"The Missing Factor": Economy and Labor in Late Roman North Africa (400–600 CE)

This article examines the re-emergence of commercialized agriculture from the fourth century onwards and the related penetration of the monetary economy into the rural areas, and it seeks to demonstrate a causal connection between economic expansion, wealth accumulation, and the increase of wage laborers—of landless peasants in particular. It accordingly argues that as a form of organization of labor, tenancy remained quantitatively predominant, but it was the very existence of a supplementary labor force composed of slaves and wage laborers that made tenancy so resilient in the face of changes in market demand. While slavery played a pivotal role in elite control over the commercialized production of specific cash crops, by offering a flexible seasonal labor supply, wage-labor assured the elasticity necessary for large, landed infrastructures. In essence, this article shows that it was this mixed labor regime that provided the real pay-offs. It also claims that since this regime was accompanied by the increased predominance of gold in all types of transaction, the process of economic growth widened the polarization between the two main social classes, one defined by factors of land or capital and the other by labor. This state of affairs generated as a further consequence the reaction of the laborers, which mainly took the form of an increased, and at times a strategic, mobility.