
A year-by-year history of economic growth and pollution in the Roman Empire - wisemang
https://kottke.org/18/05/a-year-by-year-history-of-economic-growth-and-pollution-in-the-roman-empire
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montrose
That graph is fascinating to someone who's studied a lot of ancient history.

The thing that strikes me most is how bad things were after the fall of the
Western Roman Empire. Yes, the eastern half kept chugging along. But judging
from this data, it didn't chug very hard.

Another striking thing is how bad things things seem to have been in the first
century BC. Apparently the problems during that time were not merely political
squabbles at the top of a society that otherwise kept operating as usual.

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icegreentea2
Well remember that this record is a proxy of silver refining activity in
Spain. I haven't had a chance to read the actual paper, but I don't think this
dataset would well capture information regarding the activity of the Eastern
Empire's mining/production centers.

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montrose
That is interesting: the Riotinto silver was mixed with lead to a degree that
eastern sources weren't?

(If that's the explanation, another interesting thing about this graph is the
uptick in the early 700s, presumably due to the Moorish invasion. By 750 they
seem to have been mining on a greater scale than the Romans, which is not what
I'd have expected.)

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icegreentea2
I don't know if the lead/silver mix was different.

The paper specifically calls out mining activity around the Rhine as having
significant impact on the lead signal, with a 2-5 fold greater impact compared
to Spanish sites. The authors suggest that the 700s spike in lead pollution
was driven by increased activity in France and Britain (which once again has a
many fold greater impact on this measurement than in Spain).

Also, doing a cursory look at sources suggests that the eastern empire relied
far more on gold and bronze coinage than silver, suggesting another possible
source for the lack of an Eastern Empire signature.

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montrose
They think there was a lot of mining going on in England in 750?

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icegreentea2
Huh, interesting. The paper calls out activity around Derbyshire, and cites a
book "Mining, metallurgy and minting in the Middle Ages". The book itself
appears to focus on a later period.

Poking around, it looks like there is evidence for lead mining in the
Derbyshire region possibly including Roman times, but there isn't any great
data floating around.

The other source the authors suggested (Merovingian mining and coin production
in France at Melle) seems to have far stronger evidence for large scale
production in that time period.

~~~
montrose
I have no trouble believing there was extensive lead mining in England in
Roman times, but it's harder to believe it was happening in 750. I can't think
of anything the Anglo-Saxons would have been using lead for, and it's hard to
imagine there was much of an export trade. I would also be surprised if the
Franks were making silver coins on anything like the scale the Romans did.

On the other hand, the lead's there in the data; it must have come from
somewhere; so that part of the graph seems to me the most intriguingly
mysterious bit.

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xtiansimon
Slightly off-topic (but if we're looking back to the Roman Empire, I think on-
topic lense might have trouble focusing. haha), this link reminds me of an
interesting MOOC, Critical Perspectives on Management [1] on Coursera. And the
first week starts with _The Lessons from Rome_:

"In Ancient Rome, merchant organisations very similar to modern firms were
critical to capitalising key markets and to solving serious logistical
problems to enable a vibrant trading network across the Mediterranean,
including, critically, supplying the city of Rome itself with the food its
citizens needed to survive. We will examine the Roman grain market and the
organisations that operated within that market to ask: what, exactly, is a
firm? What led to the firm's evolution? And what is the issue of agency that a
firm inevitably entails?" (from the syllabus)

[1]: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-
management](https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-management)

