Per Capita GDP in the Early Roman Empire

Abstract

This chapter draws together the implications of the previous chapters in order to investigate the size of the Roman economy at its maximum extent. If one takes Roman Italy as being comparable to the Netherlands in 1600, then the Roman Empire as a whole is comparable to Europe as a whole. The putative advantages of the early modern Netherlands over Roman Italy are less clear than their advantages over the Roman Empire as a whole. Roman Italy was heavily urbanized, and it is probable that the proportion of the labor force in agriculture there was less than 50 percent. Rome did not have a bond market, but it had a more sophisticated financial system than the Netherlands. The comparability is enhanced by noting that neither the Netherlands nor Rome had an industrial revolution.