The great medieval economic historian Chris Wickham passed away on October 9, 2026, and my social media feed has been awash with tributes (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). These are personal as well as academic. Here I focus on the academic side. By all accounts he was a great guy as well as a fantastic scholar, but I never got the opportunity to interact with him directly.
Everyone discussing his passing seems to share a sense of awe and of loss. The awe stems from the range of his expertise and his mastery of the historiography of many countries over many centuries. A typical statement from the introduction of his last major book, The Donkey and the Boat, notes that he had to end the book in 1180 because
“I wanted to be able to study all available documentation, documentary, literary, and archaeological alike, for the regions I was focusing on; I needed to study it all directly, as the use made of it by too much of the historiography has been distorted by prior assumptions about what the historian ought to be finding” (p. 7).
If another author wrote something like this it would likely sound boastful, but with Wickham it was entirely serious and credible.
The awe is also what generates a sense of loss, even for those of us who never met him. What other books could he have written? What other periods of history could he have extended his critical mind over? He was only 76 years old. It seems the world has lost not only the foremost scholar of this period but also potentially another magnum opus like Framing the Early Middle Ages.
Wickham was in that class of scholars who are, in a very real sense, irreplaceable. James C. Scott, who also passed relatively recently, was another.
Framing the Early Middle Ages
Framing came out in 2005, and I was too busy doing my MPhil in Economics at the time to read it. I recall it looking out formidably from the bookshelves of Blackwell’s in Oxford, where its price was also a bit of a deterrent for an impoverished student. I did, however, buy and read it a few years later. Although a lot of it was extremely detailed and specific to particular regions and times, it fed into my nascent interest in the concept of state capacity.
Wickham does not use the term, of course. But his account of the “decline” of the Roman economy is a state-centric one. (Wickham doesn’t like loaded terms like this and prefers to talk of “simplification.”) The late Roman state was a huge consumer, and Wickham saw its fiscal and military machinery as a major driver of regional flows of goods and money. It was the state, through its tax system, that obliged rural populations to participate in market exchange. And it was the Roman state that upheld elite demand for luxury manufactured goods. What happened in Western Europe after 400 AD was the gradual disappearance of this state and, eventually, of professional military forces.
This provided a stimulating and challenging explanation for the sharp contrast between the world of late antiquity and that of the early Middle Ages. That contrast had been brought home to me by reading Bryan Ward-Perkins’s book on the economic decline of the Roman world, and it had motivated Henri Pirenne’s famous Mohammed and Charlemagne.
I’ve written some critical things about this state-centric thesis (see here). But I think that Wickham’s framework, with its focus on the importance and consequences of maintaining or not maintaining a paid military, is undoubtedly the right one for analyzing this crucial transition.
Medieval Europe
Framing and its more accessible sequel, The Inheritance of Rome, are critical for understanding the transition from the empire to the rise of established polities in what would become the nation states of medieval Europe. But the other Wickham book that has influenced me is his shorter Medieval Europe. My coauthor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (henceforth JFV) has written a nice piece on X going into some detail on the work (originally written in 2017). He notes that:
“Medieval Europe is no exception. The amount of material condensed into 352 pages is so extraordinary that, merely to absorb even a minimal amount of its detail, I have had to let a few other obligations slide over the last few days. The end result has led me, almost by necessity, to write this post.
Before continuing, however, I should warn our readers. Medieval Europe is an uncompromising academic monograph. The prose is clear and, on many occasions, brilliant in its precision, but this is not a book to take to the beach for a little light entertainment that requires no thought. Wickham is not going to tell you about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s love affairs. He is going to tell you how the fiscal capacity of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Norman conquest of England in 1066 would prove crucial to the evolution of the political economy of northern Europe in the centuries to come. This is not a world of lances and tournaments; it is a world of productive systems and administrative structures.”
JFV goes on to note Wickham’s background as a Marxian historian, and hence his emphasis on the material foundations and structure of each society. He notes the irony that, when it comes to history, neoclassical economists like himself are closer to sophisticated Marxian or Marxian-influenced historians like Wickham than to other historians, because they share a focus on the economy and on how material resources get distributed.
