population/land ratios enabling more nutritionally ample lives.
Population was pushing much less against available local food resources, thus the ecological niches sustaining people were larger—despite the collapse in trade—and so were the people. Nothing surprising to the Rev. Thomas Malthus in this.
Smithian shrinkage
Yet, it was also the collapse of comfort. The collapse of the previous imperial order made travel—and so trade—much more dangerous. Markets, such as they were, became almost entirely local. The possibilities for Smithian specialisation dramatically shrank.
This shrinkage included collapse in specialisation in literacy. Hence “Dark Age”: with the lack of written records, the period becomes “dark to history”.
The collapse in literacy was not nearly as complete as in the Aegean Dark Age that followed the Late Bronze Age collapse. But we see the same collapse in trade, shrinkage or disappearance of cities, disappearance of literacy, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, just not as bad.
The Church had much to do with why the collapse in literacy was not as complete. But another reason is that states did not entirely disappear. Unlike Aegean Dark Age Greece and Anatolia, Western Europe did not collapse back to village-level organisation.
Many of the post-Roman states (particularly in the British Isles) were not much more than elevated chiefdoms. Nevertheless, there was more capacity to create and sustain a higher level of social order, and so social complexity.
Differing manorialisms
The pattern of loosening Malthusian constraints, but collapsing Smithian specialisation, had a great deal to do with why post-Roman manorialism was very different from Western Roman manorialism. The late Roman villas had two labour forces—the bound tenants (coloni) and slaves (servii). The former tended their leases, the latter the villa’s directly farmed land.
The late Roman villas had no significant role in providing public order—that was done by the (highly bureaucratised) late Roman state of the Dominate (284-476). Such villas also tended to be fairly specialised in what they produced.
Dark Age-cum-medieval manors were quite different. They had a single workforce of bound serfs, that both tended their own leases and worked on the manor-holder’s demesne. The manors were centres of a wide range of production: a range of crops, animals, various craft folk (notably blacksmiths).
The manors also produced local public goods. The manors had manorial courts and the manor holders were typically required to provide military service.
This enabled a high level of economising on administrative costs. It also provided the base for an unusual social pattern—a ruling elite grounded in the countryside, not cities. This, in turn, enabled the rise of self-governing commercial cities.
One of the paradoxes of medieval Europe is this system of castles-knights-manors-serfs also generated the most empowered commercial elites known in history up to that point: at least for any polities larger than city-states. It also generated the most sophisticated financial structures known up to that time.
Yes, the late Roman Republic and Early Empire was a vibrant commercial polity, with sophisticated law friendly to commerce. But much of that commerce was carried on by the landowning elite. There was really no equivalent of the armed—or at least defended by urban militias—commercial elites of medieval Europe, where ruler after ruler decided it was wise to incorporate their representatives in their deliberative bodies.
Raiding- versus ordering- predation
Predation on fellow humans is a general problem across human history, and prehistory. But there is a very large different between “raiding” predation and “ordering” predation.
Predation that is just about taking can be hugely destructive. Unless you are intending to enslave them, there is no restraint in keeping folk alive—you just take whatever you can.
The Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck—where only 1-in-17 male lineages survives—tells us how horrible it is when predation is simply about killing the men and taking the women. That bottleneck arose because there were assets to defend—farms and herds—that generated enough resources to enable continuing aggression at the level of kin-groups. It ended up with lots of slaughtered men and boys—hence the disappearance of so many male lineages—and women who bred with their rapists who had killed all their male relatives.
This was intense selection among men for effective teams and among women—somewhat less intensely—for compliant accommodation.
What brought this to an end was the development of chiefdoms and states. Suddenly, there was a reason to keep men alive and families intact—so you could tax them. That also gave you are reason to protect them. Yes, chiefdoms and especially states were structures of predation, but structures of ordering predation: a very different phenomenon than raiding predation.
Public goods have a scope problem
Ordering predation involved providing public goods to protect those you were taxing (and to facilitate taxable trade). Something economists seem to miss is that public goods—services that are non-rivalrous (many folk can consume at once) and non-excludable (you cannot pick and choose who gets the service)—have a scope problem. Yes, you can fund them via taxes—coerced payment—but you still have an issue with taxing who and protecting whom? This is the scope problem.
Again and again, public and private providers of public goods solve this problem by tying them to locality/territory. That is, folk in this area will pay the taxes—and be protected so they can. In other words, the public goods are territorialised and so, in effect, turned into club goods. Territoriality solves the scope problem.
Medieval Europe, with its myriad of local public good providers—whether holders of manors, or the militias of the walled, self-governing cities—generated very different politics than societies where a centralised state dominated the provision of public goods.
The imperial bureaucracies of Dominate Rome strangled the self-governing cities that enabled the Principate (27BC-284) to so dramatically economise on administrative costs. The autocratic bureaucracies of imperial China made sure that there were no self-governing cities. Chinese bureaucratised autocracy dealt with the limits of centralised command-and-control in such a vast state by having self-governing clans. This had very different social and institutional implications than the no-kin-groups, self-governing cities of medieval Europe.
Islam, and Brahmin civilisation—with their revelation-based law that precluded entrenching formal political bargaining in law—limited the political possibilities to autocracies that came and went while leaving remarkably little institutional legacies behind them.
The only other civilisation that produced disseminated rural-based political power, and commercial elites with significant institutional power, was daimyo-and-samurai Japan. Local, rural-based, ordering-predation of a castle-dwelling elite again produced a distinctive outcome.
