Customer Reviews

Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems (Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy)

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In the past 100 years historians without decent training in economics have produced thousands of pages of work of dubious quality about the economy of the ancients. That kind of stuff was called the study of "ancient economy". These historians usually first started out by claiming that the ancient economy was primitive, overwhelmingly rural, almost completely based on subsistence production. The ancients didn't have any economic "rationality", "economics" was subordinate to politics, there wasn't a civil society in Ancient Greece. Whats the basis for such claims? Pretty much none. They read those claims from other texts and continually repeated what they read, ad nauseun. Those were ages of ideological nonsense invading what should have been serious topic of study.

But in the last few decades archeological research has been slowly destroying this nonsense model of the ancient world. Of course some people still maintain with toes and nails these nonsenses as the result of their training. But things are getting better and better and this is the result of this new work on ancient economic history.

Instead of that bunch of nonsense, this books offers decent hard data on archeological surveys, shipwrecks, urbanization, money and wages and other data about the Roman Economy. It clearly improves the understanding of the reader about the economic conditions of the ancient world. While still a bit too primitivist for my taste, the book surely is a great improvement over past efforts and signals the beginning of serious study of the ancient economy. (I would have given the book 4 stars, but due to it's unique quality, I give it 5 stars)

Highly recomended!