Central European - 1 years ago

PhD graduate David Rockwell, from CEU’s Department of Medieval Studies, received one of the university’s Best Dissertation Awards this year in recognition of his dissertation research titled “Justinian’s Conniving Bankers: Lobbying and the Imperial Bureaucracy in Sixth-Century Byzantium”. For the dissertation, which he defended in April, Rockwell reconstructed the practice of petitioning for new law-making – called lobbying – by banking and financial interests under the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I (527-565 A.D.).   Rockwell’s research found that the financiers of Constantinople, as portrayed in a series of constitutions, were sophisticated actors both well-versed in the laws applicable to their business and well-organized to lobby for changes to said laws. The dissertation, which was supervised by CEU Professor Volker Menze, is being prepared for publication by Oxford University Press.  CEU spoke with Rockwell to learn about his research and how his previous professional career as a lawyer shaped his approach.      What is your research aim?   I’m not a typical CEU student in that prior to doing my MA and PhD at CEU in Medieval Studies, I had a career as a financial lawyer for almost 30 years. For that, I got my law degrees from Cambridge University and then from Harvard Law School. I had read classics as an undergraduate and always wanted to go back to these sources. I found myself reading sources of Justinian s laws, both his great compilation of Roman law that was completed in 523 A.D. and the collection of new laws he issued after that and thinking about how banking and lending might have worked under the various laws of the classical, late antique and early medieval periods.  I realized I had something to add, having immersed myself for more than a quarter of a century in details of loans, guarantees, credits, etc. My practical law experience allowed me to look at the laws in a different way than academic lawyers and legal historians typically do. The scholars who have studied these sources generally work within the continental “Romanist” tradition, which composes the bulk of the writing on this subject. That school approaches the legal system as an intellectual construct focused on theoretical questions of how the legal principles work together as a system.  By virtue of my practical experience, I see laws more as tools that people, at least well-advised people, can use to do new things, to create new structures, to seek advantage over others, to disadvantage their opponents. Laws are things that don’t just exist in the conceptual world, but can be used, interpreted and even abused to achieve desired ends. Their ambiguities, contradictions and silences are not flaws, or are not only flaws, but are also opportunities in the eyes of those who can spot them.   One consequence of the focus by the continental tradition on law as an intellectual system is that, to the extent humans enter into it at all, that scholarship centers on the people who control the law – the emperors, officials and bureaucrats in charge of drafting laws and building the system. In my approach, I m centering instead on the people who actually used the laws on a day-to-day basis – that is, what did all this legislation look like from the receiving end? This approach opened an entire range of possible ways to provide a new narrative from the sources to me.  What did your research find?  What I found to be happening in the sources is very different than what others, particularly legal historians, tend to focus on. I used the financial law sources because that s where my particular professional expertise lies and where I could best interpret the laws. These financial laws provide uniquely rich and full descriptions of the lobbying that went on that preceded their passage. This lobbying rarely features in the literature discussing them. Given that the only comparable records of lobbying in the legislation is that by the church, this means that the financial laws represent an unexploited resource for historians.  One finding that surprised me was how aware ordinary people seemed to be of laws and changes to laws, and not just the elites. In one case study, I was looking at people who were basically freed slaves or children of freed slaves, and so very far down the social scale in terms of rank and status. They too were petitioners, showing a sophisticated understanding of how one law interacted with another. There was likely some lawyer in the background who was helping them, but even so that meant that advice of a sophisticated nature was available to common people. I was surprised as I went through the materials to find how people seemed to really know and follow the constantly changing legislation. They complained about it regularly, but they tried to keep up.   One of the main findings of the dissertation is that it wasn t the case that the emperor gave the law, and everybody said, “Yes, sir. We will comply with the law,” and went about their business doing so. No, this society had very astute consumers of the law who read it intelligently, looking for its ambiguities, silences, contradictions, and relations to other laws. They read to see whether there were inconsistencies between the laws and how those inconsistencies might be exploited. The sources show the active application of intelligence to constructing the law, and what it might mean, how it affected how you might go about your business, or even avoid and evade the law. It was an iterative process.  