Kyle Harper

Huge amounts of the population are dying of this horrible sudden disease and the crops don't grow.

And you don't have microbiology and you don't have climatology.

So you explain it in the – with the resources of the worldview you have.

And there's a huge burst of like apocalyptic thought in the 6th and 7th century, which is always kind of there.

I mean you mentioned that Christianity's eschatological –

It is, yes, fundamentally.

But like that comes out in different ways with different sort of emphases and different time periods.

And this is a period, the 6th century, when there's a really sharp emphasis on eschatology in Christian thought.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, like I think this is like the sort of question that historians ought to worry about all the time.

Like we ought to be thinking about why didn't the Roman economy catalyze the takeoff?

Because in some ways it –

It was so precocious for its time period, and it seems not utterly impossible, right?

The Roman world is still a pre-industrial economy, so agriculture is the dominant sector.

The majority of people work in agricultural pursuits, and productivity is low.

They don't have modern mechanized traction.

They don't have modern synthetic fertilizers.

They don't have the modern –

Green revolution yields, all the things that have made agriculture stupendously productive.

So just like the primary sector is fairly limited in terms of its productivity because of the sort of limitations on technical inputs.