GRC30560 Economies of the Roman Empire

Academic Year 2024/2025

This module examines evidence for the Roman economy and the ongoing debates about the nature of that economy. The arguments are partly derived from both material and literary sources, and, as we will see, there exists no academic consensus about the meaning of much of this evidence. The Romans had no real concept of a distinct area of human activity that we would recognise today as 'the economy', and so did not tend to express themselves in what modern audiences might recognise as ‘economic’ terms.

Together we will examine questions such as: how do you work to reconstruct an economy without written evidence? Did the Roman empire experience economic growth? Did slavery contribute to increased productivity, or did it perhaps stifle innovation? Did the empire witness technological advances that had economic consequences? Did the empire ever run out of gold and silver? Why was there long-distance trade in the Mediterranean, and beyond the boundaries of the empire? Was there a market economy, and was there an important merchant class in the Roman world? As we will discover through close examination of textual and archaeological evidence there are no easy answers to these seemingly simple questions.