A model of real income growth in Roman Italy
The economic impact of Roman imperialism on the mass of Italy’s population is still only poorly understood: who benefited, and how?
The Roman slave supply
This survey of the scale and sources of the Roman slave supply will be published in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge world history of slavery, 1: The ancient Mediterranean world.
Roman population size: the logic of the debate
Our ignorance of ancient population numbers is one of the biggest obstacles to our understanding of Roman history. After generations of prolific scholarship, we still do not know how many people inhabited Roman Italy and the Mediterranean at any given point in time.
Rule and Revenue in Egypt and Rome: Political Stability and Fiscal Institutions
This paper has more modest goals. It takes as its starting point Levi’s hy- pothesis that the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate in the late first century BC brought political stability, which led to rationally calcu- lated fiscal reforms. It examines the effects of this transition in Egypt where there is abundant evidence due to the survival of administrative and tax docu- ments on papyrus and potsherds.
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.
The monetary systems of the Han and Roman empires
It is not an exaggeration to say that the existing body of research scholarship on Roman coins, money, and the monetary economy greatly exceeds corresponding scholarship on early Chinese money in terms of both volume and sophistication. As a consequence, while the physical characteristics of Roman coins and their distribution have already been studied in very considerable detail and much attention has been paid to their relevance to broader questions of economic history, our knowledge of ancient Chinese money and its uses remains much more limited and fragile and many important questions have barely been addressed at all.
In search of Roman economic growth
The real question is not what the data reveal about change over time: it is what we would need to know in order to determine whether these data reflect extensive or intensive economic growth; why any such growth occurred, abated, and ceased; and how it related to the distribution of incomes.
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.