What kind of sources and data do you use for this research?  My principal sources were the collections of Justinian’s legislation from 535 onward, known as the “Novels” (because they were “new” at least as compared to the laws contained in his great compilation of Roman law). The Novels fundamentally come to us through three sources. One is the Greek Collection of 168 laws (with a small number of duplications) known to us through two main manuscripts: one in Florence, the other in Venice. The second is co-called Authenticum, which is a Latin collection of the laws translated – poorly – from the Greek. The third is something called the Epitome of Julian, which is a summary of the Novels that was prepared by a law professor, probably for instructional purposes.  What challenged you with the project?  The main challenge was simply that I fell between academic disciplines: legal history on the one hand, and late antique social history on the other. Neither of these disciplines converses with the other as much as they really should. This is the challenge of interdisciplinarity, right? If you re going to do interdisciplinary work, you need to cope with the fact that you re going to fall outside of the mainstream channels of scholarship in the respective areas that you re entering.  The other thing that surprised me, which is a modern controversy, was how limited the scholarship has been on these topics in relation to their social, political and cultural aspects. I see law as a social phenomenon, so my approach puts me outside the continental tradition of thinking about law as being some pure, stand-alone intellectual construct. It can be studied that way, of course, but there is so much that goes missing with that approach.  My disciplinary influences thus include both legal history as well as late antique social, economic, and political history. I have to understand what the legal historians are saying, but I also have to look at the social and, especially, economic aspects. This is particularly the case with respect to maritime loans, where we have some actual figures on changes to interest rates. One thing I do in the dissertation is a financial analysis of different loan structures, the sort that you might find in a finance department. And most importantly, I contextualize the financial content socially, specifically the content of petitioning the emperor by imperial subjects generally, not just financiers and churchmen.  Nearly everybody did so, from the highest to lowest society. For the financial Novels, at least, none of this had been contextualized, in the sense of being analyzed in this broader context. How did they make their approach? How long did they have to wait? Who did they approach in order to make things faster? Did they pay bribes? These are some examples of the sorts of social questions I wanted to ask.   Why does this topic matter?  These sources have a lot to tell us about how people petitioned the emperor. The financial Novels contain very detailed descriptions of what happened, and in my opinion, they have been underutilized, because in order to understand what s going on, you have to understand both the substantive law and the petitioning process. The substantive law has largely been left to the legal historians, yet they have little interest in the circumstances in which a law is promulgated.  Whereas for me, I think it s pretty important to know why a particular law was passed and the circumstances in which it was so that it can be properly interpreted. I think my dissertation will open these sources of laws to new audiences and provide a new narrative related to early Byzantine finance. In particular, I hope that my approach and findings open access to the interpretation of Justinian’s financial Novels, and of lobbying more generally by social and cultural historians in a way that hasn t been previously available.  So, my contribution should help other people make use of these sources. One of my objectives has been to lay the groundwork with respect to financial law so then, say, some more technically minded economic or financial historian can come in and approach these sources in a way that they could not before.  I would also like to point out that CEU Department of Medieval Studies is a wonderful place in which to do interdisciplinary research. They pride themselves on interdisciplinarity, and they mean it. They have been hugely supportive of my work and my approach even when it was clear that my work doesn t fit neatly into the usual academic disciplines. They understand the challenges of interdisciplinarity and have been a hugely supportive and helpful place in which to pursue this kind of research.    This interview is part of CEU s Research in the Spotlight series, which features the projects recognized in the university s 2024 Best Dissertation Awards. The full list of winners can be found here.       Unit: Department of HistoryDepartment of Medieval StudiesCategory: NewsAlumni StoriesImage: Content Priority: High

Latest News

Hashtags:   

David

 | 

Rockwell

 | 

Sheds

 | 

Light

 | 

Lobbying

 | 

Sixth

 | 

Century

 | 

Byzantium

 | 

Research

 | 

Spotlight

 | 

Sources