Hendrik Verhagen has provided us with a well-balanced book on the evolution of Roman law in the field of real securities. To explore the origins of Roman debt security arrangements, V. embarks on a sweeping and refreshingly innovative discussion, encompassing diverse juristic writings, imperial constitutions and some sources for legal practice, as well as skilfully applying methods from the social and economic sciences.

In the introduction, V. lays out the time frame for his analysis, largely confined to the classical Roman law of the Principate. To his credit, he does not surrender to the recently fashionable temptation to present a study ranging from ancient legal institutions to their modern equivalents — an endeavour that rarely proves to be genuinely successful. His focus is on the legal rules and institutions connected with pignus and hypotheca, whose origin and further development lie in transactional practices, although he does not offer a more elaborate treatment of fiducia (5f.). Despite initial hopes, the reader is largely confronted with an analysis focusing predominantly on the theory of Roman law (except for the excerpts from the Sulpician archive — a very specific corpus coming from Italy itself). However, V. deliberately excludes from the study provincial legal practice depicted in the later papyri. To be fair, V. does express the aim of dealing with developments in post-classical law in future work — a commendable goal, as a comprehensive study of Byzantine securities remains a desideratum.

The chief merit of V.’s work is its methodology, offering an appealing new approach to analysis, and thus enriching the instrumentarium of legal-historical research. By invoking models from social-systems theory, evolutionary theory and economic theories of law, V. outlines in ch. 1 the analytical basis for his account of the origins and creation of further legal variants of pignus and hypotheca. He also presents the particularities of Roman law from a systems perspective, highlights the structural links between law, economics and society, and finally justifies the evolutionary perspective on legal change and continuity adopted in his study. V. is fully aware of the possible limitations of these approaches and identifies their shortcomings to demonstrate how they should be used in historical research. He adapts the sociological conceptual framework to the dogmatic grid of Roman law and makes an excellent selection of secondary literature on the subject. This work can thus be seen as a part of a broader reflection on the fundamental questions of legal history — ‘why and how legal systems change?’ (28).

Chs 2–3 mainly deal with the evolutionary mechanisms of Roman law in the form of the formulary procedure, the edictal system and the activity of jurisprudence, but they also map out the economic environment of the law of real security. These chapters will be of value for readers less familiar with Roman historical reality, providing the necessary context for later arguments. Chs 4–6 discuss the origins of pignus and fiducia in the Republic and their evolutionary trajectories. Ch. 5 shows in detail the transition from the forfeiture pledge to a pledge enforceable by sale, while ch. 6 focuses on the hypotheca and its ancestors as a non-possessory pledge that could be granted nuda conventione. In chs 7–9, V. investigates variants of the ‘contractual’ pledge recognised in the Nerva–Antonine age, i.e. the possibility of multiple pledges, as well as pignus nominis, antichresis and hypotheca generalis. Chs 10–11 deal with further developments under the Severans, the ‘pledge-like’ preferential rights of the Roman treasury arising by operation of law, the consequences of lack of ‘publicity’ of fiscal and conventional pledges and the rules governing the execution of charged assets. Finally, ch. 12 returns to some of the questions posed in ch. 1 as well as seeking to assess the evolution of the Roman law of real security.

A review this short cannot do full justice to the book. Without doubt V. demonstrates an exhaustive knowledge of earlier discussions of fiducia cum creditore, pignus, hypotheca, making this publication of interest to both experienced researchers and law students. There are plenty of ways in which the analysis could be strengthened by including additional voices, for example in the case of Roman approaches to title registers in Roman Egypt or Greek influences on the solutions adopted in case of conventional pledge, but even those who are not convinced by his ideas will find in V. a discerning interlocutor. The book is well organised in thematically structured chapters, while the division into concise subsections makes the discussion generally easy to follow. On occasion, however, the presentation becomes somewhat fragmented, with discussion on a given issue initiated in one section and concluded in another, obscuring the author's opinion. In a few cases, V. infers the popularity or limited applicability of certain types of real collaterals on the basis of the number of attestations in the Digest or Codex. This argument, however, can easily be flipped by saying that the difficulty, uniqueness or complexity of a legal problem can also translate into higher numbers of studies by jurists (as indeed he recognises, e.g. at 76 and 81). These minor points in no way alter the fact that V.'s book is well thought-out and will prove useful. He makes a persuasive case for the benefits of economic analysis and employment of contemporary instruments for understanding the development of historical institutions for securing debt as well as investigating their potential correlations with economic growth in the Roman empire, a theme which should be of special interest to both legal historians and historians of ancient economies.