Rome S Economic Revolution

Kay examines the economic change in Rome between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC. He focuses on how the increased inflow of bullion and expansion of the availability of credit resulted in real per capita economic growth in the Italian peninsula, radically changing the composition and scale of the Roman economy.

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.

Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections. This volume focuses on food and drink outlets in particular, combining analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources to offer a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop.

The Roman conquest of Italy in the Republican period (from c. 400 to 50 BC) led to widespread economic changes in which the conquered Italians played an important role. Italy's Economic Revolution analyses the integration of Italy during this period and explores the interplay between economic activities and unification in its civic, legal, social, and cultural senses. On one hand, it investigates whether Italy became more integrated economically following the Roman conquest and traces the widely varying local reactions to the globalization of the Italian economy; on the other, it examines whether and how economic activities carried out by Italians contributed to the integration of the Italian peoples into the Roman framework. Throughout the Republican period, Italians were able to profit from the expansion of the Roman dominion in the Mediterranean and the new economic opportunities it afforded, which led to gradual changes in institutions, culture, and language: through overseas trade and commercial agriculture they had gained significant wealth, which they invested in the Italian landscape, and they were often ahead of Romans when it came to engagement with Hellenistic culture. However, their economic prosperity and cultural sophistication did not lead to civic equality, nor to equal opportunities to exploit the territories the Italians had conquered under Rome's lead. Eventually the Italians rose in rebellion against Rome in the Social War of 91-88 BC, after which they were finally granted Roman citizenship. This volume investigates not only whether and how economic interaction played a role in this civic integration, but also highlights the importance of Roman citizenship as an instrument of further economic, political, social, and cultural integration between Romans and Italians.

Contents: PART ONE : SUPPLYING THE ROMAN ARMIES HERZ, P.: Die Logistik der kaiserzeitlichen Armee. Strukturelle Überlegungen. ERDKAMP, P.: The Corn Supply of the Roman Armies during the Principate (27 BC - 235 AD). CARRERAS MONTFORT, C.: The Roman military supply during the Principate. Transportation and staples. BLOIS, L. DE: Monetary policies, the soldiers’ pay and the onset of crisis in the first half of the third century AD. PART TWO : COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSPORT HAYNES, I.: Britain’s First Information Revolution. The Roman army and the transformation of economic life. KISSEL, Th.: Road-building as a munus publicum. KOLB, A.: Army and transport. PART THREE : THE ROMAN WEST: HISPANIA, BRITANNIA AND GERMANIA DAVIES. J.L.: Soldiers, peasants, industry and towns. The Roman army in Britain. A Welsh perspective. WHITTAKER, C.R.: Supplying the army. Evidence from Vindolanda. FUNARI, P.P.A.: The consumption of olive oil in Roman Britain and the role of the army. WIERSCHOWSKI, L.: Das römische Heer und die ökonomische Entwicklung Germaniens in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 1. Jahrhunderts. REMESAL RODRIGUEZ, J.: Baetica and Germania. Notes on the concept of ‘provincial interdependence’ in the Roman Empire. KONEN, H.: Die ökonomische Bedeutung der Provinzialflotten während der Zeit des Prinzipates. PART FOUR : NORTH AFRICA AND THE EAST MORIZOT, P.: Impact de l’armée romaine sur l’économie de l’Afrique. ROTH, J.: The army and the economy in Judaea and Palestine. ALSTON, R.: Managing the frontiers. Supplying the frontier troops in the sixth and seventh centuries.

"Recent works by economic historians of early modern Europe have argued for a link between encyclopedias of the 18th century and the developments culminating in the Industrial Revolution. Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopedie aimed to disseminate useful knowledge for productive growth and was one of the most visible contributions to what economic historian Joel Mokyr has labelled a "culture of growth." While the Ancient Romans didn't have anything like these encyclopedias, they did have its very popular and acknowledged ancestor, the thirty-seven books of Pliny's Natural History. Much has been written about Pliny's view of nature, his scientific thought, his ideology of empire, and so on, but there has been no comparable effort to probe Pliny's economic views and the impact, if any, of his history on Roman economic growth. In Pliny's Roman Economy, eminent Roman historian Richard Saller aims to bring together the economic observations and instances of financial reasoning scattered throughout the Natural History. Taken together, they do not amount to a discipline of "economics," but, Saller argues they do provide insights into Pliny's views about different forms of production and commerce, about labor and agency, about price formation and profitability, about investment and consumption and about technology. Combined with archaeological and other evidence, Pliny's work can also provide us with one of our best textual pictures of the working of the Roman economy"--

Tabernae' were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections in numbers far exceeding those of any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city, and indeed in the very definition of urbanization in ancient Rome, is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, and one which bears fruitful further exploration. 'The Roman Retail Revolution' offers a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop, focusing on food and drink outlets in particular. Combining critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, it challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city and unravels the historical development of tabernae to identify three major waves or revolutions in the shaping of retail landscapes. The volume is underpinned by two new and important bodies of evidence: the first generated from the University of Cincinnati's recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts, and the second resulting from a field-survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with the volume's interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.