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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Bowman, Alan and Andrew Wilson. "Quantifying the Roman economy: Integration, growth, decline?" in Quantifying the Roman economy: methods and problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 3-84.
Main Argument: Quantifying the Roman economy: it's difficult. Nonetheless, there is incontrovertible evidence that the Mediterranean as a whole experienced economic growth during the period of the high empire (1stC BCE to 4thC CE), although whether that growth continued after 200 C.E. is another question. Also, ancient technology was definitely a driving factor in ancient economic expansion. The currency and monetary institutions were definitely effectively integrated, and there is enough of an array of integrated economic institutions and patterns of behavior to agree that there was a de facto integrated "economic policy," although using that phrase overstates the case. That said, it seems that there was considerable regional diversity across the Roman Mediterranean throughout the period. Economic growth is clearly also tied into questions of "globalization" and "Romanization" (both deprecated terms, but still useful), as well as the question of to what extent the Roman economy was structurally integrated.
Argument, Sources, Examples The editors argue that "it is important to make economic sense of something which clearly was in many respects one political entity or 'system' which included Britain, North Africa, and Syria, without having to decide which was more or less 'typical'; and (2) that the links and connections (or perhaps now 'connectivities') between the different parts) conceived both geographically and structurally) of the Mediterrannean will inform our understanding of the sense in which we can talk of unity, a single empire or diverse regions as part of a single political and economic 'system'" (8-9). They focus on four areas: demography and urbanization, agriculture, trade, and metal supply and coinage. In terms of quantification, there are three issues: whether estimates of GDP are useful; what factors are drivers of growth (or indications of contraction); and what factors are reflections of rather than causes of growth. Part of the problem is estimating the population of the empire as a whole (when?), which is an issue that will not die. [Personally I like 55/60 million, it's a nice round number, but I could see as low as 40 million, depending.] A better approach might be to try to get more specificity, particularly at the local level, into the question of urbanization rates. (Is 55/60 million and a 10% urbanization rate even physically compatible?) The authors are very much against the Oxford approach for modeling the Roman economy as a whole, partly because the evidence just isn't there and partly because it's too diverse to model effectively at the macro-level.
Bibliographic Data: Hopkins, Keith. “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire.” In Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 178-204.
Main Argument: Rome was big enough as an empire that its political economy achieved several important economies of scale, which were crucial to its longevity and its success.
Argument, Sources, Examples
Important points:
- Rome as the heir to empires it surpassed, all engendered by three technologies: writing, money, and iron weapons and tools
- Three innovations of Augustus: 1. "the citizen army that had so threatened the central polity during the last century of the Republic was demilitarized and disempowered" (180); 2. "the Roman aristocracy became, much more than it had ever been before, an aristocracy of office with extremely low rates of hereditary succession" (181); 3. "the emperors at Rome effectively changed the nature of Roman citizenship. The plebs at Rome were disfranchised and no longer constituted the electorate for competing aristocrats" (ibid).
- problem of how to exploit empire effectively while rewarding those who created it, so exploitation of rich was constrained by their dependency on the poor to provide military service, obedience, and a small capital tax
- empire moved along axis from indemnities to taxation as it settled, but Roman taxes remained comparatively low, set only high enough initially to recoup costs of war. Aristocratic wealth constrained tax-raising powers of central gov't and eventually broke up the western empire when aristocrats began refusing taxation outright
- "The empire’s persistence was a symptom of the thoroughness with which Romans destroyed previous political systems and overrode the separate cultural identities of the kingdoms and tribes which they had conquered. Or, rather, the Romans, particularly in areas of already established polities and high culture, left their victims with a semitransparent veil of self-respect that allowed them an illusion of local autonomy" (185)
- "This simple equation— taxes plus rents exported roughly equaled in value exported and traded goods— however oversimplified it is, highlights the lines of trade and the volume of traffic that criss-crossed the Mediterranean, through a network of coastal or riverine towns centered on, and fueled primarily by, consumption in the city of Rome" (187)
- the emperors of the High Empire were not actually very good at being in control, due to founding mythology of the principate. aristocrats could potentially could be emperor and emperors killed a lot of aristocrats
- "The Roman aristocracy, broadly understood, had a small semihereditary core, a fluid and porous outer ring of politically and administratively active representatives (albeit with no explicit representative functions), and a broader pool of potential senators who were politically active, if at all, only at the local level" (189)
- Republic: aristocratic wealth concentrated in Italy; empire: aristocratic wealth dispersed throughout the empire
- army was essentially depoliticized and also located along the frontiers, which meant a) initial depopulation of rural Italy; b) increasing provincialization of army; c) most inhabitants of the empire actually never saw a soldier
- "Roman money was part real money and part a monument to political ambition" (202). meaning that significant chunks of gold coins did not circulate but were kept as "treasure". But also meaning that the growth in the volume of trade goods explains the explosive growth of the money supply without hyperinflation (although the coinage did tend to devalue over time; see Scheidel in Rome and China)
Bibliographic Data: Rathbone, Dominic. "Egypt, Augustus and Roman Taxation.” Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 4 (1993): 81-112.
