The Roman economy is often presented as underdeveloped and underachieving (Garnsey and Saller 1987: 43-7). Such views are the legacy of the huge intellectual contribution of Moses Finley (1985) to the debate on the ancient economy. Key elements of what I shall term the Finleyite primitivist (minimalist) vision of the Roman economy are: an emphasis on subsistence agriculture; the role of towns as centers of consumption, rather than of trade and industry; the low social status of craft workers; retarded technological diffusion; and a lack of economic rationality, illustrated inter alia by the low level of non-agrarian capital investment (Finley 1985; de Blois et al. 2002; Duncan-Jones 1982: 1; Hopkins 1983a: x-xiv). Such views are not unchallenged, however, and there is also strong support for a vision of a more evolved and complex economy than Finley was prepared to admit (K. Greene 1986; W. V. Harris 1993b). Strong evidence has been adduced in favor of more rational economic accounting on Egyptian estates in the Fayum (Rathbone 1991). Rather more surprising perhaps is the fact that similarly sophisticated accounting systems are to be found even in the remote oasis communities of the Egyptian desert (Bagnall 1997). In several recent discussions an emerging strand is that the Roman economy contained elements of both achievement and underdevelopment (de Blois et al. 2002: xiii-xviii; Jongman 2002: 43-7; Mattingly and Salmon 2001b: 8-11). In this chapter, I shall briefly review some of the key points of theoretical debate and then comment on a series of different areas of economic activity that I think illustrate both the controversies and the potential of the evidence now available on the Roman economy.
The contributions of Hopkins to the debate have been important in introducing a series of modifications and qualifications to the primitivist view (Hopkins 1978c and d, 1980, 1983a and b, 1995/6; K. Greene 1986: 9-16 for a useful summary). He has argued that between 200 BCE and 200 CE overall agricultural production and the amount of land in cultivation rose, accompanied by an increase in both population and per capita production; a higher proportion of the population in this period was engaged in non-agrarian production and service industries; inter-regional trade in manufactured and staple commodities reached a peak; taxation in the Roman world may have been a stimulus to trade. It is on this early ‘‘imperial’’ period of Rome’s history that I shall focus, though important studies exist on the Late Roman Empire and its changing economy (de Blois and Rich 2002; Garnsey and Whittaker 1998; A. H. M. Jones 1964, 1974; Wickham 1988; Whittaker and Garnsey 1998). In late antiquity, the nature of the Roman economy changed considerably, with interregional trade shrinking in the west, but initially expanding in the east after the foundation of Constantinople (Kingsley and Decker 2001). Overall, the transition to the Dark Ages was slower than was once believed, but the break-up of the empire had undoubted repercussions on its economy (Liebeschuetz 2002).
The nature of the evidence relating to the Roman economy is very uneven. Literary sources are few, reflecting the social mores of the time as much as reality (note that upper-class Romans professed that ‘‘of all pursuits by which men gain their livelihood none is better than agriculture... none more fitting for a free man,’’ Cic. Off. 1.152). Documentary evidence in the form of papyri and writing tablets is limited to a few locations, most notably Egypt, and its typicality has been much debated. There is a dearth of ancient quantitative data on the Roman economy and our views on ancient attitudes are heavily colored by the disparaging remarks of Roman aristocrats regarding trade. Socially speaking, farming and land-ownership were the most respectable sources of wealth; manufacturing and commerce were looked down on. But there is ample evidence to suggest that even senators were loath to overlook non-agrarian money-making possibilities altogether, getting round the social stigma by using slaves and freedmen to look after their interests in such ventures, or advancing loans (D’Arms 1981). Elite involvement may have been even higher outside Italy, as there is still less evidence regarding the attitudes of the provincial curial class to manufacturing and commerce.
Archaeological evidence is increasingly abundant, but is also biased by factors of preservation. Organic commodities, such as foodstuffs, animal products, wooden artifacts, and textiles, are poorly conserved in most archaeological deposits, but are demonstrably key components oftrade in any age in the past. This is especially the case with textiles - their primacy in Diocletian’s Price Edict is striking - though the archaeological evidence is elusive (Drinkwater 2001, 2002; A. Wilson 2001). Certain other valuable items, such as glass and metal items, could be recycled and are disproportionately under-represented in rubbish deposits. The most abundant archaeological materials are ceramics, their numbers reflecting their essential fragility more than their economic value. Yet pottery vessels were often containers for other commodities, such as olive oil, fish sauces, or wine, or were traded alongside now-perished commodities, and thus may stand in as proxies for trade in those other goods. Some of the best archaeological evidence for ancient commerce has come from shipwrecks, where the composition and quantification of near-intact cargoes can sometimes be calculated (A. J. Parker 1992).
