I subscribe to Paul Krugman’s Substack and read it every day because he explains the economy in ways I can understand. He’s also one of the few experts who, on the rare occasion he gets something wrong, owns it and tries to make sense of where he failed. So he has my trust, respect, and reader loyalty. Highly recommend. (He also won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008.)
In one of his recent posts, he wrote:
“According to social media, many men are obsessed with the Roman Empire. I’m not one of them, partly because I’ve read Patricia Crone’s classic Pre-industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, so I know that even at the height of its glory the Roman Empire would have looked incredibly poor and shabby by 21st-century standards.”
Since I’m working on a Roman Era historical fantasy, I had to read that book right away. My goal is to depict the Roman Empire as accurately as I can, even though I veer into fantastical elements. I know I won’t get everything right—and as I’ve written before, I hate writing violence, which is a big part of history.
Mind blown by a discovery
Right away, I found interesting details for my story (I’ll get to those in a minute), but I didn’t expect to have my mind blown by a completely different yet related idea about Europe (in the second part of the book).
In the author’s words:
“As a traditional society [Europe] was a failure long before it capped its deviant development by its invention of industry.” (p. 174)
And:
“There is only one respect in which all non-European civilizations genuinely resemble each other more than Europe, and that is in their successful discovery of durable solutions to the problems inherent in pre-industrial organization. Europe failed: had it succeeded, it would have remained a pre-industrial society.” (pp. 199-200)
Growing up in a European country, I had always assumed that the path to modernity I studied in school was more or less the default path for most societies. Patricia Crone argues the opposite: that Europe stumbled into modernity by failing at being a successful pre-industrial state.
“the historical record suggests that all non-European paths were leading towards modified versions of the same societies, not towards that evolved in Europe.” (p. 199)
“Europe failed to devise a socio-political and cognitive order in which a united elite kept both the high culture and the society it sanctioned in place and in which drastic change was impossible because all the key members of society had too strong an interest in the order that prevailed.” (p. 200)
To compare, she offers the example of China (and not only):
“China is a star example of a successful civilization: the problems inherent in pre-industrial organization had here been solved with such expertise that people could do more thinking and accumulate more wealth than ever before without thereby undermining the prevailing order. China reached the pinnacle of economic development possible under pre-industrial conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different direction are in evidence; no movements towards take-off were blocked.” (pp. 200-201).
The reasons Europe diverged are many. To begin with:
“Europe was formed by barbarian invaders who adopted a religion of Hebraic origin which had long coexisted with Graeco-Roman culture, or in other words there were three quite different components to European civilization. This fact was of immense importance for the subsequent evolution.” (p. 187)
Add to that Europe’s rain-fed instead of irrigation-based agriculture, the constant fragmentation caused by barbarian attacks, the existence of a church parallel to the component states, the dissolution of tribal ties, the development of feudalism, the state’s loss of taxation power, the self-management of towns (in the absence of states that could defend life and property), and the emergence of individualism. Crone argues that many traits we now consider precursors of modernity were actually undesirable in a successful pre-industrial society.
Pre-Industrial Societies was written in 1989 and is still studied in colleges and universities. I don’t know if Patricia Crone’s theory is definitive, and there might be other scholars out there arguing the opposite. My point is that her theory can be correct—and if so, some of the things we take for granted about history might need a second look. If you have time to check it out, you may agree or draw a different conclusion.
Returning to the pre-industrial details I was researching, here are three ways this book influenced the worldbuilding and characters in my work-in-progress.
The ancient labor market was very different from today (pp. 39-42)
Since most workers were either forced into labor or inherited their jobs, there was little demand for a labor market in the pre-industrial world, which includes the Roman Empire and its neighbors. Outside those two sources of labor (forced and inherited), seasonal work was traded with relatives and neighbors. When there was need for permanent work, it was dominated by contracts of adoption. Instead of paying wages, an employer made a worker part of their household.
“The fact that neutral labour barely existed in the pre-industrial world had the further effect that you were unlikely to get very far without patronage. You had to know somebody who knew your employer and who could recommend you, guarantee your reliability and assure him that you were of the right social, political and religious background.” (p. 41)
A reality of the time was that…
“Wherever trust mattered as much as or more than skills, nepotism was a virtue, not a sign of corruption.” (p. 42)
For someone like me, who left my native country with a job at a global corporation, nepotism sounds bad. But for the Romans it was good. As an aside, with all the AI-enabled scams everywhere now, we might need to fall back on a kind of “trust economy” where we’re less open to doing business with strangers, at least for a while. It would be interesting to see whether we end up circling back to something older until we figure out how to protect ourselves from these new dangers. Word of mouth over ads and so forth.
In my novel:
With this new understanding of the pre-industrial labor conditions, I sketched a new subplot: After much effort, my protagonist secures an apprenticeship for her son with a blacksmith. The boy lives in the blacksmith’s household and is considered part of it. His mother can visit him and send money and supplies, but he doesn’t come home. To open his own shop someday, he’ll need patronage from someone higher up. His mother will try to get that from the king.
The Roman Empire was afraid of the power of its provinces (p. 69)
In the times of Emperor Trajan, who is a character in my novel, Governor Pliny the Younger, who is the inspiration for my main antagonist, asked for permission to form a fire brigade of 150 men in a town that had been devastated by fire (Pliny the Younger, Letters X.33). The emperor refused (Trajan, Letters X.34) because…
“whatever name we give to [such associations], and for whatever purposes they may be founded, they will not fail to form themselves into dangerous assemblies.”
The emperor thought it was too risky to allow local people to organize, even to fight fires. But a resilient population would have been good for the empire’s health. This was a vulnerability of the Roman Empire that neighboring kingdoms such as the Gauls and the Visigoths exploited for centuries.
In my novel:
Drawing directly from this, I added a subplot where my protagonist, who’s fighting the Romans, starts a fire in the provincial capital of Viminacium. The Roman governor makes sure the fire is extinguished. He then wants to form a fire brigade to prepare for the next attack, but the emperor stops him. The governor’s good planning clashes with the empire’s fear of provincial power.
I was familiar with this episode from the Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger, which I read years ago. But until Patricia Crone explained it in context, I didn’t think to use it in my novel. Sometimes it takes me a while to connect the dots. Sigh…
The overall idea that I should always question my historical assumptions
Whenever I read a book for my novels’ worldbuilding, the effect is hard to quantify. Once I absorb the knowledge, every scene I draft is filtered through it. In this case, the main realization is that many things I take for granted in the modern world become open questions in a pre‑industrial one.
Historical fantasy novels often blend modern sensibilities with old standards of living without much contradiction. It makes sense that they do that, since authors write for readers with modern values. I don’t intend to reconstruct history to the point where it becomes unrecognizable to our everyday expectations of life, emotions, and values. But I do want to depict a Roman Empire most readers wouldn’t want to live in, echoing Paul Krugman’s point at the top of this essay.
