Paying up: Numidian peasants and the wider economy

In an important prolegomenon to her new book, Surviving Rome, Kim Bowes calls for a qualitative, microhistorical approach to Roman economic history, in order to build the large mosaic of the Roman economy from smaller, case-based tesserae.1 Such a bottom-up approach would contrast the large-scale, muscular models like those of Scheidel and Friesen, which take on the whole of the Roman economy, with more nuanced accounts of its separate parts.2 Paolo Tedesco's new book offers just such a microhistory: a detailed analysis of the world of the Albertini tablets, produced by the peasants who lived on the Fundus Tuletianos in southern Numidia at the end of the 5th c.CE.He then uses the vantage point established by this microhistory to examine a much longer chronology of the relationship between producers, landowners, and the state.The book begins with an overview of the settlement patterns of later Roman North Africa, starting with the extensive imperial properties, which were leased to members of the elite or farmed directly by conductores through tenants.The emperor owned between a quarter and a third of all the arable land, while most of the rest consisted of large, privately owned estates, the patrimony of Roman senators such as Symmachus, the Roman churches, and the provincial élites.Further down the scale, the curial class, and with them the African bishops, were always landowners.There is not much trace of smallholders; although surveys such as that of Dougga show a dense network of occupied sites, these may have been the homes of tenants rather than independent landowners.3 At the bottom rank of the producers were the wage laborers, who worked seasonally, perhaps to supplement inadequate incomes from their own farming.The African picture, as elsewhere, is thus a highly variegated one, but as a whole seems to consist largely of peasants bound by more or less onerous contracts of tenancy to landowners of various ranks.Over all loomed the demand of the Roman state for taxes, and specifically the annona that fed Rome.Tax collection was the responsibility of the municipal curiales, who were either oppressed by shortfalls or enriched by skimming, depending on their networks and skill.This fiscal role of the municipia has been stressed by Chris Wickham as fundamental to the prosperity of the towns.4 The arrival of the Vandals changed some of that, and broke the