Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World

Abstract

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. Contributors to this volume - Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki Wim Broekaert, Ghent University Jean-Pierre Brun, College de France Alessandro Christofori, University of Bologna Kerstin Dross-Krupe, Kassel University Miko Flohr, Leiden University Christel Freu, Laval University Penelope Goodman, University of Leeds Orsolya Lang, Aquincum Museum Lena Larsson Loven, University of Gothenburg Nicolas Monteix, University of Rouen Jeroen Poblome, University of Leuven Candace Rice, University of Edinburgh Kai Ruffing, Kassel University Carla Salvaterra, University of Bologna Nicolas Tran, Institut Universitaire de France Carol Van Driel-Murray, Leiden University Andrew Wilson, University of Oxford