One of the major problems of the late Roman Empire were the major landowners. These landowners evaded paying taxes and hid the best working men from state authorities to prevent them from being recruited in the army. This added to two problems the empire was facing. A lack of finances, and a shortage of manpower. Another factor hindering the Roman Empire (and most major states throughout history, TBH) was rampant inflation. Were there any measures the Romans realistically could have undertaken to take down the landowners and handle inflation? Now the ''solving'' of inflation is especially hard for the Romans since they had not discovered the concept, but there might be things they could have tried without the knowledge of inflation,
Roman reforms to curtail the landowners and Inflation
- Thread starter The Anglo-Dutch Union
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They understood inflation, hence Justinian's Edict on Maximum Prices; they just didn't have effective tools to control it.
Ah my bad. But was there anything they realistically could have done? They couldn't have taken cash out of circulation, but possibly a shift to paper cash such as china?
Shifting to unbacked currency during a period of low confidence in government-issued cuurency is literally the worst solution one could come up with, honestly...
Yes, but I'm searching for solutions for inflation, which was a constant even during stable years of Roman government. I'm not proposing they switch to a new currency just after Adrianople...
No, the inflation was ultimately due to supply-side issues: fifty years of agricultural and population losses from famine, plagues, civil war and foreign invasions, and the only real solution to wait it out until those things subsided. Paper money would have just resulted in Gresham's Law being called Diocletian's Law.
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Williams, S. (1996). Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, chapter 1 "The Third Century Collapse" ?
Is there some newer theory on the economic impact of the Crisis of the Third Century that I should be reading?
Oh, I see your point. The reason for debasement was to keep paying for military expenditures without raising taxes any further; but those expenditures and the inability to extract more taxes were because of the ongoing crises mentioned above (which from your chart we can see went back even past the third century). So both.
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Essentially yeah. But these reforms were made in the east, and could they have worked in the west? And these reforms did not touch upon the major landowner