Thomas Pynchon (1937–) is a leading member of those American novelists who began their careers in the 1960s whose subsequent output not only garnered major awards but has gained recognition as making a unique commentary on recent American culture and history. In his introduction to his collection of short fiction, Slow Learner (1984), Pynchon explains how the writings of the Beats helped him to break free from the literary decorum stifling expression in late-1950s America and to create fiction containing a range of different voices, however profane. From the same period, the decade following Hiroshima, Pynchon dates “one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent … in our history,” namely, that of science fiction. Pynchon himself has incorporated a number of science fiction tropes in his fiction: moon rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow, extraterrestrials in Vineland, a hollow earth voyage in Against the Day, among other examples. In a 2006 letter in support of Ian McEwan, who had been accused of plagiarism in his novel Atonement, Pynchon found common cause with “most of us who write historical fiction.” A diversity of voices and a concern to investigate different historical moments have been two of the main characteristics of Pynchon’s fiction together with a skill at moving the reader to and fro between high seriousness and low farce.

Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), alternates episodes from 1898 up to the 1930s with sections taking place in late 1955 and 1956. The latter approach the Suez crisis but cut off just before it breaks. Similarly the first episode in the historical sequence, originally published as a stand-alone story set in Egypt, “Under the Rose,” is set on the eve of the Fashoda crisis of 1898, which almost brought France and Britain to war over rival imperial claims in Africa. This story establishes one of Pynchon’s main historical themes – empire – whose ideology he was challenging when he incorporated the story into V. by multiplying perspectives to include those of the local functionaries blanked out in the guidebooks of the period that were his source for locations.

At the heart of Kurt Vonnegut’s (1922–2007) career as a novelist rests an idealism dressed up in the playful trappings of a rebellious teenager who thumbs his nose at the establishment for supremely moral reasons. A countercultural figure who gained literary celebrity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vonnegut is best characterized as an American trickster whose values are an ad hoc mixture of the public school education he received in the Midwest during the Great Depression, his own family’s religious skepticism, and his experiences as a prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, Germany.

His ascendancy as a novelist parallels the rise of postmodern fiction in America as practiced by such luminaries as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and John Barth. But Vonnegut’s own work, while highlighting its constructed nature through a range of metafictional techniques and its adamant assertion that there is no essential center of reference, nonetheless argues for a consistent morality that might best be called postmodern humanism. Vonnegut’s fiction should be seen as an antecedent for the work of such contemporary novelists as David Foster Wallace, Sherman Alexie, and Dave Eggers, and his legacy continues to influence both public and literary spheres.

The history of economic thought, rooted in (moral) philosophy and jurisprudence, is readily analyzed using general principles that equally apply to ancient and modern thought. It seems almost a platitude to say that ancient sensibilities differed from our own, or even from those of medieval Europe, shaped as it was by Christianity, and that we should not lose sight of this. This observation, however, is far from redundant considering that a great deal of (pseudo)history of thought has been done by adapting the work of one author to a theoretical grid worked out by another, sometimes in a later period.

The Romans, like the other ancients, lacked a systematic view of economics, either as an abstract theory or as an activity independent of politics. Though this may appear an endorsement of the Polanyian conception of economics “embedded” in other categories, the picture has now become more complex. After the traditional division into “primitivists” and “modernizers,” and Finley's “new orthodoxy,” the recent institutional approach raises fresh doubts. The basic principle that institutions are involved in economics as soon as transactions reach a relevant size (and cost) is acceptable; but to attribute “the fundamental assumption of scarcity” of neoclassical theory to ancient economic thought appears excessive. Only in modern thought is the postulate of scarcity required to define an economic good; at most, antecedents may be found in the medieval debates on value that inspired the analysis of exchange, reflected in the formulation of concepts such as indigentia (i.e., wants), an idea destined to play an important role in later economic thought.