(As an aside, I have a currently unread copy of Wickham’s edited volume Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century sitting on my desk, but I don’t find much of interest or insight in modern Marxism-infused history. It is a testament to Wickham’s work that I find it so fascinating independent of any interest in things like the transition problem. His strength relative to others in this tradition is that he is resolutely empirical.)
Where Medieval Europe has influenced me is primarily in how it conceives of feudalism. As JFV notes in his review, feudalism is a contested concept among medievalists, and many refuse to use it. In my ongoing work with Desiree Desierto, however, we view it as the critical ingredient in the later rise of constitutional government in Western Europe. (JFV is also right to emphasize the importance of intellectual developments and legal concepts.) Wickham would likely disagree with our arguments, but he still provides the essential insights into how the agrarian economies of these societies worked, introducing his own distinctive phraseology such as “capillary power” and “coherence” (as applied to either economies or states).
Mediterranean Trade and a Lost Opportunity
As we have seen, Wickham’s scholarship should have led to fruitful interactions with economic historians, in particular his attentiveness to the material conditions and structure of the economy and his mastery of archaeological evidence. It is my understanding that he did have good relations with historians at Oxford who were associated with the economic and social history group there. Nonetheless, I think there was a missed opportunity.
Wickham’s last major book, The Donkey and the Boat tackles a big topic. Ever since the work of Robert Lopez, many have located the origins of the rise of the West in the period after 1000, and specifically in the emergence of prosperous city-states in northern Italy.
In his 2021 piece in Past & Present, Wickham took economic historians to task for this approach:
“Modern-orientated European economic history tends, still today, to see pre-capitalist (or pre-industrial, or just ‘pre-modern’) economies as basically primitive, ‘backward’ as they are sometimes described, unable to take advantage of the technological breakthroughs that presented themselves; or else — or, sometimes, as well as — simply potentially modern societies, running by modern economic rules, but just undermined or blocked by institutional failures, or sometimes furthered by their efficiencies, as in much New Institutional Economic history. Different regions get brownie points for being more like modern societies; the active economies in the list I began with get seen as handing the torch on, one to another, until it finally ended up in its natural home, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England, ready for industrial society to be born.”
Wickham was, of course, versed in all approaches to economic history, and it would be churlish of me in the extreme to chide him for unfamiliarity with developments in modern economics. The following footnote indicates that he was very well acquainted with the vast empirical literature surrounding the Great Divergence debate. As I’ve noted, his range was extremely impressive. Still, my impression is that he formed a rather negative view of the “New Institutional Economics” early on. This meant that opportunities to connect his work with later developments in economic history or political economy were never taken up.
In particular, he clearly wasn’t a fan of Avner Greif’s influential work on trading networks in the Mediterranean. There are a couple of places, often in the footnotes, where he takes a pointed dig at Greif’s work as overly schematic. Unfortunately, beyond the paragraph quoted above, we never got a sustained criticism of, or engagement with, this work or with institutional economics more generally. New institutional economics and economic theory in general have more to offer beyond this one case study and set of models.
One definitely gets the impression that Wickham came to believe that economists wading into medieval history were not well-versed enough in the complex, multilingual historiographies or in the ever-growing archaeological evidence to be taken too seriously. I won’t wade into the controversies surrounding private and public ordering in these medieval trade networks, but I think this led him to miss how powerful and insightful modern economic theory can be. He was able to extract a lot of insight and value from the Marxian economic history literature without necessarily being influenced too much by the baggage that accompanied it. But he didn’t think the more recent advances in economics had much that was relevant for medieval economic history.
So the missed opportunity, for me, is that we never saw a serious dialogue in print about questions like these. How general is his model of peasant production? Could it be embedded in a simple neoclassical model? And how does the model, which is really an ideal type rather than something an economist would recognize as a model, account for transitions between modes of production?
But as with all great scholars, the conversation about his work will continue long after his death.