The Roman Market Economy

The Roman Market Economy
Author: Peter Temin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 069114768X

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.

Quantifying the Roman Economy

Quantifying the Roman Economy
Author: Alan Bowman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2009-06-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199562598

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.

Rome's Imperial Economy

Rome's Imperial Economy
Author: W. V. Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-02-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019959516X

An assessment of the economic success of Imperial Rome, consisting of eleven previously published papers by the historian W. V. Harris, with additional comments to bring them up to date. Harris also includes a new study of poverty and destitution, and a substantial introduction which ties the collection together.

Pliny's Roman Economy

Pliny's Roman Economy
Author: Richard Saller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691229554

The first comprehensive study of Pliny the Elder’s economic thought—and its implications for understanding the Roman Empire’s constrained innovation and economic growth The elder Pliny’s Natural History (77 CE), an astonishing compilation of 20,000 “things worth knowing,” was avowedly intended to be a repository of ancient Mediterranean knowledge for the use of craftsmen and farmers, but this 37-book, 400,000-word work was too expensive, unwieldy, and impractically organized to be of utilitarian value. Yet, as Richard Saller shows, the Natural History offers more insights into Roman ideas about economic growth than any other ancient source. Pliny’s Roman Economy is the first comprehensive study of Pliny’s economic thought and its implications for understanding the economy of the Roman Empire. As Saller reveals, Pliny sometimes anticipates modern economic theory, while at other times his ideas suggest why Rome produced very few major inventions that resulted in sustained economic growth. On one hand, Pliny believed that new knowledge came by accident or divine intervention, not by human initiative; research and development was a foreign concept. When he lists 136 great inventions, they are mostly prehistoric and don’t include a single one from Rome—offering a commentary on Roman innovation and displaying a reverence for the past that contrasts with the attitudes of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists credited with contributing to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Pliny shrewdly recognized that Rome’s lack of competition from other states suppressed incentives for innovation. Pliny’s understanding should be noted because, as Saller shows, recent efforts to use scientific evidence about the ancient climate to measure the Roman economy are flawed. By exploring Pliny’s ideas about discovery, innovation, and growth, Pliny’s Roman Economy makes an important new contribution to the ongoing debate about economic growth in ancient Rome.

The Origins of the Roman Economy

The Origins of the Roman Economy
Author: Gabriele Cifani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108478956

Focuses on the economic history of the community of Rome from the Iron Age to the early Republic.

The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy

The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy
Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0521898226

Thanks to its exceptional size and duration, the Roman Empire offers one of the best opportunities to study economic development in the context of an agrarian world empire. This volume, which is organised thematically, provides a sophisticated introduction to and assessment of all aspects of its economic life.

The Romanization of Britain

The Romanization of Britain
Author: Martin Millett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1992-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521428644

This book sets out to provide a new synthesis of recent archaeological work in Roman Britain.

The Romans and Trade

The Romans and Trade
Author: André Tchernia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 019109109X

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.

The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World

The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 17
Release: 2007-11-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0521780535

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.

Managing Information in the Roman Economy

Managing Information in the Roman Economy
Author: Cristina Rosillo López
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9783030541026

1. Asymmetric Information and the Roman Economy: Introduction -- 2. Economics and Information: Asymmetries, Uncertainties and Risks -- Part 1: Information Management -- 3. Managing Economic Public Information in Rome: the Aerarium as Central Archive of the Roman Republic -- 4. Managing Uncertainty and Asymmetric Information in Roman Auctions -- Part 2: The Real Estate and Land Property Market -- 5. Asymmetric Information, ager publicus and the Roman Land Market in the Second Century BC -- 6. Domum pestilentem vendo: Real Estate Market and Information Asymmetry in the Roman World -- 7. Marriage and Asymmetric Information on the Real Estate Market in Roman Egypt -- Part 3: The Labour Market -- 8. Information Asymmetry and the Roman Labour Market -- 9. Asymmetric information and adverse selection in the Roman slave market: the limits of legal remedy -- Part 4: Trade and Financial Markets -- 10. Information Landscapes and Economic Practice in the Roman World -- 11. Roman Professional collegia and Economic Control. A Monopoly of Information? -- 12. A case of Arbitrage in a Worldwide Trade: Roman Coins in India -- 13. Information Governance in Roman Finance -- 14.Conclusions.