Shane Bobrycki - Economic Welfare and Demographic Decline: The Case of the Early Middle Ages


Demographic decline has been called the "fundamental characteristic" of early medieval Europe, c. 500–1000 CE. Yet this thinning of European populations has given rise to open questions too. How do we reconstruct population trends from scanty records? What causal role should we attribute to factors such as climate change, disease, war, migration, and socioeconomic change? What variations prevailed in time and space? The subject of this talk is one of these debated questions: what was the relationship between depopulation and economic welfare? Was it a good thing or a bad thing that European populations shrank by a third or more, and remained low for centuries thereafter? Some economic historians have seen demographic decline as economically calamitous, reducing specialization and leading to stagnation. Others see it as a boon for the lower orders, who may have eaten better, suffered less from disease, avoided some surplus extraction, and lived longer. This talk considers the evidence for the impact of depopulation on medieval living standards, and asks what may be the relevance of this distant history for demographic change in our own time.



This seminar took place in person on Wednesday 8 March 2023 at 12.00 EST in the Lee Gathering Room, CGIS S030, Harvard University AND via Zoom.