Introduction

After the armies of the eastern Roman Empire had conquered the Vandal Kingdom, the emperor Justinian (527–65 ce) decided to build a city on the location of a minor and insignificant town, close to where his army had landed. The account by the contemporary historian Procopius shows his wholehearted support of the undertaking:

This one passage offers occasion for several reflections on urbanism in the Roman world. To begin with, the ancients did not perceive a city as merely a concentration of many people in one place. To them it was a symbol of prosperity and civilized culture. Hence, peoples without towns and cities were uncivilized. Concomitantly, country-dwellers are often depicted by the urban writers as boorish and ignorant simpletons, at best as naïve and unspoiled. Related to these ideas is the notion that a city is only a city if it contains the markers of civilized life: towns and cities had to be built around public monuments like temples, theatres, and baths, and contain halls and public spaces where councils and people assembled. In the later Roman Empire, walls had become an important feature too. Without these monuments and features such settlements would indeed have been no more than many people living in the same place. Hence, it was the duty of rulers and of social elites to support urban society by building and maintaining public monuments. Rulers of the Roman Empire could of course go a step further and, in the tradition of Hellenistic kings, create a city were none had been before. At the end of Classical Antiquity Justinian founded Justiniana Prima near his birth place in modern Serbia.

Any attempt at providing a synthesis of the salient characteristics and chronological development of ‘post-Roman’ economies, which will be taken here to begin from the fifth century ce, is complicated by the extent to which change varied across space and time. The most meaningful and revealing approach to this infinite variety lies in extended and comparative regional study, as has recently been magisterially demonstrated. Within the confines of an overview, however, one can only try to encapsulate this general pattern of fragmentation within a unitary framework of analysis, notwithstanding the schematic superficiality that this inevitably involves. In outline, a familiar distinction between the political destinies of the two halves of the empire, the fragmented, newly-barbarian West and the integrated and lately-flourishing East, can readily be carried over into the economic sphere because of the importance of the fiscal interests of the Roman state in shaping the dynamics of production and exchange. In neither case, however, was any radical economic transformation immediately and generally triggered by ‘the fall of Rome.’ In the East, the late antique boom encouraged by the foundation of Constantinople, and implicit in the expansion of the extent and intensity of rural settlement in several regions, continued unabated. In the West, with the notable exception of Britain, where the involution of the Roman system was complete within little more than a generation, the various successor-states entered upon a species of economic half-life, in the sense that they emitted Roman-ness in various aspects of their fiscal organization and patterns of exchange until the later seventh century, but in steadily diminishing quantities. This fading but still recognizably post-Roman pattern would be significantly complicated, but not fundamentally altered, by the absorption of Africa and parts of Italy back into the imperial orbit as a result of Justinian's reconquests. In the seventh century, however, the eastern empire underwent a military-political crisis of its own, at once more concise in its nature and less decisive in its outcomes. The Byzantine state survived, in shrunken form, and a variant of fiscal organization was maintained by the Umayads in the territories over which they had assumed control.

Economists seeking to explain the unparalleled economic growth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have paid increasing attention to human capital – that is, the education, training, and health of the labor force. Over the past two centuries higher levels of education have provided the foundation for discovery of new knowledge and the resulting technological advances needed to sustain growth over long periods at unprecedented rates. Training and education of the work force has enabled the technology to be used in economic production. And the life span and health of the population have improved to permit longer life spans and more intensive use of the skills. The magnitude of these gains is striking, as the average life span has more than doubled and the productivity per worker has increased by an order of magnitude in the most developed economies.

Roman historians have considered various aspects of the subject, but none has conceptualized a study of the Roman economy based on human capital. This is not surprising, since only in the second half of the twentieth century, when investments in human capital have come to dominate investments in physical capital, has it become clear to economists that the quality of labor is a major driver of growth. In the absence of reliable quantitative data for Rome, this chapter aims to provide a description of the levels of education and training of various sectors of the Roman labor force, an analysis of the extent of institutionalization of education and training, and some broad comparisons with other pre-industrial economies in order to assess Rome's level of economic development. The challenge is to add precision to the assessment of Keith Hopkins (1995/96) of “modest, though significant growth” of the Roman economy. While it is not possible to calculate a growth rate with any confidence, it is possible to assess Roman institutions for education and training against those of other pre-modern economies. I will argue that Roman imperial levels of urbanization, education, and literacy (unsurprisingly) exceeded those of previous societies, but fell noticeably short of the most advanced societies of early modern Europe before the industrial revolution. On the one hand, Rome benefited from the more intense exchange of knowledge and differentiation of labor that generally comes with higher levels of urbanization; on the other hand, Rome was not able to break out of the contradiction that more intense urbanization also brought higher mortality.