It is generally accepted that the Roman economy was predominantly based on farming, essentially agriculture, much of it at or close to subsistence levels. Yet in many regions of the Roman Empire, there were significant changes in rural settlement and output following the incorporation of land within the empire (Barker and
Lloyd 1991; Carlsen et al. 1994; Garnsey 2000; K. Greene 1986: 67-141; Rich and Wallace-Hadrill 1991). The conquest of huge territories gave unparalleled opportunities for the reorganization of landholding arrangements. The imposition of the Roman taxation system may also have had an impact, but above all it was the organization of labor and production by the local elites operating within the new framework that meant that significant surpluses could be generated from unprecedented crop specialization at the regional level. The clearest evidence of such changes can be traced in areas like North Africa, where several regions developed a clear specialization in olive oil production, with a significant capacity for export (D. J. Mattingly 1988a).
It is also increasingly recognized that the non-agricultural sector of the Roman economy was of considerable importance at the regional level and that some cities show a degree of specialization in their commercial and/or manufacturing activity (Mattingly and Salmon 2001a). The scale and significance of the construction industry at major cities can now be better evaluated (DeLaine 1997, 2000, 2001), along with the infrastructure of other service industries in towns. The image that most cities were passive consumers of localized rural production is no longer sustainable.
One of the major brakes on the development of the Roman economy was the relative difficulty of the empire’s communications and the constraints ofits transport systems. It has been suggested that it was cheaper to transport grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other by ship than to move it 75 miles overland (Jones 1964: 841-2). This pessimistic view ofland transport is reinforced by studies of the costs of sea:river:overland transport in the Roman world, which can be expressed in the ratio 1:4.9:28 (K. Greene 1986: 39-40). However, such deterministic views take no account of other factors that may have contributed to patterns of transport, such as risk, seasonality, or lack of alternatives. In practice, detailed studies of Roman roads, river transport, and maritime traffic support the view that the first two centuries ce in particular saw substantial growth in the scale and volume of transportation in all these areas (K. Greene 1986: 17-44; Laurence 1998; A. J. Parker 1992: 16-30; Rouge 1981).
It is clear that the Roman economy was not a homogeneous entity, but that there were important infrastructural and regional differences at play across the empire. The degree of‘‘connectivity’’ within and between regions remains uncertain (Horden and Purcell 2000). However, lack of uniformity should not occasion surprise in an empire that spanned an area of over 3.5 million square kilometers (the same area today is broken up into more than 30 nation-states), with a population of over 50 million people. What is perhaps most striking is the degree of interconnectedness and integration achieved in a territory of this size (Fulford 1987; Woolf 1992).
At the heart of the empire lay an exceptionally large and atypical city (Morley 1996; Pleket 1993a). A key ingredient of the Roman economy was the element of state control occasioned by the elaborate arrangements, known as the annona system, set in place to ensure the food supply of the city of Rome and of the army (Aldrete and Mattingly 1999; Garnsey 1988; Sirks 1991; Whittaker 1994: 98-130). In the early principate, there was no state merchant fleet, so the carriage of cargoes to Rome was regulated by payments of subsidies (vecturae) and other inducements to private shippers.
These state redistributive mechanisms of trade were no doubt most influential in certain localities at certain times, rather than generally or evenly across space and time, but nonetheless functioned as a mechanism for integrating regional economies (Remesal Rodriguez 2002; Woolf 1992). It is clear that market trade developed alongside the redistributive system and, on some trade routes, was indivisible from it (K. Greene 1986: 45-8; W. V. Harris 1993b: 14-20).
Other mechanisms of exchange such as individual gift exchange, elites’ redistribution of the products of their own estates to their urban houses or other properties, and barter are likely to have persisted and played a role at all times (Whittaker 1985). In sum we can discern regional differences in economic activity and success, suggesting that there was not a single integrated economy, but rather a series of interlocking regional ones.
World History
