This volume focuses upon the people of rural Roman Britain - how they looked, lived, interacted with the material and spiritual worlds surrounding them, and also how they died, and what their physical remains can tell us. Analyses indicate a geographically and socially diverse society, influenced by pre-existing cultural traditions and varying degrees of social connectivity. Incorporation into the Roman empire certainly brought with it a great deal of social change, though contrary to many previous accounts depicting bucolic scenes of villa-life, it would appear that this change was largely to the detriment of many of those living in the countryside.
The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity.Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century.The Roman Market Economy reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.
As it is today, the property market was a key and dynamic economic sector in Ancient Rome. Its study demands a deep understanding of Roman society, of the normative frameworks and the notions of wealth, value, identity and status that shaped individual and collective mentalities. This book takes a multisided insight into real estate as the subject of short- and long-term economic investments, of speculative businesses ventures, of power abuses and inequalities, of social aspirations, but also of essential housing needs. The volume discusses thoroughly relevant and new literary, legal, epigraphic, papyrological and archaeological evidence, and incorporates comparative historical perspectives and methodologies, including economic theory and current, critical sociological debates about the functioning of modern real estate markets and issues linked to its commodification and regulation. In pursuing this line of enquiry, the contributions that make up the book investigate the impact of ideas such as profit, risk, security and trust in transfers, management and use of residential houses, commercial buildings and productive estates in urban and rural contexts. The work further evaluates the legal responses to and the public enforcement strategies concerning such activities, the high mobility of fortunes and unstable property-rights that resulted from one-off but also structural, political, financial, economic and institutional crises that marked the history of the Roman Republic and Principate. This book aims to demonstrate the relevance of the study of pre-modern real estate markets today, and will be of significant interest to readers of economic history as well as Roman law, Roman archaeology, the history of urbanism and social history.
In stark contrast to popular narratives, The Great Divergence Reconsidered shows that Europe's rise to an undisputed world economic leader was not the effect of the Industrial Revolution, and cannot be explained by coal or colonial exploitation. Using a wealth of new historical evidence stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Roman Studer shows that this 'Great Divergence' must be shifted back to the seventeenth century, if not earlier. Europe was characterized by a more powerful transportation system, bigger trade flows, larger and better integrated markets, higher productivity levels, and superior living standards even before the Industrial Revolution brought about far-reaching structural changes and made Europe's supremacy even more pronounced. While the comparison with Europe draws significantly on India, the central conclusions seem to hold for Asia - and indeed the rest of the world - more generally. An interplay of various factors best explains Europe's early and gradual rise, including better institutions, favorable geographical features, increasing political stability, and increasingly rapid advances in science and technology.
The first volume in a new series, Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy: a collection of essays, edited by the series editors, focusing on the economic performance of the Roman empire, and suggesting how we can derive a quantified account of economic growth and contraction in the period of the empire's greatest extent and prosperity.
This is the first study to analyze a wide spread of price data to determine whether market development led to economic growth in the early modern period.
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.
This open access book demonstrates the application of simulation modelling and network analysis techniques in the field of Roman studies. It summarizes and discusses the results of a 5-year research project carried out by the editors that aimed to apply spatial dynamical modelling to reconstruct and understand the socio-economic development of the Dutch part of the Roman frontier (limes) zone, in particular the agrarian economy and the related development of settlement patterns and transport networks in the area. The project papers are accompanied by invited chapters presenting case studies and reflections from other parts of the Roman Empire focusing on the themes of subsistence economy, demography, transport and mobility, and socio-economic networks in the Roman period. The book shows the added value of state-of-the-art computer modelling techniques and bridges computational and conventional approaches. Topics that will be of particular interest to archaeologists are the question of (forced) surplus production, the demographic and economic effects of the Roman occupation on the local population, and the structuring of transport networks and settlement patterns. For modellers, issues of sensitivity analysis and validation of modelling results are specifically addressed. This book will appeal to students and researchers working in the computational humanities and social sciences, in particular, archaeology and ancient history.
