Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Fall of Rome. As always, I'm your host, Patrick Weiman. Thank you for joining me.

We've spent the last two episodes talking about the Roman economy before and during the fall of the Empire.

I suggested that what made the complex and enormously productive Roman economy stand out among pre-modern economies more generally

was a combination of a few things, including full monetization and price-setting commercial markets.

The most distinctively Roman thing about the Roman economy, though, was the sheer scale of the movement of goods from place to place.

Every economy since the Neolithic, and even earlier, has had room for long-distance trade of luxury items.

But what set the Romans apart was the fact that they moved huge quantities of low-value bulk items from place to place.

grain, olive oil, wine, woolens, and pottery all moved around and beyond the Mediterranean world, linking gall in North Africa, Iberia and Italy, the Balkans and Britain, into a tight economic unit built on the roads and ports funded and maintained by the Roman state.

But let's take a step back from this and consider the broader implications of all that movement.

Sacks of grain didn't pick themselves up and cross the sea, travel up river, or hop onto a cart to cross some mountains all on their own.

It was people who were doing the moving, and the goods were just along for the ride.

The Roman economy was just a reflection of and helped to drive the movement of huge numbers of people from place to place.

One good, well-reasoned estimate suggests that roughly 40% of the Roman Empire's population would have moved a substantial distance from their places of birth over the course of their lives.

For comparison, that's higher than the current lifetime rate of state-to-state migration in the United States, which is about 30%, and even after dropping in recent years, the United States rate of internal migration is really high compared to most of the developed world.

If that 40% estimate for the Roman Empire is correct, and I'd say there's good reason to believe that it is, then it helped to produce a level of personal mobility that wouldn't be matched for centuries to come.

The implications of all that movement are staggering for understanding the culture and society of the Roman Empire.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about what that level of mobility meant for the Roman world and how it fell apart.

I'm Patrick Weiman, and this is the Fall of Rome.

The Roman Empire was fundamentally a space of movement.

We've discussed at Great Link the movement of goods, and there were sailors and carters and boatmen and merchants who regularly made trips of various lengths from city to city, and town to town for commercial purposes.

They weren't the only ones moving, though.

The ships, roads, ports, and rivers of the Empire that carried trade goods also transported students traveling to intellectual centers, aristocrats and their entourage traveling from the city to one of their states, slaves on their way to market, priests, craftsmen, and other people.

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