Author: Paul Erdkamp
Publisher: Peeters
ISBN: 9789042932807
Category : Rome
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
History is a reality that can be observed only through the traces it has left. Some are words and images (on parchment, papyrus, stone or any other bearer) conveying us the emotions and reflections of people in the past. Others are the scars and leftovers of human lives and actions, scattered in the landscape, buried or sunk under water. Historians and archaeologists are experts in restoring the damage done to a body of evidence by time or human manipulation. We are trained empiricists, wont to look down and think bottom-up. Economic history, however, requires us to do more: we need to look up. Economics is about explaining patterns in human interaction by detecting its causes and effects. However good our restored data are, the patterns they reveal will always be too fragmented and have too many loose ends to unveil reality. Economic history is always an act of imagination. The challenge is to ensure that it does not become an insubstantial pageant. Theories, models and comparative history help us to do that. They are explanatory frames and tools, showing the consequences of our assumptions and suggesting solutions to fill in the gaps. They do not diminish the need for empirical research methods. The output of any model depends on the reliability of its input data. This book discusses theories and models we believe are useful in economic history, but it also invites the reader to look at methods (both new and traditional) to ensure that input data are reliable, and offers case studies showing what can be done.
Author: Richard Duncan-Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521892896
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Duncan-Jones presents a series of studies and debates on interlocking themes which explore central areas of the Roman economy and the ways those areas connect and interact. The studies are grouped into five sections: Time and Distance, Demography and Manpower, Agrarian Patterns, The World of Cities, and Tax-payment and Tax-assessment.
Author: Richard Duncan-Jones
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004525130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Were legal systems in the Roman empire conducive to economic growth and development? Were legal rules and procedure changed in response to economic needs? This book offers detailed studies to provide some answers to these basic questions.
Author: Alan Bowman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199562598
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
The first volume in a new series, Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy: a collection of essays, edited by the series editors, focusing on the economic performance of the Roman empire, and suggesting how we can derive a quantified account of economic growth and contraction in the period of the empire's greatest extent and prosperity.
Author: W. V. Harris
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191616494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
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.
Author: Cristina Rosillo-López
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030541002
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
This volume studies information as an economic resource in the Roman World. Information asymmetry is a distinguishing phenomenon of any human relationship. From an economic perspective, private or hidden information, opposed to publicly observable information, generates advantages and inequalities; at the same time, it is a source of profit, legal and illegal, and of transaction costs. The contributions that make up the present book aim to deepen our understanding of the economy of Ancient Rome by identifying and analysing formal and informal systems of knowledge and institutions that contributed to control, manage, restrict and enhance information. The chapters scrutinize the impact of information asymmetries on specific economic sectors, such as the labour market and the market of real estate, as well as the world of professional associations and trading networks. It further discusses structures and institutions that facilitated and regulated economic information in the public and the private spheres, such as market places, auctions, financial mechanisms and instruments, state treasures and archives. Managing Asymmetric Information in the Roman Economy invites the reader to evaluate economic activities within a larger collective mental, social, and political framework, and aims ultimately to test the applicability of tools and ideas from theoretical frameworks such as the Economics of Information to ancient and comparative historical research.
Author: Richard Saller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691229562
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
"Recent works by economic historians of early modern Europe have argued for a link between encyclopedias of the 18th century and the developments culminating in the Industrial Revolution. Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopedie aimed to disseminate useful knowledge for productive growth and was one of the most visible contributions to what economic historian Joel Mokyr has labelled a "culture of growth." While the Ancient Romans didn't have anything like these encyclopedias, they did have its very popular and acknowledged ancestor, the thirty-seven books of Pliny's Natural History. Much has been written about Pliny's view of nature, his scientific thought, his ideology of empire, and so on, but there has been no comparable effort to probe Pliny's economic views and the impact, if any, of his history on Roman economic growth. In Pliny's Roman Economy, eminent Roman historian Richard Saller aims to bring together the economic observations and instances of financial reasoning scattered throughout the Natural History. Taken together, they do not amount to a discipline of "economics," but, Saller argues they do provide insights into Pliny's views about different forms of production and commerce, about labor and agency, about price formation and profitability, about investment and consumption and about technology. Combined with archaeological and other evidence, Pliny's work can also provide us with one of our best textual pictures of the working of the Roman economy"--
Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521780535
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 17
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Book Description
In this, the first comprehensive survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. They reflect a new interest in economic growth in antiquity and develop new methods for measuring economic development, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately.
Author: Dimitri Van Limbergen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031062817
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
This book focuses on those features of the Roman economy that are less traceable in text and archaeology, and as a consequence remain largely underexplored in contemporary scholarship. By reincorporating, for the first time, these long-obscured practices in mainstream scholarly discourses, this book offers a more complete and balanced view of an economic system that for too long has mostly been studied through its macro-economic and large-scale – and thus archaeologically and textually omnipresent – aspects. The topic is approached in five thematic sections, covering unusual actors and perspectives, unusual places of production, exigent landscapes of exploitation, less-visible products and artefacts, and divergent views on emblematic economic spheres. To this purpose, the book brings together a select group of leading scholars and promising early career researchers in archaeology and ancient economic history, well positioned to steer this ill-developed but fundamental field of the Roman economy in promising new directions.
