Paolo Tedesco: The Rise and Fall of North Africa’s Peasantry

The Rise and Fall of North Africa’s Peasantry: A Study in Formal Subordination
Paolo Tedesco, University of Tübingen

This paper traces the rise and fall of the North African peasantry between the fourth and the seventh century CE.
Building on Brent Shaw’s seminal study Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World, I argue that Late Antiquity was the highpoint of African wage labour participation in the Roman imperial economy. In this period, the percentage of wage labour as part of the economically active population rose consistently. This process is observable elsewhere in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the fifth to the seventh century.
While Shaw’s study correctly identifies the main motors of wage employment and organization of agriculture in the dynamics of the local ecology and harvest cycles, this paper claims that the late antique monetary revolution determined a major re-organization of rural labour forces. Without altering the predominance of a mixed labour regime (that pulled together tenants, slaves, and wage-labourers under the legal framework of the "colonate"), the penetration of money in rural areas generated a polarization between two main social classes. These were defined by factors of land or capital on the one hand, and of labour, on the other. The result of this was an increased subordination of peasant labour to coercion, debt bondage relation, involuntary retention, and, at times, "proletarianization".