Tag: medieval economy
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How Byzantine Silk Manufacturing Created Imperial Wealth
For centuries the Byzantine Empire controlled the production and distribution of the most valuable textile in the medieval world, extracting extraordinary economic rents from a silk industry that combined stolen Chinese technology with rigorous state regulation to produce both revenue and diplomatic currency. This article traces the full arc of Byzantine silk economics from the 6th-century acquisition of sericulture to its eventual displacement by Italian manufacturing competitors.
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The Economics of the Black Death
The Black Death killed between 30 and 50 percent of Europe's population in five years, and the resulting labor scarcity triggered a wage explosion, the collapse of serfdom, and a divergence between western and eastern European institutions that shaped the next five centuries. This is the economic history of how demographic catastrophe became economic revolution.
