The geographical, political, and social imperatives of the Roman Empire contributed a number of peculiarities to its economy. We might conceptualize this in terms of a political economy that operated alongside a social economy that was in turn interleaved with a true market economy. The political economy was primarily the product of the need to extract surplus from the empire to support the mechanisms of state.
These included securing the food supply for the city of Rome and for the army (the annona), exploiting mineral resources to sustain the coinage system, and obtaining and transporting the raw materials to embellish the capital - notably from widespread imperial quarries for a range of decorative stones. Although Rome claimed a monopoly over significant mineral resources and sources of marble and decorative granites, and had access to substantial volumes of foodstuffs from state lands and imperial estates or as tax in kind, the expense of exploiting these resources and of transporting the commodities huge distances to their chosen destination would have defied normal economic logic. This was a redistributive exchange system operating on a grand scale (Aldrete and Mattingly 1999). For example, monolithic columns of granite weighing up to 200 tonnes were quarried at Mons Claudianus in the eastern Egyptian desert and then transported more than 120 kilometers overland to the Nile and then onwards to Rome (Maxfield 2001). The infrastructure to support this extraordinary operation, involving permanent settlements at the quarries, the requisition of huge numbers of draught animals, and construction of special boats, etc., could only have been undertaken by a state such as Rome (Adams 2001). The operation of the political economy of the annona and of the extraction and transport of metals and stone thus represents a huge anomaly in the Roman economy. It is clear that some of the archaeological evidence of long-distance movement of goods around the Roman world can be related to this political economy, which subsidized or underwrote transport costs (A. Kolb 2002).
The Roman army was another institution with a distinctive mode of economic operation that set it apart from the rest of provincial society (Erdkamp 2002). The army had complex networks of supply contracts, often operating across provincial boundaries (Carreras Montfort 2002; Whittaker 1994: 98-131). Evidence on preserved writing tablets from the late first-century ce fort of Vindolanda in northern Britain provides many insights into the operations of the military quartermasters and supply specialists - the beneficiarii (Bowman 1994; Carreras Montfort 2002: 77-9, 82-7; Remesal Rodriguez 2002). In one tablet, a certain Octavius writes to Candidus concerning a range of deals he is brokering - concerning grain, animal hides, and leather ware ( Tab. Vindol. II. 343). The military was a cash purchaser on a large scale and contracts were filled at three levels: in the immediate locality of a fort, within the province, and from extra-provincial sources. Long-distance movement of goods was perhaps more common than might be imagined, since traffic in goods under military contracts was not liable to the normal customs dues on inter-provincial trade (though the state evidently had to guard closely against sharp practice by merchants who claimed exemptions also for additional cargo). The similarity of materials being transported to Rome and to the army garrisons and the close correlation of administrative controls (insofar as they can be discerned) suggest plausibly that military supply was also under the overall supervision of the praefectura annonae from an early date (Remesal Rodriguez 2002). The potential impact of the military supply network on economic patterns and development in frontier provinces such as Britain is increasingly recognized, despite the limitations of the evidence (Fulford 2004).
However, it is also apparent that free market trade flourished alongside the imperial economy, especially in the core provinces of the empire. This can be seen in part in the long-distance transport and wide distribution of many goods to centers other than the city of Rome and the main military frontiers. This was a widespread trading economy, sustained by the purchasing power represented in many Roman cities. Mercantile relations extended well beyond the imperial frontiers, for instance, towards India and China in the east and sub-Saharan Africa in the south.
It has sometimes been asserted that long-distance Roman trade was above all about luxuries and that staple foodstuffs and articles of low intrinsic value would rarely circulate beyond a 50-mile range from where they were produced. However, there is a wealth of archaeological evidence to contradict this assumption about transport costs in the Roman world. The regular occurrence on shipwrecks of large quantities of low value coarseware pottery vessels is a case in point (Pucci 1983: 110-11). There are two possible explanations and both of them may have contributed to the observed pattern. First, the annona system did not have to conform to normal rules of economic rationality and could implement mass transfer of grain from Egypt to Rome or olive oil from southern Spain to Britain (Carreras Montfort 2002). The second possibility is that the existence of a core of‘‘tied’’ trade under state contracts had a far more widespread effect of cross-subsidizing the transport of other commodities and of stimulating demand in civil markets. The distribution patterns for many products extend well beyond the major supply routes leading to the city of Rome or the main military markets.
Who were the merchants and shippers of the ancient world? We have already noted the social distance that Roman senators established between themselves and such activity, but there is evidence to show that fortunes were made in trade and that in the provinces at any rate some merchants were prominent individuals (Giardina 1993b; W. V. Harris 2000; Paterson 1998). Not all were the archetypal ‘‘wealthy freedman’’ made infamous in the Satyricon of Petronius. Even if the literary sources are relatively silent about merchants, evidence survives in the form of public inscriptions and in painted notations ( tituli picti) on trade goods. For instance, the collegium of Augus-tales at Misenum numbered over 100 members, indicating the importance of wealthy freedmen traders in that harbor town (D’Arms 2000).
My overall judgment of the Roman imperial economy is that it was extraordinary by the standards of a pre-industrial world, most notably in terms of its scale. However, it was a very imperfect and heterogeneous institution (and many of the points made by the primitivists are accurate to this extent). Yet it did achieve growth and it created a level of regional integration, or at least interconnectedness, that marks it out from other ancient economies. The role of state regulation was of high importance in many areas, but since the Romans tended to operate through the use of private individuals and companies (as estate and mine lessees, shippers, and contractors), the resulting pattern is a colorful mosaic of tied and free market activity.
World History
