Recent work on the Roman economy has been driven by controversy about the rôle of empire in growth and integration: was economic expansion primarily sustained by fiscal and rentier demand and predation or by market forces unleashed by imperial peace? Both factors were undoubtedly influential but their relative significance remains contested. A seasoned economist operating from a neo-classical perspective tempered by at least some appreciation of institutional constraints, Temin enters the fray with gusto and verve by emphasizing the market dimension of the Roman economy. His key claim is that ‘there were enough market transactions to constitute a market economy, that is, an economy where many resources are allocated by prices that are free to move in response to changes in underlying conditions’ (6), on a scale comparable to other pre-modern market economies such as England and the Netherlands. T.’s book develops this proposition in three parts that deal with prices, markets in different goods, and growth and GDP.
In keeping with social science principles, T. seeks to devise testable hypotheses to make his case. Drawing on six grain prices from different parts of the Empire dating from the mid-second century b.c. to the late first century a.d. and crude geographical metrics, he argues that prices were inversely correlated with distance from Rome, a city whose massive demand he deems to have determined prices elsewhere if there was sufficient market integration. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a poor test case: price denominations from different centuries should not be treated as equivalent and the real cost of grain transport via different media does not in fact yield the correlation observed by T. (as I show in JRA 27 (2014); for other problems, see G. Bransbourg, http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/3). More suitable evidence would have been available. Slave prices appear consistent with the notion of a unified market for these mobile high-value goods that could readily be traded over long distances. One might also ask whether the growing geographical peripheralization of Roman military recruitment was a consequence of fixed nominal army wages across the Empire. In the future, geospatial and agent-based modelling promise novel opportunities for testing assumptions about the principal determinants of economic exchange. The much more abundant grain prices from Hellenistic Babylon studied by T. provide stronger support for the importance of price-setting markets: this material is bound to be of interest to students of ancient Mediterranean economies. Perhaps less rewardingly, T.’s chapter on price behaviour in the Roman Empire above all succeeds in highlighting the intractable difficulties in accounting for monetary inflation from the late second century a.d. onward.
The chapters on labour markets and financial intermediation are the most engaging contributions in the second section. However, T.’s hyperbolic claim that the Roman world was endowed with ‘a unified labour force’ (114) is not borne out by the evidence adduced: moderate levels of nominal or real wage dispersion across the Empire do not support this scenario unless there is a credible counterfactual scenario that could disprove it, an alternative which T. fails to develop and which does not actually seem historically feasible. Low wage dispersion may just as well have been the result of broadly similar levels of regional development — common in agrarian societies — combined with a unified market in precious metals and the absence of exotic local land/labour ratios that might have supported much higher real wages. Conversely, T.’s conceptualization of Roman slavery in terms of labour market relations is stimulating: institutionally, the Roman slave system was well equipped for rewarding obedience and skills with positive incentives (through compensation or manumission), as his explicit comparison with much more restrictive New World slave regimes makes abundantly clear. Yet T. glosses over his second precondition for the presence of a labour market — workers’ freedom ‘to change their economic activity and/or their location’ — which does not readily apply to Roman-style chattel slavery (even though the implicit bargaining tool of flight might profitably have been analysed in these terms). He also neglects to consider whether the conspicuous accumulation of human capital in the domain of skilled slave labour depressed wages and interfered with market mechanisms. In ch. 8, a comparative perspective leads T. to conclude that in some respects Roman financial institutions rivalled or surpassed those of eighteenth-century England, the Netherlands and France, an index of sophistication unavailable to conventional ‘within-case’ studies of Roman conditions.
In the third part, T. offers a short primer on growth theory and very helpfully sets out a Malthusian framework for the study of Roman economic development, a perspective that has been receiving growing support from recent studies of trends in real wages and body height. In the final chapter, T. retreats from his earlier minimalist estimate of Roman GDP.
T.’s book frequently improves on his earlier articles from which it is largely derived. The deplorable fact that ancient historians continue to neglect social science approaches makes his intervention all the more welcome. T.’s main contribution lies in his repeated insistence on formal model testing and comparative historical analysis. The occasional misstep should not tempt ancient historians to dismiss Economics altogether. As T.’s own previous collaboration with D. Rathbone suggests, the future may well lie not so much in more single-authored contributions by economists but in more direct collaboration and joint publication across disciplines.
