The last real depression

Fun article on the collapse of Rome and its affect on England in the Financial Times. Things didn’t go well and stayed bad for hundreds (600 or so)of years. The potter’s wheel disappeared, for heaven’s sake, and stayed disappeared for centuries. How can you lose the wheel? Wow.

For two or three hundred years, beginning at the start of the fifth century, the economy of Britain reverted to levels not experienced since well before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The most startling features of the fifth-century crash are its suddenness and its scale. We might not be surprised if, on leaving the empire, Britain had reverted to an economy similar to that which it had enjoyed in the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age. But southern Britain just before the Roman invasion was a considerably more sophisticated place economically than Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries: it had a native silver coinage; pottery industries that produced wheel-turned vessels and sold them widely; and even the beginnings of settlements recognisable as towns. Nothing of the kind existed in the fifth and sixth centuries; and it was only really in the eighth century that the British economy crawled back to the levels it had already reached before Emperor Claudius’s invasion. It is impossible to say with any confidence when Britain finally returned to levels of economic complexity comparable to those of the highest point of Roman times, but it might be as late as around the year 1000 or 1100. If so, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years.

The author, Bryan Ward-Perkins, is a British professor with several books to his credit, including “The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization”. That’s the kind of cheery title I like so I just put it on my Kindle. Cool.