Rome's Economic Revolution

Abstract

This book examines economic change in Republican Rome and Italy between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC and fills a major gap by explaining how the economic world of Cicero came into being. The general proposition that the second and early first centuries bc were a time of economic change has been stated before, but there is no comprehensive study that has tackled economic development during this period. Indeed, to date, little attempt has been made to explain why, or indeed even whether, the Roman economy of the first century bc was significantly different, in qualitative or quantitative terms, from that of the late third century bc. The author argues, against the current orthodoxy among specialists, that the prime consequences of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean were financial. His thesis is that increased inflows of bullion, in particular silver, combined with an expansion of the availability of credit to produce significant growth in monetary liquidity. In turn, this increase in the supply and availability of money stimulated market developments, such as investment farming, trade, construction, and manufacturing. In the final chapter, the author constructs a probabilistic quantification of the Italian economy to show that real per capita economic growth is likely to have occurred between 150 and 50 bc. Without an understanding of this economic revolution, the contemporaneous political and cultural changes in Roman society cannot be fully comprehended or explained.