An assessment of the economic success of Imperial Rome, consisting of eleven previously published papers by the historian W. V. Harris, with additional comments to bring them up to date. Harris also includes a new study of poverty and destitution, and a substantial introduction which ties the collection together.

The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity.Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century.The Roman Market Economy reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.

A bold application of economic theory to help provide an understanding of the role that law played in the development of the Roman economy

The Roman Empire has long held pride of place in the collective memory of scholars, politicians, and the general public in the western world. In Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE, Daniel Hoyer offers a new approach to explain Rome's remarkable development. Hoyer surveys a broad selection of material to see how this diverse body of evidence can be reconciled to produce a single, coherent picture of the Roman economy. Engaging with social scientific and economic theory, Hoyer highlights key issues in economic history, placing the Roman Empire in its rightful place as a special—but not wholly unique—example of a successful preindustrial state.

Imperial Rome has a name for wealth and luxury, but was the economy of the Roman Empire as a whole a success, by the standards of pre-modern economies? In this volume W. V. Harris brings together eleven previously published papers on this much-argued subject, with additional comments to bring them up to date. A new study of poverty and destitution provides a fresh perspective on the question of the Roman Empire's economic performance, and a substantial introduction ties the collection together. Harris tackles difficult but essential questions, such as how slavery worked, what role the state played, whether the Romans had a sophisticated monetary system, what it was like to be poor, whether they achieved sustained economic growth. He shows that in spite of notably sophisticated economic institutions and the spectacular wealth of a few, the Roman economy remained incorrigibly pre-modern and left a definite segment of the population high and dry.

A major new history of the spectacular rise and fall of the ancient world's greatest empire

The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world? In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.