The role of slave labor has rightfully been a focus of historians assessing the performance of the Roman economy. But to develop a comprehensive picture of economic relationships in the Roman Empire, one must assess the situation of the empire's vast class of small-scale landowners, tenants, artisans, and people engaging in various forms of wage labor. Often these groups overlapped. So a basic question is the degree to which economic growth in the Roman Empire benefited the vast class of working people in the Roman economy. Did the legal and social institutions surrounding the use of contract labor encourage the efficient use of resources, or did they simply promote the interests of the empire's elite at the expense of the vast majority of its population, including both farmers and urban laborers? As comparisons with later societies will show, it is unlikely that Roman workers ever escaped Malthusian constraints, so that population remained a decisive factor in determining the welfare of workers. In the Roman Empire, workers faced increasing competition as population grew over the first two centuries ce, at least until the Antonine Plague in 165 ce, which apparently caused widespread loss of life and arguably substantial economic disruption. Indeed, documentary papyri from Egypt, which provide some detailed information about wages and prices, suggest that wages and prices remained relatively stable in Egypt until in the 160s ce, when they doubled over a period of thirty years, quite possibly as a result of the loss of population. This sudden change, after a long period of stability, suggests how important population pressure was to the welfare of the empire's workers. After the 190s ce prices and wages remained stable until about 270 ce, when serious inflation set in.

There is no single up-to-date study of the Roman economy in English. Chapters 18–28 of W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge 2007; henceforth CEHGRW) cover the development of the Roman economy from its beginnings into late antiquity. M. I. Finley's classic The Ancient Economy, first published in 1973, expanded in 1985 and now available in an updated edition with a foreword by I. Morris (Berkeley 1999), is still required reading for its coherent (if contested) vision of the Greco-Roman economy as a whole. M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2nd edn. revised by P. Fraser, Oxford 1957) and A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (3 vols., Oxford 1964) are ambitious works that focus more specifically on particular periods of Roman economic history. P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (London 1987), chapters 3–5 offer a convenient overview, and C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford 2005) traces the ending of the Roman economy. Recent treatments in other languages include H.-J. Drexhage, H. Konen and K. Ruffing, Die Wirtschaft des Römischen Reiches (1.-3.Jahrhundert): Eine Einführung (Berlin 2002) and J. Andreau, L’économie du monde romain (Paris 2010). W. Scheidel and S. von Reden (eds.), The Ancient Economy (Edinburgh 2002) reprint important contributions to this field and provide a more wide-ranging bibliographical essay (272–8). The most comprehensive relevant bibliography, with close to 3,400 titles, can be found in the aforementioned CEHGRW (769–917).

W. V. Harris, “Between archaic and modern: some current problems in the history of the Roman economy,” in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Inscribed Economy: Production and Distribution in the Roman Empire in the Light of instrumentum domesticum (Ann Arbor 1993), 11–29 discusses the state of research, as do I. Morris, “The ancient economy twenty years after The Ancient Economy,” Classical Philology 89 (1994), 351–66 and J. Andreau, “Twenty years after Moses I. Finley's The Ancient Economy” in Scheidel and von Reden's aforementioned collection (33–49). In their introduction to J. G. Manning and I. Morris (eds.), The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford 2005), 1–44, the editors consider different approaches to the study of ancient economies.

The role of transport in the economy of the Roman world is far from clearly understood, and is a controversial issue in modern historical debate. Our knowledge is hampered by two main factors: first, the nature of our evidence. Ancient authors were generally not interested in how commodities were transported, and really only comment on the exceptional. And second, our understanding of transport has arguably been hampered by both a failure of modern scholars to fully appreciate its complexities, and by, it has to be said, in some cases, willfully bending the facts, and more seriously evidence, to fit preconceived ‘models.’ The purpose of this chapter is to review evidence for transport, survey modern views of its role, assess the still prevailing orthodoxy that it restricted economic growth, and suggest a way forward to understanding its real capacity and function in the Roman economy. It can only scratch the surface of a very large and complex topic, which deserves a full treatment.

