How Complex was the Late Antique Economy: Subsistence or Highly-Integrated

LATE ANTIQUE ECONOMY
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Introduction
Late Antiquity is the period used explicitly by historians in describing the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world, the Near East, and mainland Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, and marked the end of the crisis of the Roman Empire and was contemporary with the Sasanian Empire. The late antique economy characterized agriculture, trade, and manufacturing. As a result, it was both a subsistence and highly-integrated economy. A subsistence economy focuses on providing basic human needs such as clothing, shelter, and food, rather than to the market. A highly-integrated economy is where efforts are channeled towards increased investment to support common trade, single currency, and industrialization to harmonize the policies and rules of trade and facilitate economic development. Thus, the late antique economy's complexity embeds the primary, secondary, and tertiary production activities.[William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado, "Recent research on the late antique countryside," (2004), 25.]
Primary Production
Like many other pre-modern economies, the late antique economy was from the activities of agricultural production. Agricultural production was a quest for subsistence (self-sufficiency) by individual families or other cohesive ethnic groups to improve their living standards. Similarly, agricultural production was a part of the highly-integrated economy committed to increasing the marketization and surplus production to reduce relative costs of goods in the market spheres and increase absolute wealth for both the individuals and states.
Climate Change
The states in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and mainland Europe regions survived, as the eastern part of the empire, the economic conditions were quite different from those witnessed in the western territories. In the eastern regions, the expansion of the intensive and extensive agricultural activities within the marginal environments inarguably served as the representations of the most outstanding element of the late antique economy. The phenomenon justifies a cooler and more humid climate experienced between the 4th and 6th centuries that promoted agriculture in the eastern provinces. It meant higher rainfall and permanent river watercourses. As a result, there were increased settlement patterns in North African regions such as Egypt, Libya, and Near East. The cooler and humid late antique climate promoted economic development in these eastern regions and is often blamed for economic decline in the western regions during the late antique period. The favorable climatic conditions in the eastern regions, which meant improved agricultural production, contributed to improved economic transformations of the late antique economy as a whole. Though the Western regions were not heavily involved in agriculture, they were still adequately supplied with the needed agricultural products through improved trade.[Arnold Hugh Martin Jones and Peter Astbury Brunt, The Roman economy: studies in ancient economic and administrative history, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 130-31.] [Luke A. Lavan and William Bowden, Theory and practice in late antique archaeology,...