A model of demographic and economic change in Roman Egypt after the Antonine plague

Abstract

Demography has long been an essential ingredient of economic history. Students of the “ancient economy”, by contrast, have been late to give demography its due weight, and attempts to illustrate the potential relevance of population issues have been rare.1 This case-study of Roman Egypt aims to interpret empirical evidence of economic change with reference to demographic factors. I will argue that in the late 2nd c. A.D. a severe mortality crisis triggered price and wage shocks, and that during the following century the resultant population loss contributed to a decrease in the return on land and to a rise in the real wages of workers. I must stress at the outset that my model is deductive in so far as it predicts specific developments based on the internal logic of economic and demographic relationships as illustrated or corroborated by comparative evidence from other periods, and also in that it seeks to situate and explain disparate samples of empirical data within a preconceived unifying interpretative framework. In this it is my goal to provide the most economical and internally consistent explanation for the largest possible amount of the available data. No explanatory model can ever be “complete” or even “correct” to the extent that it would accommodate every single artifact of historical information, eliminate the need for complementary explanations, or fully disentangle the complexity of historical events; rather, it needs to be judged in terms of whether it exceeds (actual or potential) comparably comprehensive alternative models in its capacity to interpret and explain the evidence in a logically coherent and historically plausible fashion.