In Trading Communities, Taco Terpstra shows that long-distance trade in the Roman Empire was conducted through foreign trading communities living overseas, held together by ethnic and geographical identity.

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period. Combining a wide range of research traditions from all over Europe and utilizing evidence from Italy, the western provinces, and the Greek-speaking east, this edited collection is divided into four sections. It first considers the scholarly history of Roman crafts and trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world, and on Italy and France. Chapters discuss how scholarly thinking about Roman craftsmen and traders was influenced by historical and intellectual developments in the modern world, and how different (national) research traditions followed different trajectories throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second section highlights the economic strategies of craftsmen and traders, examining strategies of long-distance traders and the phenomenon of specialization, and presenting case studies of leather-working and bread-baking. In the third section, the human factor in urban crafts and trade-including the role of apprenticeship, gender, freedmen, and professional associations-is analysed, and the volume ends by exploring the position of crafts in urban space, considering the evidence for artisanal clustering in the archaeological and papyrological record, and providing case studies of the development of commercial landscapes at Aquincum on the Danube and at Sagalassos in Pisidia.

Ancient Roman trade was severely hampered by slow transportation and by the absence of a state that helped traders enforce their contracts. In Trading Communities in the Roman World: A Micro-Economic and Institutional Perspective Taco Terpstra offers a new explanation of how traders in the Roman Empire overcame these difficulties. Previous theories have focused heavily on dependent labor, arguing that transactions overseas were conducted through slaves and freedmen. Taco Terpstra shows that this approach is unsatisfactory. Employing economic theory, he convincingly argues that the key to understanding long-distance trade in the Roman Empire is not patron-client or master-slave relationships, but the social bonds between ethnic groups of foreign traders living overseas and the local communities they joined.

Much like our world today, Late Antiquity (fourth-seventh centuries CE) is often seen as a period rife with religious violence, not least because the literary sources are full of stories of Christians attacking temples, statues and 'pagans'. However, using insights from Religious Studies, recent studies have demonstrated that the Late Antique sources disguise a much more intricate reality. The present volume builds on this recent cutting-edge scholarship on religious violence in Late Antiquity in order to come to more nuanced judgments about the nature of the violence. At the same time, the focus on Late Antiquity has taken away from the fact that the phenomenon was no less prevalent in the earlier Graeco-Roman world. This book is therefore the first to bring together scholars with expertise ranging from classical Athens to Late Antiquity to examine the phenomenon in all its complexity and diversity throughout Antiquity.

Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpin of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth - as well as the fate - of nations. Yet was it always thus? The Roman economy was large, complex, and sophisticated, but in terms of its structural properties did it look anything like the economies we know and are familiar with today? Through consideration of the allocation and uses of capital and credit and the role of innovation in the Roman world, the individual essays comprising this volume go straight to the heart of the matter, exploring such questions as how capital in its various forms was generated, allocated, and employed in the Roman economy; whether the Romans had markets for capital goods and credit; and whether investment in capital led to innovation and productivity growth. Their authors consider multiple aspects of capital use in agriculture, water management, trade, and urban production, and of credit provision, finance, and human capital, covering different periods of Roman history and ranging geographically across Italy and elsewhere in the Roman world. Utilizing many different types of written and archaeological evidence, and employing a range of modern theoretical perspectives and methodologies, the contributors, an expert international team of historians and archaeologists, have produced the first book-length contribution to focus exclusively on (physical and financial) capital in the Roman world; a volume that is aimed not only at specialists in the field, but also at economic historians and archaeologists specializing in other periods and places.

The economic success of the Roman Empire was unparalleled in the West until the early modern period. While favourable natural conditions, capital accumulation, technology and political stability all contributed to this, economic performance ultimately depended on the ability to mobilize, train and co-ordinate human work efforts. In Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, the authors discuss new insights, ideas and interpretations on the role of labour and human resources in the Roman economy. They study the various ways in which work was mobilised and organised and how these processes were regulated. Work as a production factor, however, is not the exclusive focus of this volume. Throughout the chapters, the contributors also provide an analysis of work as a social and cultural phenomenon in Ancient Rome.

Covering material from the time of Julius Caesar to the sack of Rome, this topically arranged reference set provides substantive entries on people, cities, government, institutions, military developments, material culture, and other topics related to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was one of the greatest and most influential forces of the ancient world, and many of its achievements endure in one form or another to this day. Because of its geographic breadth, cultural diversity, and overall complexity, it is also one of the most difficult organizations to understand. This book focuses on the Roman Empire from the time of Julius Caesar to the sack of Rome. While most references on the Roman world provide a series of alphabetically arranged entries, this work is organized in broad topical chapters on government and politics, administration, individuals, groups and organizations, places, events, military developments, and objects and artifacts. Each section provides 20 to 30 substantive entries along with an overview essay. The work also provides a selection of primary source documents and closes with a bibliography of important print and electronic resources.

In this volume, papers by leading Roman historians and archaeologists discuss trade within the Roman Empire and beyond its frontiers between c.100 BC and AD 350, focusing especially on the role of the Roman state in shaping the institutional framework for trade. As part of a novel interdisciplinary approach to the subject, the chapters address its myriad facets on the basis of broadly different sources of evidence - historical, papyrological, andarchaeological - demonstrating how collaborations with the elite holders of wealth within the empire fundamentally changed its political character in the longer term.

How ancient Mediterranean trade thrived through state institutions From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? In Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. Terpstra details how business practices emerged that were based on private order, yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors—from Greek city councilors and Ptolemaic officials to long-distance traders and Roman magistrates and financiers—Terpstra illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes of Roman mobility and migration, discussing i.a. the mobility of the army, of the elite, of women, and war-induced mobility and deportations.