Conditioning factors

The geographer Strabo makes the following comment on the Mediterranean, but more importantly its relations with the lands on which it bounds: “It is the sea more than anything else that defines the contours of the land and gives it its shape, by forming gulfs, deep seas, straits, and likewise isthmuses, peninsulas and promontories; but both the rivers and the mountains assist the seas herein.” While it is clear that for Strabo the sea is the principal factor, he raises the important point that rivers and mountains are the points of connection to inland regions. Indeed, an essential part of how Strabo viewed his world is how specific points (cities, ports) and wider regions are connected with each other:

Economics is about the allocation of resources. In the modern industrialized world, most goods and services are allocated through transactions, which in turn are mostly purchases and taxes. Goods are largely the outputs of early modern economies, while services – particularly labor services – are more typically the inputs. To understand how an economy works, we need to consider how inputs are directed to provide the outputs that people desire. There also are economic analyses of marriages and families, seeing marriage itself, fertility choice, and the raising of children as decisions that affect the allocation of resources. Ancient economies clearly differed from modern ones, but the principles of economics still hold true, and economics can bring clarity to the analysis of how resources were allocated in the ancient world.

I make this case in several steps. First, I describe the concepts of a market and of institutional economics. Second, I separate supply and demand and discuss the nature of economic incentives and equilibrium to show that economics may be useful even in the absence of market activity. Third, I introduce the concept of comparative advantage to explain trade. Fourth, I discuss possible economic growth as well as catastrophes like plagues. Fifth, I turn to money and prices. Sixth, I discuss the nature of information that can be used to test hypotheses about all these topics. The last two topics are discussed on this volume's web site.

How did the Roman economy affect people's well-being? As I have noted in the opening chapter, there are many ways of assessing well-being, in terms of income and consumption and by considering goods such as education, security, or freedom. In this chapter I focus more narrowly on biological living standards. Did the inhabitants of the Roman Empire live longer lives, grow to be taller, and enjoy better health and diets than the populations of earlier or later periods? As we will see, the relationship between any of these features and economic performance is complex, and economic interpretations of physical well-being are fraught with great difficulties. A growing body of pertinent evidence nevertheless merits our attention. Indeed, progress in the study of Roman health and nutrition has been so rapid that any attempt to summarize the current state of knowledge is bound to be out of date almost upon publication. The following survey cannot offer more than a snapshot of recent and ongoing developments that promise to put our understanding of the quality of life in the Roman world on a more solid footing.

Longevity and mortality

Progress has primarily occurred in the study of skeletal remains. While this research has shed new light on stature, health, and nutrition, it has thus far failed to provide reliable new information on longevity. Until and unless this happens, our knowledge of this vital measure will not increase beyond what little we can say about it at present. The study of ancient life expectancy is severely constrained by our reliance on a relatively small amount of textual data.

Our efforts to understand the way in which manufacturing was organized in the Roman world are necessarily hampered by the state of our evidence. Not only is this evidence fragmentary, it is also capable of supporting potentially conflicting conclusions about the dominant patterns of industrial organization and the degree to which these patterns may have changed over time.

On one level, the surviving material is capable of supporting an argument about modest development in the scale and organizational complexity of manufacturing. It is clear, for instance, that urban development and modest economic growth in Italy did create concentrated consumer markets in which demand became sufficient to provoke labor differentiation and specialization within several individual industries. Specialization is best attested in industries geared toward elite consumption, such as construction or the manufacture of durable goods in precious metals (both of which I explore in more detail below). Specialization may also have existed at lower levels of the market: Xenophon notes that in the shoemaking industries in Athens during the fourth century bce, some men earned a living by cutting out soles, others by fashioning the uppers, and more still by stitching the pieces together; there is no reason to doubt that the same held true in the Roman empire (Xen. Cyr. 8.2.5).

Defining the Roman economy

What was the “Roman economy?” In this volume, we apply this term to economic developments that occurred within the Roman Empire, a polity that evolved from an alliance system in peninsular Italy into a large empire that from the second century bce onward came to dominate and then rule the most densely populated parts of western Eurasia and North Africa west of Mesopotamia and Iran before it eventually experienced substantial contraction in the fifth and seventh centuries ce. Although many of the following chapters devote particular attention to conditions in Roman Italy, the original core of the empire, coverage extends across the varied territories under Roman control. More specifically, this volume seeks to relate economic structures and processes to the formation of the imperial state.

