Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa Erika T. Hermanowicz Leslie Dossey Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 47 Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010 Pp. xix + 352. This is an exciting and innovative book that looks beyond the literature generated by elites to understand better the lives of the North African peasantry. Dossey utilizes an impressive array of evidence—especially archaeological surveys and anonymous Christian sermons collected for use by parish priests—to get us closer to the people who otherwise make only a faint impression on the historical record. The author sets aside traditional ideas regarding peasant resistance to Roman hegemony and concludes that the social tension marking the fourth through the sixth centuries, including unrest among the Circumcellions, is actually attributable to the rural population's desire to participate in the "same material culture, community structures, and intellectual currents as were affecting urban society" (174). The book is divided into three parts, introduced by an historical overview (Chapter One). In the first part (Chapters Two and Three), Dossey discusses how Roman occupation in the first centuries of the common era severely disrupted North Africa's economy as well as traditional settlement patterns. Rural consumption was very low, too low to attribute it exclusively to economic factors. While others have concluded that these consumption patterns indicate insufficient "Romanization," Dossey argues that social constraints were placed on peasant participation in the market. The expectation that rustics were only to sell goods, not buy them, was fulfilled by the power of the local decurions, who extracted surplus in the form of taxes and ran the municipalities that regulated the production of goods. A radical shift occurred during the fourth through the sixth centuries. Fineware reached its peak of distribution, and other items, such as clothing, metal, glass, and coinage, enjoyed an increase. This is not indicative of demographic change, but a consumer revolution. Rustici were now obtaining goods. Dossey believes that the origins of this phenomenon did not come from Mediterranean trade, as some have argued, but from the chaos of the third century. The fracturing of relationships between the provinces and the centers of empire, including the decentralization of mints, promoted the development of regional industries and the circulation of coinage. What began in the third century came to fruition in the fourth, when elites became more amenable to rural entrepreneurship. The local decurions, who once exercised control over the peasantry, had largely been replaced in estate ownership by senatorial, absentee landlords. The latter were not as threatened by peasant consumption and willing to allow the development of workshops and markets on their estates. One would expect that the new wealth of the North African countryside would have led to the formation of more cities, but between the early fourth and sixth centuries the emperors created none. Dossey attributes this hiatus to imperial disillusionment with local self-government, another reaction to the crisis of the [End Page 609] third century. Explaining how North African villages and estates established or maintained communal recognition in the face of imperial resistance constitutes the second part of the book (Chapters Four and Five). The answer was the church. In the fifth century, the provinces of North Africa had more bishops than any other place in the empire, and while the struggle between the Catholics and Donatists is partly to blame, Dossey argues that the push to ordain bishops actually came from rural populations who were seeking to become self-governing communities. Rustici who had previously thought of themselves only as members of their separate estates now looked to their cathedrae for identity. The North African peasantry was not only wealthier than it had ever been, but also politically active. In the third part of the book (Chapters Six and Seven), Dossey asserts that these rural bishops and their clergy preached and read to their congregations, creating not just political communities, but textual ones, defined in Brian Stock's The Implications of Literacy (1987) as people organized into a "group centered on the shared internalization of canonical texts" (174). At the core of such North African communities was, of course, the Bible, whose stories...