I’ve been reading recently about the people of Southeast Asia who seem to have chosen a “lower” level of development – and a freer, less laborious life – with an attempt to look at a view of history from outside the nation state, and that took me on to Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Published in 1988 it is a book that sometimes shows its age (and I think its account of the Ik in northern Uganda – based on others’ research – is frankly bizarre and nonsensical; the controversy is discussed on Wikipedia).
But I found myself revisiting the thoughts of how many peoples through history might have chosen to move back to a lower level of complexity and technology, in the interests of a better life (a thought with obvious importance today).
Tainter is, as you’d expect, much interested in the fall of Rome, which he puts down to, as with other cases, to a decline on the rate of return on expansion, to the point where it starts to be negative: “the Empire had to maintain a far-flung, inflexible administrative and military structure on the basis of variable agricultural output, and in the face of an increasingly hostile political environment.” (p. 149) “During the fourth and fifth centuries .. The Empire… was suistaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population…. the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes… reduced finances weakened military defense, while military disasters in turn meant further loss of producing lands and population.” (p. 150)
His view of the so-called Dark Ages is rather different to the classic one: “The collapse yielded at the same time both a reduction in the costs of complexity and an increase in the marginal return on its investment. The smaller, Germanic kingdoms that succeeded Roman rile in the West were more successful at resisting foreign incursions (e.g. Huns and Arabs) than had been the later Empire. They did so, morever, at lower administrative and military costs. The economic prosperity of North Africa actually rose under the Vandals, but declined again under Justinian’s reconquest when Imperial taxes were reimposed. Thus the paradoz of collapse: a drop in compexity brings ith it a corresponding rise in the marginal return on social investment.” (p. 151)
So there as, Tainter suggests, often a welcome for the “barbarians”. “Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the burdens of Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory. … Zosimus, a writer of the second half of the fifth century AD, wrote of Thessaly and Macedonia that “as a result of this exaction of taxes city and ountryside ere full of laments and complaints and all invoked the barbarians and sought the help of the barbarians”.” (p. 147)
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