Main Argument: Happy families are all alike, but senatorial provinces were not all the same; Rathbone argues that "the fiscal arrangements made between 30 and 27 BC by Octavian for Egypt are not particularly peculiar," especially because Egypt was effectively the first "imperial" province (110). "Far from being an exceptional case, Egypt was the laboratory in which Octavian developed and tested the novel elements of the fiscal system which as Augustus he made, with some modifications, standard throughout the empire" (111-12).
Argument, Sources, Examples The poll tax was the most radical of the taxes introduced to Egypt, and Augustus imposed it thereafter throughout the empire so that he would never have to tax Rome and Italy again. Most notably, he also created the category of "ge idiotike" which essentially corresponded to the ager privatus, which was a major force for muncipalization: "a crucial royal right of assignment of land in return for personal service was abandoned and replaced with the concepts of private landownership and communal obligations arising from it which were characteristic of the Greek and Roman city-state" (85). That said, most practice in Egypt accords with the precedents of incorporating other former Hellenistic kingdoms as provinces. The other notable exception was Octavian's confiscation of the estates and assets of Cleopatra VII and her allies as his personal patrimonium, a right which he did not have under Roman law and which was part and parcel of his emerging monarchy--indeed, this was a prime weapon wielded against senators down to the end of the high empire, and in this he drew firmly on Ptolemaic rather than Roman precedents.
Bibliographic Data: Goldsmith, Raymond W. "An Estimate of the Size and Structure of the National Product of the Early Roman Empire." Review of Income and Wealth 30 (1984), 263-88.
Main Argument:
Useful figures:
- Area of the empire: 3.3km^2
- Population estimate: 55 million [NB this is low, 60-70 million more common)
- Population of Rome: 1 million
- Rate of urbanization: 10%
- Other cities with 500K people: three (Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage)
- Gross national product: 20bn HS [based on pop of 55 million]
- Birth and death rates: very high
- Income inequality: very high (top 3% received 20-25% of the wealth)
- Slave population: 10-15%
- Working population: 40%
- Share of gov't expenditures in GNP: ~5%
- Capital expenditures in GNP >2%
Critical assessment: Goldsmith concludes that this was a "stagnant" economy, which is frankly staggeringly wrong and based on some wrong-headed assumptions about premodern economies. Note also that his population figures are low and his "snapshot" method (his year is 14 CE) shouldn't actually let him talk about change over time, but he does it anyway. However, not all his fault; Greenland ice cores and Swedish lakebeds not yet analyzed.
Further reading: Ken Pomeranz, The Great Divergence
Meta notes: "To be Roman was to be sweaty and clean. The Roman Empire was an empire of conquest but also a unitary symbolic system." --Keith Hopkins
Main Argument: Quantifying the Roman economy: it's difficult. Nonetheless, there is incontrovertible evidence that the Mediterranean as a whole experienced economic growth during the period of the high empire (1stC BCE to 4thC CE), although whether that growth continued after 200 C.E. is another question. Also, ancient technology was definitely a driving factor in ancient economic expansion. The currency and monetary institutions were definitely effectively integrated, and there is enough of an array of integrated economic institutions and patterns of behavior to agree that there was a de facto integrated "economic policy," although using that phrase overstates the case. That said, it seems that there was considerable regional diversity across the Roman Mediterranean throughout the period. Economic growth is clearly also tied into questions of "globalization" and "Romanization" (both deprecated terms, but still useful), as well as the question of to what extent the Roman economy was structurally integrated.
Argument, Sources, Examples The editors argue that "it is important to make economic sense of something which clearly was in many respects one political entity or 'system' which included Britain, North Africa, and Syria, without having to decide which was more or less 'typical'; and (2) that the links and connections (or perhaps now 'connectivities') between the different parts) conceived both geographically and structurally) of the Mediterrannean will inform our understanding of the sense in which we can talk of unity, a single empire or diverse regions as part of a single political and economic 'system'" (8-9). They focus on four areas: demography and urbanization, agriculture, trade, and metal supply and coinage. In terms of quantification, there are three issues: whether estimates of GDP are useful; what factors are drivers of growth (or indications of contraction); and what factors are reflections of rather than causes of growth. Part of the problem is estimating the population of the empire as a whole (when?), which is an issue that will not die. [Personally I like 55/60 million, it's a nice round number, but I could see as low as 40 million, depending.] A better approach might be to try to get more specificity, particularly at the local level, into the question of urbanization rates. (Is 55/60 million and a 10% urbanization rate even physically compatible?) The authors are very much against the Oxford approach for modeling the Roman economy as a whole, partly because the evidence just isn't there and partly because it's too diverse to model effectively at the macro-level.
Bibliographic Data: Hopkins, Keith. “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire.” In Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 178-204.
Main Argument: Rome was big enough as an empire that its political economy achieved several important economies of scale, which were crucial to its longevity and its success.
Argument, Sources, Examples
Important points:
- Rome as the heir to empires it surpassed, all engendered by three technologies: writing, money, and iron weapons and tools
- Three innovations of Augustus: 1. "the citizen army that had so threatened the central polity during the last century of the Republic was demilitarized and disempowered" (180); 2. "the Roman aristocracy became, much more than it had ever been before, an aristocracy of office with extremely low rates of hereditary succession" (181); 3. "the emperors at Rome effectively changed the nature of Roman citizenship. The plebs at Rome were disfranchised and no longer constituted the electorate for competing aristocrats" (ibid).
