Family matters, Economy, culture and biology: fertility and its constraints in Roman Italy
However, the theory concerning fertility behaviour during the Late Roman Republic that has been put forward by Brunt depends largely on such viewpoints as have become controversial in the discipline of demography. Rather than purely economic and rational in scope, decision making processes – such as those concerning marriage and procreation – are embedded in specific cultural and social settings that affect outcomes through the creation or upholding of practical, structural, normative or perceived constraints.
Who Built the Pyramids?
Who Built the Pyramids? Not slaves. Archeaologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers.
Human labor and harbor capacity at Rome
This paper aims to reconstruct and suggest many of the aspects of Roman dock workers including their numbers, hiring practices, and unloading practices. The role of harbor capacity will also be reviewed to understand Rome’s ability to safely import several hundred thousand tons and prevent famine.
Real wages in early economies: Evidence for living standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE
In this paper, I present a critical survey of pertinent data from antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages.
The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world
This paper has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labor in different sectors of historical economies.
Communal Agriculture in the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayyum
My approach to land rights is social and economic rather than juristic. In other words, I am not interested in the interpretation of ancient legal terms according to Roman or civil law categories, which risks imposing rigid categories on social relations that have little explanatory power…In this paper, I use the economic concepts of communal and private land rights to illuminate these relations.
Human capital and the growth of the Roman economy
This paper takes as a starting point Keith Hopkins’ basic article, “Rome, taxes, rents and trade.”1 Walter Scheidel’s introduction to the article described it as “…the only comprehensive attempt to explain the dynamics of the Roman imperial economy currently available….
The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire
Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that elites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income while middling households (perhaps 10 percent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.
A comparative perspective on the determinants of the scale and productivity of maritime trade in the Roman Mediterranean
I argue that imperial state formation was the single most important ultimate determinant of the scale, structure, and productivity of maritime commerce in the Roman period. Hegemony and subsequent direct rule created uniquely favorable conditions for maritime trade by cutting the costs of predation, transactions, and financing to levels that were lower than in any other period of pre-modern Mediterranean history.
Real wages in early economies: Evidence for living standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE
In this paper, I present a critical survey of pertinent data from antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages. This broadened perspective expands the chronological scope of the historical study of real incomes of unskilled workers from a few centuries to up to four millennia and at least in a few cases enables us to trace contours of change in the very long run.