Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems (Studies on the Roman Economy)

Jun 29

Ebook Free Download | Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems (Studies on the Roman Economy) | The programme of research which this volume introduces is concerned with the fundamentals of the Roman imperial economy and will attempt detailed analysis of major economic activities (agriculture, trade, commerce, mining), utilizing quantiWable bodies of artefactual and documentary evidence and placing them in the broader structural context of regional variation, distribution, size and nature of markets, supply and demand. The chronological parameters are 100 bc–c. ad 350, covering the period of greatest imperial expansion and economic growth (to c. ad 200), followed by a century conventionally perceived as one of contraction or decline.1 Geographically, we will draw on material selected from all over the Mediterranean world: Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and Italy will be our most fruitful sources of data, which will be gleaned almost entirely from published archaeological and documentary sources.
The project will provide a detailed basis for assessing the rate and volume of economic growth in the earlier empire and the extent of contraction after ad 200. We will also consider to what extent the Roman economy was integrated across the whole empire rather than a number of disparate but linked regional economies; and how far it was structurally integrated that is, were state mechanisms of economic control and the behaviour of ‘free market’ local economies part of a coherent economic ‘system’? In addressing these general questions we will focus on several underlying issues which will, in combination, oVer a set of carefully framed deWnitions. These include: the constituents of economic growth; levels of sophistication and rationality in ancient economic strategies; inter-operation of regional markets; the extent to which recent analysis of economic institutions and behaviour is applicable to the Roman economy, in terms of intensity of production in agriculture and manufacture, markets, supply and demand, movement of goods over what distances, distribution of population and the eVects of urbanization, behaviour of currency and prices, institutional control and free markets, and the application of developments in ancient technology which we believe to be much more signiWcant than is generally recognized.

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