- problem of how to exploit empire effectively while rewarding those who created it, so exploitation of rich was constrained by their dependency on the poor to provide military service, obedience, and a small capital tax
- empire moved along axis from indemnities to taxation as it settled, but Roman taxes remained comparatively low, set only high enough initially to recoup costs of war. Aristocratic wealth constrained tax-raising powers of central gov't and eventually broke up the western empire when aristocrats began refusing taxation outright
- "The empire’s persistence was a symptom of the thoroughness with which Romans destroyed previous political systems and overrode the separate cultural identities of the kingdoms and tribes which they had conquered. Or, rather, the Romans, particularly in areas of already established polities and high culture, left their victims with a semitransparent veil of self-respect that allowed them an illusion of local autonomy" (185)
- "This simple equation— taxes plus rents exported roughly equaled in value exported and traded goods— however oversimplified it is, highlights the lines of trade and the volume of traffic that criss-crossed the Mediterranean, through a network of coastal or riverine towns centered on, and fueled primarily by, consumption in the city of Rome" (187)
- the emperors of the High Empire were not actually very good at being in control, due to founding mythology of the principate. aristocrats could potentially could be emperor and emperors killed a lot of aristocrats
- "The Roman aristocracy, broadly understood, had a small semihereditary core, a fluid and porous outer ring of politically and administratively active representatives (albeit with no explicit representative functions), and a broader pool of potential senators who were politically active, if at all, only at the local level" (189)
- Republic: aristocratic wealth concentrated in Italy; empire: aristocratic wealth dispersed throughout the empire
- army was essentially depoliticized and also located along the frontiers, which meant a) initial depopulation of rural Italy; b) increasing provincialization of army; c) most inhabitants of the empire actually never saw a soldier
- "Roman money was part real money and part a monument to political ambition" (202). meaning that significant chunks of gold coins did not circulate but were kept as "treasure". But also meaning that the growth in the volume of trade goods explains the explosive growth of the money supply without hyperinflation (although the coinage did tend to devalue over time; see Scheidel in Rome and China)
Bibliographic Data: Rathbone, Dominic. "Egypt, Augustus and Roman Taxation.” Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 4 (1993): 81-112.
Main Argument: Happy families are all alike, but senatorial provinces were not all the same; Rathbone argues that "the fiscal arrangements made between 30 and 27 BC by Octavian for Egypt are not particularly peculiar," especially because Egypt was effectively the first "imperial" province (110). "Far from being an exceptional case, Egypt was the laboratory in which Octavian developed and tested the novel elements of the fiscal system which as Augustus he made, with some modifications, standard throughout the empire" (111-12).
Argument, Sources, Examples The poll tax was the most radical of the taxes introduced to Egypt, and Augustus imposed it thereafter throughout the empire so that he would never have to tax Rome and Italy again. Most notably, he also created the category of "ge idiotike" which essentially corresponded to the ager privatus, which was a major force for muncipalization: "a crucial royal right of assignment of land in return for personal service was abandoned and replaced with the concepts of private landownership and communal obligations arising from it which were characteristic of the Greek and Roman city-state" (85). That said, most practice in Egypt accords with the precedents of incorporating other former Hellenistic kingdoms as provinces. The other notable exception was Octavian's confiscation of the estates and assets of Cleopatra VII and her allies as his personal patrimonium, a right which he did not have under Roman law and which was part and parcel of his emerging monarchy--indeed, this was a prime weapon wielded against senators down to the end of the high empire, and in this he drew firmly on Ptolemaic rather than Roman precedents.
Bibliographic Data: Goldsmith, Raymond W. "An Estimate of the Size and Structure of the National Product of the Early Roman Empire." Review of Income and Wealth 30 (1984), 263-88.
Main Argument:
Useful figures:
- Area of the empire: 3.3km^2
- Population estimate: 55 million [NB this is low, 60-70 million more common)
- Population of Rome: 1 million
- Rate of urbanization: 10%
- Other cities with 500K people: three (Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage)
- Gross national product: 20bn HS [based on pop of 55 million]
- Birth and death rates: very high
- Income inequality: very high (top 3% received 20-25% of the wealth)
- Slave population: 10-15%
- Working population: 40%
- Share of gov't expenditures in GNP: ~5%
- Capital expenditures in GNP >2%
Critical assessment: Goldsmith concludes that this was a "stagnant" economy, which is frankly staggeringly wrong and based on some wrong-headed assumptions about premodern economies. Note also that his population figures are low and his "snapshot" method (his year is 14 CE) shouldn't actually let him talk about change over time, but he does it anyway. However, not all his fault; Greenland ice cores and Swedish lakebeds not yet analyzed.
Further reading: Ken Pomeranz, The Great Divergence
Meta notes: "To be Roman was to be sweaty and clean. The Roman Empire was an empire of conquest but also a unitary symbolic system." --Keith Hopkins