These diverse geographical features shaped the economic and political development of peninsular Italy. What are the implications of this diversity? The Romans, when developing their empire, would have had to develop a flexible strategy not only to deal with the various political configurations of peninsular Italy (as visible through some of the literary as well as archaeological sources), but also a flexible strategy to deal with the varied geographical features of the peninsula. The varied geographical fabric of peninsular Italy meant that there was no one demographic pattern, no one agriculture, no one industry, but a mosaic of patterns, illustrating an essential element of the longue duree of Italy.
The complexity of the interrelationship between humans and environment is illustrated by a series of cycles of interaction. One is a cycle of metallurgical production, forest clearance, and agricultural intensification. The later part of the first millennium BC was a period of intensified metallurgical production, both of iron and more precious metals such as silver. Increased availability of iron for agricultural production (as well as many other uses) would have facilitated more intensive agriculture and vegetational clearance through wide availability of cutting tools. This very clearance would have necessitated more metallurgical production to maintain the agricultural fields, and further clearance to maintain the large supplies of wood to produce the charcoal to produce the iron. A separate cycle may have involved the intensified silver production for coinage (a response in itself perhaps to intensified economic activity in the republican period, including the need even to pay for the military in times of political unrest; see also Chapter 3). This specialized activity also requires wood and has been claimed to be the cause of the first global pollution since lead levels (a byproduct of silver production) have been found in the ice of Greenland.45 The republican period is also a time of intensified ceramic production, which would have had similar resource requirements.
Another related cycle is that of agricultural expansion and changed ecological conditions with implications for health, particularly in the form of malaria.4 The regionally specific economic intensification of the Hellenistic/republican period may easily have led to increased erosion through increased runoff of water. It should, however, be pointed out that more local regional research needs to be undertaken to date precisely (by archaeological means) the episodes of alluviation. In these local conditions of erosion, the coastal conditions of specific parts of the peninsula may have been radically changed to have produced lagoonal conditions that promoted malaria. The high presence of disease not only would have affected age expectancy in those very specific regions affected, but also adversely affected the conditions of agricultural intensification, and without either the development of malarial immunity or the input of fresh manpower (by expendable slaves?) the very agricultural intensification, which initiated the cycle, would have been adversely affected. Similarly, urban centers would probably have needed to have been replenished constantly by an influx of population from more healthy, often rural, and usually upland areas.
Ecological collapse should not, however, be overstressed. In explanations of the later collapse of the Roman Empire, some authors have been tempted to overemphasize this explanation.47 Simplistic relationships must be avoided.48 Buffering and human response are the normal route. Problems encountered in the republican period may have had a response in terms of better land-use practice in the full imperial period. This makes collapse in the later Empire simply as a response to erosion and degradation less likely as a primary cause.
Some authors envisage a longue duree contrast between regions; Walker draws a contrast between the centrality of Tuscany (‘‘in the turbulent midstream of history’’) compared with the Marche (‘‘destined to remain in the backwaters’’).49 It must be recalled that impressions of southern Italy taken from modern land use and distribution of resources are profoundly affected by the events of post-Roman history.50 Southern Italy was the locus of prosperous Magna Graecia at the time of republican Italy. Today it is a landscape exhausted by overexploitation. There is a complex interplay between geography, economics, and politics, of which this chapter provides merely the geographical foundations.
World History