That the institutional structure of Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was so like that of Europe in 1468 meant that Japan could just fast-forward 400 years of European-cum-Western political and technological development. This the Japanese state did so effectively that, by 1904, Japan was more industrialised than Spain or Portugal—who had been imperial powers since 1500. Hence Japan’s ability to defeat Imperial Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.
Both medieval Europe and medieval Japan generated franchised public goods. From vassals and fiefs to modern franchised services such as McDonald’s, and charter schools, franchising has regularly been the main alternative to bureaucratised provision by command-and-control for coordination-at-scale.
Historically inadequate economic growth models
All of which makes something of a nonsense of the sequence of mainstream economic growth models, from the Keynesian Harrod-Domar growth model, to the Solow-Swan growth model, and the Mankiw–Romer–Weil version of the latter model. Models that sit very badly with the expanding long-term economic growth literature nicely presented in Garett Jones’ The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left.
The aforementioned growth models presume that technology evades Malthusian constraints—which was not true for most of human history, except to a very limited degrees at the margin—and that there are no blocks to either Smithian growth via specialisation or Schumpeterian growth via innovation. Yet collapse in specialisation possibilities, and blocks to innovation, are both recurring features of economic history.
Much more seriously, these models assume away social blocks, or serious social frictions, for the simple creation, use and combination of factors of production. The deep economic growth literature shows quite clearly that such assuming away is a nonsense. Folk are not interchangeable, optimising social widgets. In particular, culture—including cultural distance—matters. Assuming away social blocks, and social frictions, is a mistake also made by much migration economics that the same deep economic growth literature is also demolishing.
Malthus, Smith and bargaining politics
So, Dark Age Europe had both a reduction in Malthusian pressures, leading to tall, well-fed folk—despite the collapse of trade and the demise of comfort—and a collapse in trade leading to a dramatic shrinkage in Smithian specialisation and a collapse in comfort and literacy.
From this arose—based on a public-order-providing manorialism—a devolved system of ordering-predation that also enabled the development of a politically empowered mercantile elite, one with increasingly sophisticated financial services. Courts that were themselves commerce-friendly—or could be pushed into being so—were a significant element in this. Both because of self-governing cities that lived on commerce and local magnates that wished to attract trade to their localities, including by promoting trade fairs.
That law was human—so political bargains could be entrenched in law and different legal arrangements could be experimented with—was crucial. Single-spouse marriage, enabling much more productive use of the talents of women—particularly elite women—also helped greatly. The Church and the manorial elites coming together to suppress kin-groups enabled the development of a much wider range of mechanisms for social cooperation.
Thus, that the Church sanctified—and in some ways extended—the Roman synthesis of: law as human, single-spouse marriage, no cousin marriage, consent for marriage and testamentary freedom, was a key set of building blocks in all of this. Nevertheless, it was possible to produce much of the key institutional arrangements without that specific synthesis: medieval Japan demonstrated that.
Avoiding over-centralised state power—and its socially-imperial bureaucracies—via a decentralised elite proved, over the longer term, to be a major social and institutional advantage for both medieval Christendom and medieval Japan.
A pervasive advantage that contemporary, poorly controlled and accountable, socially-imperial bureaucracies seem to be in the process of throwing away. For what is known as “wokery” is precisely the politics of networks—motivated and coordinated by ostentatiously moral purposes—taking over such bureaucracies and giving them overweening moral purposes that block accountability: for to question purpose, action or effect is to commit a sin against those trumping moral purposes.
We saw this is the responses to Covid—to question whether measures were appropriate was wanting to kill grandma. We see this in responses to Trans—to question whether “gender affirming care” is appropriate is to want “trans kids” to kill themselves. We see this in the response to immigration—to question whether migration is socially positive, and whether all migrants are equally so, is to hate migrants. And so on. The activist’s fallacy:
We are doing X to achieve Y,
You question/are against X,
Therefore
You are against Y,
is working overtime.
All of which is highly moralised—but deeply self-serving, if in a
highly self-deceptive way—wielding of moral legitimacy to achieve dominating social leverage. The attack on open debate, and so on accountability, is profound. But if you think you own morality, own knowledge, own psychological soundness, there is no limit to how grandiose one’s toxic social stupidity-through-arrogance can become. Until and unless there is revolution, civil war or civilisational collapse.
ADDENDA: A comment notes that “another important consideration is the Plague of Justinian, that took out up to 1/5th of the population. This meant that those who survived had on average an addition 20% resources available to them.”
In Western Europe, there had already been a significant collapse in trade and political fracturing, so the Malthusian effect dominated. The earlier Antonine and Cyprian plagues had just led to more extraction by ruling elites (i.e. an increase in ordering predation), through labour bondage and state bureaucracy.
References
Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.
Richard Hodges & David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne & The Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis, Cornell University Press, 1983.
Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.
W.M. Jongman, J.P.A.M. Jacobs,, & G.M. Klein Goldewijk, ‘Health and wealth in the Roman Empire,’ Economics & Human Biology, (2019). 34, 138-150.
Joseph R. McConnell, Andrew I. Wilson, Andreas Stohl, Monica M. Arienzo, Nathan J. Chellman, Sabine Eckhardt, Elisabeth M. Thompson, A. Mark Pollard, and Jørgen Peder Steffensen, ‘Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity,’ Proceedings National Academy of Sciences USA, 2018, May 29;115(22):5726-5731.
Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997.
Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, (trans.) Gerard Chapple, University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2010.
Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34.
Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham & Luke Glowacki, ‘Self-Interest and the Design of Rules,’ Human Nature, August 2017.
Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127.
Edward Peter Stringham, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077.
Fascinating. Thanks for this.
Another strong showing. The common ground shared by medieval Europe and Japan - particularly interesting! More like this please.