Weber, Mickwitz, and the Economic Characterization of Late Antiquity

In ‘Finance, Coinage and Money from the Severans to Constantine’, which he published in 1975, Michael Crawford summed up the economic background of the late empire in the following terms: ‘Empire-wide, the debasement of the silver coinage brought about a move to the collection of taxes and the payment of soldiers and offcials largely in kind ... The monetary circle simply became increasingly meaningless. It was doubtless completely abolished in the end by Theodosius I.’1 Crawford’s assertion illustrates an important fact: the crux of the theory of a late imperial economic decline has always been some set of postulates about the monetary history of the fourth century.

Ancient history · Assertion · Economic history · Economics · Empire · Keynesian economics · Late Antiquity · Roman Empire · Classical Antiquity Studies · Computer Science · History