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5. Late Antique Tax Policy and Incentives for Investment
- University of Michigan Press
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163 Chapter 5 Late Antique Tax Policy and Incentives for Investment %% The reliance of the Roman state and of many private landowners on the continued production of tenants in long-term tenure arrange‑ ments created a degree of institutional path dependence with important consequences for the empire’s agrarian economy. This institutional path dependence is especially apparent in the fourth century and later. In this period, the difficulty of altering fundamental institutional arrangements imposed serious constraints on the Roman government as it struggled to maintain a fiscal system whose basic principles included the binding of certain categories of farm tenants (coloni) to the soil that they cultivated. In this chapter, I focus on the economic implications of late antique fiscal legislation. I do not provide a full account either of agrarian conditions in the later Roman Empire or of the changing legal status of coloni. Rather, I am concerned with tracing the likely effects on the incentives for invest‑ ment that late Roman fiscal policy created, as well as the response of the Roman government to the legal problems engendered by its fiscal policy. Consequently, my focus is primarily on analyzing the legislation itself, es‑ pecially as it provides a way to discern the capacity of the Roman govern‑ ment to develop laws that promoted growth in the rural economy. The efforts of the Roman government to restrict the movement of coloni had important consequences both for the incentives to invest in agriculture by landowners and tenants and more broadly for the role that law played in defining relationships in the rural economy. The govern‑ ment bound coloni to their land to establish a more certain and reliable basis for taxation, and this policy was linked with the tendency in the early Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire 164 empire for many tenants to remain on their estates for long periods of time. The government imposed much of the responsibility to collect taxes and provide revenues to the state on large landowners, and it also undertook to ensure landowners had the means to meet these fiscal obligations by restricting the mobility of the rural workforce. At the same time, restrict‑ ing the mobility of coloni formed part of a broader policy in late antiquity of ensuring the performance of jobs or other functions critical to the state by making them hereditary.1 The government’s interest in coloni in the fourth century was chiefly the product of its fiscal policy. For this reason, it perhaps makes more sense to speak of coloni bound to the land rather than to use the term colonate, since this term suggests the existence of a new class of farmers in a semiservile condition.2 Still, one must recognize that the Roman government’s fiscal policy helped to alter fundamental aspects of the relationship between landowners and tenants, placing many tenants in a more socially dependent relationship than had existed in the early empire.3 The problem was that the government’s fiscal policy ran up against the realities of the late imperial economy: market forces often induced powerful landowners and even some coloni to defy this legal order with apparent impunity. Their defiance of this legal order indicates their efforts to bargain around a legal institution that at times hampered poten‑ tially more efficient allocations of resources. This situation had unintended consequences for the role of the state in the rural economy. The need to maintain the empire’s tax base compelled the government to intervene in the rural economy repeatedly, and it is likely that the legal policies and institutions of the central government played a greater role in the rural economy in late antiquity than they had in previous centuries. At the same time, the contradiction between the binding of coloni to their land and the realities of the agrarian economy drove much of the bargaining beyond the shadow of the law, in that ten‑ ure arrangements between landowners and tenants who left their land were not enforceable in Roman courts of law. This circumstance tended to compromise the authority of Roman legal institutions. The government intervened in the rural economy to define the obligations of landowners and coloni within the empire’s fiscal system in the face of the apparent mobility of many coloni, and to check the growing power that landowners exercised, at least in part, as a result of the imperial government’s fiscal policies.4 The distortions in the market surrounding land tenure repre‑ sented...