In this volume, papers by leading Roman historians and archaeologists discuss trade within the Roman Empire and beyond its frontiers between c.100 BC and AD 350, focusing especially on the role of the Roman state in shaping the institutional framework for trade. As part of a novel interdisciplinary approach to the subject, the chapters address its myriad facets on the basis of broadly different sources of evidence - historical, papyrological, andarchaeological - demonstrating how collaborations with the elite holders of wealth within the empire fundamentally changed its political character in the longer term.
This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period. Combining a wide range of research traditions from all over Europe and utilizing evidence from Italy, the western provinces, and the Greek-speaking east, this edited collection is divided into four sections. It first considers the scholarly history of Roman crafts and trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world, and on Italy and France. Chapters discuss how scholarly thinking about Roman craftsmen and traders was influenced by historical and intellectual developments in the modern world, and how different (national) research traditions followed different trajectories throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second section highlights the economic strategies of craftsmen and traders, examining strategies of long-distance traders and the phenomenon of specialization, and presenting case studies of leather-working and bread-baking. In the third section, the human factor in urban crafts and trade-including the role of apprenticeship, gender, freedmen, and professional associations-is analysed, and the volume ends by exploring the position of crafts in urban space, considering the evidence for artisanal clustering in the archaeological and papyrological record, and providing case studies of the development of commercial landscapes at Aquincum on the Danube and at Sagalassos in Pisidia.
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.
André Tchernia is one of the leading experts on amphorae as a source of economic history, a pioneer of maritime archaeology, and author of a wealth of articles on Roman trade, notably the wine trade. This book brings together the author's previously published essays, updated and revised, with recent notes and prefaced with an entirely new synthesis of his views on Roman commerce with a particular emphasis on the people involved in it. The book is divided into two main parts. The first is a general study of the structure of Roman trade: Landowners and traders, traders' fortunes, the matter of the market, the role of the state, and dispatching what is required. It tackles the recent debates on Roman trade and Roman economy, providing, original and convincing answers. The second part of the book is a selection of 14 of the author's published papers. They range from discussions of general topics such as the ideas of crisis and competition, the approvisioning of Ancient Rome, trade with the East, to more specialized studies, such as the interpretation of the 33 AD crisis. Overall, the book contains a wealth of insights into the workings of ancient trade and expertly combines discussion of the material evidence-especially of amphorae and wrecks-with the prosopographical approach derived from epigraphic, papyrological and historical data.
In this, the first comprehensive survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. They reflect a new interest in economic growth in antiquity and develop new methods for measuring economic development, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately.
A fascinating history of the intricate web of trade routes connecting ancient Rome to Eastern civilizations, including its powerful rival, the Han Empire. The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes investigates the trade routes between Rome and the powerful empires of inner Asia, including the Parthian Empire of ancient Persia, and the Kushan Empire which seized power in Bactria (Afghanistan), laying claim to the Indus Kingdoms. Further chapters examine the development of Palmyra as a leading caravan city on the edge of Roman Syria. Raoul McLaughlin also delves deeply into Rome’s trade ventures through the Tarim territories, which led its merchants to the Han Empire of ancient China. Having established a system of Central Asian trade routes known as the Silk Road, the Han carried eastern products as far as Persia and the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Though they were matched in scale, the Han surpassed its European rival in military technology. The first book to address these subjects in a single comprehensive study, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes explores Rome’s impact on the ancient world economy and reveals what the Chinese and Romans knew about their rival Empires.
How ancient Mediterranean trade thrived through state institutions From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? In Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. Terpstra details how business practices emerged that were based on private order, yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors—from Greek city councilors and Ptolemaic officials to long-distance traders and Roman magistrates and financiers—Terpstra illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.
This study of ancient Roman shipping and trade across continents reveals the Roman Empire’s far-reaching impact in the ancient world. In ancient times, large fleets of Roman merchant ships set sail from Egypt on voyages across the Indian Ocean. They sailed from Roman ports on the Red Sea to distant kingdoms on the east coast of Africa and southern Arabia. Many continued their voyages across the ocean to trade with the rich kingdoms of ancient India. Along these routes, the Roman Empire traded bullion for valuable goods, including exotic African products, Arabian incense, and eastern spices. This book examines Roman commerce with Indian kingdoms from the Indus region to the Tamil lands. It investigates contacts between the Roman Empire and powerful African kingdoms, including the Nilotic regime that ruled Meroe and the rising Axumite Realm. Further chapters explore Roman dealings with the Arab kingdoms of southern Arabia, including the Saba-Himyarites and the Hadramaut Regime, which sent caravans along the incense trail to the ancient rock-carved city of Petra. The first book to bring these subjects together in a single comprehensive study, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean reveals Rome’s impact on the ancient world and explains how international trade funded the legions that maintained imperial rule.
This volume presents a systematic and fresh interpretation of a mid-second-century AD papyrus - the so-called Muziris papyrus - which preserves on its two sides fragments of a unique pair of documents: on one side, a loan agreement to finance a commercial enterprise to South India and, on the other, an assessment of the fiscal value of a South Indian cargo imported on a ship named the Hermapollon. The two texts, whose informative potential has long been underexploited, clarify several aspects of the early Roman Empire's trade with South India, including transport logistics, financial and legal elements in the loan agreement funding the commercial enterprise, the trade goods included in the South Indian cargo, and the technicalities of calculating and collecting Roman customs duties on the Indian imports. This study also considers imperial fiscal policy as it related to the South Indian trade, the overall evolution of Rome's trade relations with South India, the structure and organization of South Indian trade stakeholders, and the role played by private tax-collectors. The in-depth analysis sheds new light on this important sector of the Roman economy during the first two centuries AD in two innovative ways: through a balanced consideration of South Indian sources and data, and by drawing comparisons with the pepper trade from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, resulting in a longue durée perspective on the western trade in South Indian pepper.
