Thus the economic, military and cultural centre of gravity passed gradually over from Italy to the East, from Rome to Byzantium. So Roman society fell back upon its only ‘solution’: after most Italians had become proletarian, the harsh exploitation of the slaves on the Italian latifundiae increased, to such an extent that they ceased to reproduce their kind: and as a result the waste began to swallow up the latifundiae, and Italy had to start living parasitically, entirely at the expense of the provinces of the Roman Empire, and primarily at the expense of the rich granaries of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. The first was impossible in slaves system, the second impossible in such a system founded on commercial bases, where masses of parasites formed the state’s military strength. The second alternative was impossible due to the fact that no boundaries could stand in the way of the appetites of the landowners and the desires of the praetorian masses. The first alternative was impossible, as the slaves’ productivity of labour was very much limited by the social position of this ‘labour power’, which led to lack of interest in greater efforts, boorishness and primitivity. With the cessation of the expansion, the Roman economy was confronted with two alternatives: either to increase the total amount of produce on which the slaves, proletarians, landowners and merchants lived, or otherwise to see to the ‘economy of man’s forces’ and diminish the cruel exploitation of the slaves. Thus the very expansion of the Roman Empire became the cause of the exhaustion of the power of its expansion. The destruction, by conversion of Italy into a land of latifundiae, of the very class which had been the basis of the state’s military assurance – the peasantry – and the putting in its place of an inimical class of slaves, limited the power of the Roman Empire. They were a praetorian band, disorderly, unruly, and the source of the economic and military weakness of the Roman Empire. And so the military expansion of Rome accompanied by the tightening of the commercial bonds between the provinces of the empire brought with it two main results: the conversion of Italy into a land of latifundiae, and the conversion of Italians into proletarians (as the term meant then) – people who ate and did nothing, a group of parasites living at the expense of the toiling slaves. As slavery spread, the Italian peasant was progressively ousted by the latifundiae. with the cessation of Roman imperial expansion. The rise of Arab feudalism on the ruins of the Roman slave system, was born of the fact that the slave economy, which had been able to develop the forces of production all the while that there were constantly wide sources of labour power, became a serious obstacle to progress with the dwindling of these sources, i.e. The Rise of Arab Feudalism and the Arab Golden Age A description of Arab Feudalism showing the differences between it and European feudalism must therefore be the starting point for a study of the present-day Arab East. That between the 8th and 13th centuries the Arabs were at the peak of world culture as it was at that time is common knowledge, but the causes of their remaining behind, sunk in the feudal regime, while Europe marched forward to capitalism, the way advanced and cultured Arab feudalism turned into the backward, barbaric feudalism of today, is still an enigmatic problem for most students who come to learn about the Arab East. In order to understand present phenomena in the Arab East a certain knowledge of development in the past is indispensable. Cliff: The Problem of the Middle East (1.
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