It is usually difficult to determine the true scale of urban production activities without extensive excavation, since workshops were often quite small they may, however, have been numerous and scattered throughout a city. This article examines the evidence for production activities in the cities of Roman North Africa and shows how the importance of urban craft production has been largely overlooked in many discussions of the ancient economy. This state of affairs generated as a further consequence the reaction of the labourers, which mainly took the form of an increased, and at times a strategic, mobility. This piece also claims that being accompanied by the increased predominance of gold in all types of transaction, the process of economic growth widened the polarization between two main social classes defined by factors of land or capital, and labour. In essence, this paper shows that it was this mixed labour regime that provided the real pay-offs. While slavery played a pivotal role in elite control over the commercialized production of specific cash crops, by offering a flexible seasonal labour supply, wage-labour assured the necessary elasticity to the large landed infrastructures. To this end, this study argues that as a form of organization of labour, tenancy remained quantitatively predominant, but it was the very existence of a supplementary labour force composed of slaves and wage labourers that made tenancy so resilient in the face of changes in market demand. By examining the re-emergence of commercialized agriculture from the fourth century onwards and the related penetration of the monetary economy into the rural areas, this essay seeks to demonstrate why there was a causal connection between economic expansion, wealth accumulation, and the increase of wage labourers – of landless peasants in particular. This paper deals with the economic and social history of North Africa from the fourth to the sixth centuries.
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