Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 287
squeezed labour market, which may briefly have advantaged small agricul-
turalists but also impelled large landowners towards registered tenancy as a
mechanism for ensuring that they could call on the labour of their originarii.109
These explanations fit with long-established paradigms for interpreting long-
term socio-economic changes in the countrysides of the late- and post-Roman
world. But they lack precision when pressed into service to explain events or
processes over a period of less than a century. In this concluding section, there-
fore, I employ a collection of concepts drawn from the interdisciplinary field of
disaster studies to signal an alternative way of engaging with the experience of
rural populations during the Ostrogothic period. I make no pretence of com-
pleteness or comprehensiveness, but seek rather to point towards a new set
of tools for exploring the particularities of rural economies in the Ostrogothic
period.
Over the past several decades, scholars engaged in the study of disasters
have developed a collection of concepts that serve to relocate the focus of
attention from the crisis moment or hazard—for example, an earthquake, a
volcanic eruption, or a military invasion—to the longer-term socio-economic
structures and societal processes that together constituted a society or commu-
nity’s experience of that hazard—and most importantly what that experience
allows us to say about the nature of the disaster as an unfolding process.110 For
our present purposes, we may briefly explore two of these concepts: first, vul-
nerability or “the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity
to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a... hazard”;111
and second, resilience, a measure of an individual’s, group’s, or community’s
capacity to weather a sequence of hazards in quick succession.112
By employing these concepts, I suspect we will discover that the popula-
tions of rural Italy during this period were indeed vulnerable. But, because
these concepts demand that we pay closer attention to the collections of phys-
ical, environmental, socio-economic, and politico-military factors that con-
stituted the various micro-regions of the peninsula, we may be able to move
109 Lafferty, Law and Society, pp. 218–20.
110 For succinct, synthetic summaries of the state of the scholarship see Juneja/Mauelshagen,
“Disasters and Pre-industrial Societies”, pp. 4–7; Schenk, “Historical Disaster Research”;
Lindell, “Disaster Studies”.
111 Wisner et al., At Risk, p. 11.
112 For fuller exposition of the concept as used in Disaster Studies see the recent surveys
of Aldunce et al., “Framing Disaster Resilience”; Lizarralde et al., “Systems Approach to
Resilience”. Note also the suggestive observation of Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne,
p. 494.