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August 20 - November 13, 2022
Octavian emerged triumphant in the battle of Actium in 31 BC. By the following year, and for the next forty-five years, Octavian, known after 28 BC as Augustus Caesar, ruled Rome alone.
this transition from republic to principate, and later naked empire, that laid the seeds of the decline of Rome.
were at first political but then would have significant economic consequences.
Flavius Aetius was one of the larger-than-life characters of the late Roman Empire, hailed as “the last of the Romans” by Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Between AD 433 and 454, until he was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III, Aetius, a general, was probably the most powerful person in the Roman Empire.
late Roman Empire.
By the late Roman Empire, the so-called barbarians who were initially dominated and incorporated into Roman armies or used as slaves now dominated many parts of the empire.
All of this did not stop Roman elites from trying to appease barbarian commanders, often not to protect Roman territories but to gain the upper hand in internal power struggles.
BY THE EARLY fifth century, the barbarians were literally at the gate.
Augustus’s
changes in the structure of the army, which made secession impossible,
Tiberius,
abolished the Plebeian Assembly and transferred its powers to the Senate.
emperors began to rely not so much on the army made up of citizen-soldiers, but on the Praetorian Guard, the elite group of professional soldiers created by Augustus.
strengthened the aristocracy
property rights of common Romans less secure.
Septimius Severus seized power from Didius Julianus, who had made himself emperor after the murder of Pertinax in AD 193.
Any sense that there might have been of equality before the law deteriorated. For example, by the reign of Hadrian (AD 117 to 138), there were clear differences in the types of laws applied to different categories of Roman citizen.
more and more agricultural workers were reduced to semi-servile status and tied to the land.
The status of these servile “coloni” is extensively discussed in legal documents such as the Codex Theodosianus and Codex Justinianus, and probably originated during the reign of Diocletian (AD 284 to 305).
Growth was based on relatively high agricultural productivity, significant tribute from the provinces, and long-distance trade, but it was not underpinned by technological progress or creative destruction.
A remarkable thing about new technologies in the Roman period is that their creation and spread seem to have been driven by the state.
emperor Tiberius,
This is the fear of the economic effects of creative destruction.
Vespasian, who ruled between AD 69 and 79,
fear of political creative destruction.
Another important reason for the lack of technological innovation was the prevalence of slavery.
economic prosperity of Roman England:
By the fourth century, all were in decline, and after AD 411 the Roman Empire gave up on England.
By AD 450 all these trappings of economic prosperity were gone.
While the inhabitants of Jericho and Abu Hureyra were living in small towns and farming, the inhabitants of England were still hunting and gathering, and would do so for at least another 5,500 years.
By 3500 BC, large cities such as Uruk and Ur emerged in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq.
The Egyptian capital of Memphis emerged as a large city soon thereafter.
English divergence had historical roots, but the view from Vindolanda suggests that these roots were not that deep and certainly not historically predetermined.
By AD 450, at the start of what historians used to call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty and political chaos. There would be no effective centralized state in England for hundreds of years.
The fall of the Roman Empire was a crucial part of these common critical junctures.
From the north came the Vikings and Danes in their longboats. From the east came the Hunnic horsemen. Finally, the emergence of Islam as a religion and political force in the century after the death of Mohammed in AD 632 led to the creation of new Islamic states in most of the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, and Spain.
Feudal society was decentralized because strong central states had atrophied,
slavery disappeared from Europe.
power vacuum in which independent cities specializing in production and trade could flourish.
modern African country of Ethiopia, which developed from the Kingdom of Aksum, founded in the north of the country around 400 BC.
In AD 312, the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, as did King Ezana of Aksum about the same time.
Arabs, who, in the seventh century, expanded into the Red Sea and down the Arabian Peninsula.
system called gult, which involved a grant of land by the emperor.
gult holder had to provide services to the emperor, particularly military ones. In turn, the gult holder had the right to extract tribute from those who farmed the land.
After the seventh century, Ethiopia remained isolated in the mountains of East Africa from the processes that subsequently influenced the institutional path of Europe, such as the emergence of independent cities, the nascent constraints on monarchs and the expansion of Atlantic trade after the discovery of the Americas.
leading to sedentary life, hierarchy, and inequality—in short, extractive institutions. These took place first in Mexico and in Andean Peru and Bolivia, and led to the American Neolithic Revolution, with the domestication of maize.
The long period between the Neolithic Revolution, which started in 9500 BC, and the British Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century is littered with spurts of economic growth.
By the sixteenth century, Europe was institutionally very distinct from sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.
For example, it had developed representative institutions of a sort unseen there.
IN 1583 WILLIAM LEE
