Taxation, Commerce and the Economic Experience of Empire in Late Roman Sicily (20 min)

Presenters

James Gross, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

Taxation was the one facet of Roman rule that touched the lives of nearly all its subjects. Even the poorest farmers paid taxes, which the state transformed into pay and food for its soldiers and the populus Romani. In assembling the infrastructure, mobile capital, and human relationships necessary for this redistribution, the state created an immense network of exchange. To understand how taxation effected the lives of the empire’s subjects, this paper considers how not only the recipients, but the whole web of producers, artisans, and transporters were impacted by this network of forced exchange.

Within the prevailing, state-dominated model, taxation was a closed system operated by and for the benefit of the state. Compelled to pay at the point of a spear, taxation had a unidirectional impact on the taxed. With few exceptions, the experience of empire was reflected in the quantity of resources extracted by the state.

Drawing on recent scholarship on state power and new archaeology, I contend that the state-dominated model is flawed; Rome lacked the infrastructural capacity to tax its subjects through coercive force alone. Instead, taxation relied heavily on local collaborators whose cooperation was purchased through incentivization or negotiation. While the tax system remained extractive, within this devolved structure, the individuals implicated in taxation could make the system work for them by trading along its network.

The archaeological record of late antique Sicily reveals how this potential was realized in a province, which, starting in the fourth century, became integral to the supply of Rome. I combine rural survey evidence with the distribution analysis of pottery imports and exports to show that the intensification of state-driven redistribution along the fiscal axis linking Rome and North Africa via Sicily stimulated trade and instigated a shift toward commercial agriculture in the countryside.