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Document Details : Title: Roman Economic Growth and Living Standards Subtitle: Perceptions versus Evidence Author(s): SILVER, Morris Journal: Ancient Society Volume: 37 Date: 2007 Pages: 191-252 DOI: 10.2143/AS.37.0.2024038 Abstract : The Romans were profit- and achievement-motivated. Their state was concerned with the security of commerce. Roman law recognized bargaining and freedom of contract. Notwithstanding these essential ingredients for growth and prosperity, many ancient scholars have characterized the Roman economy as ‘primitive’. The first part of the paper defines the primitivist perception and then considers a wide range of evidence for Roman economic growth and living standards. Not surprisingly, this evidence does not suggest that Rome sustained growth rates characteristic of contemporary economies. More importantly, the evidence does not in the least suggest that growth was trivial or nonexistent or that Roman living standards were typically at bare subsistence. The ingrained belief in historically negligible economic growth, bare subsistence living standards, absence of integrated markets, and unresponsiveness of institutions to economic needs cannot arise from the handful of numbers and/or the qualitative evidence available to us. Instead, it arises from three interrelated theoretical identifications, all of which are faulty, namely: (1) the identification of economic growth with industrialization; (2) the identification of population growth with population ‘pressure’; and (3) the identification of ancient society with a subset of contemporary ‘traditional’ societies whose institutional structures wreck incentives and strangle economic growth. The second part of the paper outlines and analyzes these incorrect identifications. The third part of the paper considers broader questions of the Roman economy including limits on economic growth, reasons for economic decline, and sources of ‘industrial revolutions’. |
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