How Ancient Rome Blew Up Its Own Business Empire (Bret Devereaux, May. 2nd, 2025, Foreign Policy)
Roman aristocrats, like all ancient elites, almost universally disliked trade and held the merchants who made it possible in contempt. Trade was seen as a sordid, cheating sort of thing (the theory of comparative advantage that explained how a merchant produced value honestly would not be developed until 1776) whereby merchants could gain wealth outside of the proper ways of being born rich or capturing wealth in war. Worse yet, trade generated wealth outside of the direct control of the landholding elites who dominated politics in nearly every ancient society.
Yet the Roman Empire benefited greatly from expanding Mediterranean trade between the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Roman policy encouraged trade and the economic growth it created lined Roman coffers too, at least until the Romans themselves fragmented the pan-Mediterranean trade zone they had created, impoverishing their empire and leaving it less able to face the challenges that would eventually lead to its fragmentation and dissolution in the West. […]
Beginning in 235, the Romans entered a period known as the Crisis of the Third Century: Five decades of renewed civil war shattered the unity of the empire and thus the unity and safety of its markets. Rival emperors, locked in brutal military competition, debased the currency to pay their soldiers and buy loyalty, leading the once reliable Roman currency system to become shaky at best.
Worse yet, when the crisis came to an end, the policies the newly triumphant emperors Diocletian and later Constantine pursued hardly favored economic freedom or the renewal of markets. When Diocletian’s fumbling efforts to stabilize the Roman currency system produced runaway inflation, he responded with the traditional expedient of attempting to fix prices, issuing an edict on maximum prices, the text of which is partially preserved today.
Like most such state interventions in the economy, the edict failed to stabilize prices. Meanwhile, Diocletian also revised the tax system, creating a bureaucratic, centralized, and cumbersome taxes that relied on a five-year census that was never regularly performed, leading to tax assessments that bore little resemblance to the economic activity they were taxing. In an effort to stabilize this system, Constantine, rather than creating a more agile tax system, created a less agile economy, forbidding tenant farmers to leave their lands in a forerunner of what would become European serfdom.
The result was that while the Roman economy stabilized, it did so as a less productive economy, more exposed to the decisions and caprice of emperors and one that provided, as a result, fewer resources for the Romans to defend their empire.
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