Review by Paul Conlin
The Donkey & The Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180
Chris Wickham; Oxford University Press; 2023.
The global Covid pandemic we all lived through in 2020–23 brought new relevance—at least for many professional and amateur history buffs—to various global pandemics of the past. One well-known pandemic in popular culture is the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, which burst onto the scene from 1347 to 1353 by wiping out over a quarter of the world’s population, with flare-ups repeating for as long as 200 years after that.
That had been preceded, about 900 years prior, by a lesser-known and -understood “Plague of Justinian,” which put the final nail in the coffin—pun not intended, but still appropriate—to the Age of Antiquity and ushered in the Dark Ages. That plague appears to have not completely let up until the year 750 or so, and so the almost 600 years from 750 to 1347 were comparatively benign, in almost all of the world, from a demographic perspective.
And, of interest to actuaries, from an economic perspective as well. In Europe, the 12th and 13th centuries in particular were once known as the High Middle Ages; cultural, agricultural, and even scientific advances were starting to be recognizable as what we know today as the modern world. But even globally, there was much more long-distance trade than is generally appreciated. That’s what the eponymous “donkey” and “boat” of this book’s title are referring to—those goods were hauled short distances, by horse and donkey, to centers of commerce; then, less often but still significantly, long distances across the seas by boat. The author of this book is seeking to understand both conveyances, but with a conscious emphasis on the former.
A quick epistemological tangent is necessary and appropriate here. If you’re an amateur history buff like me, at some point in your reading journey you stumbled across one of the most famous (and impressive) history texts ever written, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean (or, more likely, its abridged edition), which—in tens of thousands of words and hundreds of color illustrations—recreates the state of European and global trade during “the age of Philip II,” which occurred in the second half of the 16th century. During that time, goods moved north and south in Europe via four “isthmuses,” as Braudel described them, which incorporated both well-known waystations such as Venice and Constantinople, and “surprises” such as the Besencon fairs (that age’s iteration of money market funds) and Ragusa (a wealthy metropolis that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1667 and is today known as Dubrovnik, Croatia). It was also an age in which Europe’s center of economic gravity was slowly migrating north, from Italy to the Netherlands and eventually to Britain.
Wickham gives a (somewhat passive-aggressive) footnote acknowledgment to Braudel on page 13 in at least three ways:
- He references Braudel in a single footnote, and then never mentions him again in the next 700-plus pages.
- He posits that Braudel’s illustrations and analysis skew to luxury goods, not quotidian goods used by the hoi polloi.
- Wickham claims that Braudel looks more at “the boat” (long-distance trade) than “the donkey” (short-distance trade), despite the fact that even in the globalized modern U.S., exports have never exceeded 7% of the economy.
All of this made the traditionalist in me chuckle, because in fact Wickham is simply doing what Braudel thought he himself was doing in the 1940s: acting the rebel against the establishment by ignoring kings and dukes and lords and instead giving voice to millers and coopers and the like. Now Wickham comes along and views Braudel as “the establishment,” and the cycle repeats itself. Sigh.
So, where Wickham declares himself to be going—and where he indeed proceeds to go—is to build up and synthesize a vast quantity of knowledge about the common folk, and their everyday activities, in five regional 950–1180 economies:
- Egypt
- North Africa and Sicily
- Byzantium
- Islamic Spain and Portugal
- North-Central Italy (“Lombardy”)
Plowing through the material is daunting and yet fun, all at the same time. I learned things I never knew I didn’t know about (learning about the “geniza,” an unimaginably vast ledger of centuries of trade transactions in Egypt, is alone worth the price of admission [and the hours of investment]).
So, why should a 21st-century actuary care about all this? Well, more than one reason:
- When the climate and demographics of Earth accommodate several consecutive centuries of slow-but-steady human progress, the gains—over time—are very impressive.
- Humans have an innate urge to trade with one another. They will create powerful networks of local, regional, and global economies if given the chance.
- Any period with an absence of such progress probably means there was something (or things) hindering that progress. It may have been something environmental, or some tyrannical taxing authority. The period of 950–1180 was unusually “blessed” with very weak state structures and royal ambitions in all five regions: Egypt had the strongest with the slowly waning Fatimid state; Lombardy in Italy had hardly any functioning state at all; the erstwhile Carolingian “Kingdom of Italy,” based in Pavia, remained vacant, allowing both coastal (Pisa, then Genoa) and inland (Milan, Verona) city-states to grow and flourish.
- Progress is not inevitable. If allowed to proceed, it will. But it’s also fragile as heck.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it … until another generation of historians comes along and challenges Wickham.
PAUL CONLIN, MAAA, FSA, has been an executive director as CVS Health since 1988.