Thanks to its exceptional size and duration, the Roman Empire offers one of the best opportunities to study economic development in the context of an agrarian world empire. Moreover, the fact that the Roman period was the only time when the entire Mediterranean basin was contained within a single political domain raises the question of how much the specific characteristics of the Roman economy owed to imperial unification. The Roman economy was a typical pre-modern economy in the sense that it depended on organic fuels and was dominated by agriculture and production within households. In developmental terms, it can be seen as the continuation and culmination of the expansion of the Hellenistic economies of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East that in turn represented the mature phase of the political and economic recovery that had commenced in the Early Iron Age. The Roman period witnessed the extension of Near Eastern, Hellenic, and Hellenistic features such as urbanization, monetization, market exchange, taxation, and chattel slavery into the western peripheries of Eurasia.

Building on Greek and Hellenistic institutions, ancient Rome created the largest slave society in history. There are several reasons for defining the Roman Empire as a slave society, above all in its Italian core but also to varying degrees in its subject territories. Slaves, numbering in the millions and widely dispersed, accounted for a non-trivial share of its total population. In key areas, slaves were not merely present but supported what has been termed a ‘slave mode of production,’ a mode that rested both on an integrated system of enslavement, slave trade, and slave employment in production, and on “the systematic subjection of slaves to the control of their masters in the process of production and reproduction.” Most importantly, Rome counts as a slave society in terms of the structural location of slavery: dominant groups, once again above all at the core, relied to a significant degree on slave labor to generate surplus and maintain their position of dominance. Since the role of slavery in central productive processes turned Rome into a ‘slave economy,’ just as the widespread domination of slaves as a primary social relationship made it a ‘slave society,’ these two terms may be used interchangeably, especially in those strata where slaves and ex-slaves continuously enveloped owners and patrons and mediated their interaction with the freeborn population. In short, Rome was a ‘slave society’ to the extent that without slavery it would have looked profoundly different.

In keeping with the theme of this volume, this chapter focuses on the economic dimension of Roman slavery. It addresses the three principal questions of ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how.’ What was the Roman slave economy like – what did slaves do, where, and for whom? How many were there and where did they come from? And how did Roman slavery compare to other major slave systems in world history? Why did Romans employ slave labor the way they did? How did the Roman slave system develop over time? The overall objective is to assess the economic importance and consequences of Roman slavery, its contribution to the formation of the Roman economy as a distinctively imperial system of domination, production, and exchange.

Although it would be attractive to offer a comprehensive survey of agriculture throughout the ancient Mediterranean, the Near East, and Western Europe, I intend to concentrate primarily upon the best attested and most productive farming regime, that of Italy, Greece, Western Asia Minor, North Africa, Baetica and Eastern Tarraconensis during the Principate and Early Empire. Within this affluent urban heartland of the Roman Empire, our sources and archaeological evidence present a coherent picture of market-oriented intensive mixed farming, viticulture, arboriculture, and market gardening, comparable, and often superior, in its productivity and agronomic expertise to the best agricultural practice of England, the Low Countries, France (wine), and Northern Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Greco-Roman farmers succeeded in supplying a large urban population equal to, if not significantly greater than, that of early nineteenth century Italy and Greece, with a diet rich, not just in cereals, but in meat, wine, olive oil, fish, condiments, fresh fruit and vegetables. The most striking evidence comes from ancient skeletal remains, which reveal robust mean heights for Greeks and Romans and a high standard of health and nutrition. Protein and calorie malnutrition, caused by an insufficient diet based overwhelmingly on cereals, was very acute throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe, and drove the mean heights of the Spaniards, Italians, and Austro-Hungarians as low as 158–162cm, comparable to the heights of poor peasants in the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The evidence from Roman Italy, on the other hand, allows us to estimate a mean height of 168cm, equal to that of Italian males just after World War II, and the material from Hellenistic Greece suggests a mean height of 172cm, a level not reached in modern Greece until the late 1970s.