Wealthy West?

[prr]

I have been doing a lot of reading in the later empire era, and keep coming across a contrarian opionion that in fact, the West was just as wealthy as the East was. I was always taught that the East had a much longer urban tradition, and was closer to the trade routes from south-central Asia (indeed the Roman East was the terminus of those routes), so it was wealthier than the West. I have heard that the West was good in terms of manpower sources for the military, but that's about it.

 

Has anyone come across any sources that would insist the other side---that the West was just as wealthy? If so, are there any English writers that support that idea?

[Number Six]

Where do you happen to come across this idea that the West was as wealthy as the East was?

In the last thirty years or so, history of late antiquity has changed a lot, but it doesn't occur to me that anybody has seriously challenged the idea of an urbann decline in the West. The phenomenon, though, has been downsized and related to different causes than it used to be.

[caldrail]

Although agricuklture as a whole continued productively, there was an increasingly fragemented western economy, held back by high taxation and costs, further stifled by provincial lawlessness and piracy. Besides which, it had been a Roman policy to attempt to concentrate wealth in the east (which admittedly wasn't a total success but the same thing happened anyway).