Reviewed by: Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy by Cameron Hawkins Claire Holleran Cameron Hawkins. Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. x + 307. Cloth, $99.00. Artisans formed the backbone of Roman urban economies; in Livy’s vivid description of a peaceful town going about its everyday business, it is the artisans who take centre stage, visibly toiling away in their open workshops (6.25). Yet the organisation of their businesses, and the strategies that they employed in order to manage their enterprises, remain somewhat understudied. Hawkins’ erudite new study is, therefore, both important and timely, making a significant contribution not only to our understanding of the world of Roman urban artisans, but also of their place within the economy, contributing to wider debates about the overall [End Page 750] performance of the Roman economy and its potential for intensive growth. The central thesis of the book contends that Roman artisans operated within a market characterised by seasonal and uncertain demand for goods, resulting in strong incentives to minimise their fixed costs and devise business management strategies that enabled them to respond effectively to fluctuations in demand. This thesis is supported by a combination of comparative material and ancient evidence and is elegantly and consistently argued throughout. The focus is primarily on the city of Rome itself during the late Republic and early empire although Hawkins draws on literary, legal, archaeological, and epigraphic material from a much wider geographical and chronological range. This is perfectly understandable given the scattered nature of the ancient source material, but some may doubt Hawkins’ claim that all urban artisans across the Roman world faced similar challenges to which they responded in similar ways. The case studies in the recent edited collection of Wilson and Flohr (Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), for example, demonstrated that while there were certainly some shared strategies, institutions, and practices within the manufacturing sector, there was also significant local flexibility, together with chronological and regional variation. Furthermore, Rome itself was surely something of a special case, given its size and its position as the seat of imperial government. Hawkins’ theoretical framework is strongly influenced by New Institutional Economics (NIE), which highlights the importance of institutions and organizations in shaping the economic behaviour of individuals. With this in mind, Hawkins draws heavily on comparative studies of artisans in northwestern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where market integration was pushing the limits of what was possible in a preindustrial context. He argues that the early modern economy shared important structural characteristics with that of antiquity, namely the agricultural basis; the coexistence of large and small urban centres; the dependence on wind and animal power for communication and transport; the small nature of manufacturing units and their reliance on human muscle and skill rather than machines or technology; and the stratification of urban populations by wealth. Important differences remain, however, not least the widespread presence of slavery in the Roman world, as well as the social and political structures governing the economic behaviour of merchants and craftsmen, and these factors could perhaps be given more prominence in the study. Another key difference highlighted by Hawkins is the nature of consumer demand. In the early modern period, new household consumer goals emerged among both the working classes and—crucially—the growing middle classes, transforming the economy; it is argued that the absence of such a development in the Roman world was a crucial factor in limiting the overall performance of the economy. Since the fluctuating market for manufactured goods is central to Hawkins’ thesis, his first chapter presents the case for seasonal and uncertain demand in both his comparative economies and that of Rome. In Rome, for example, climatic seasonality governed the agricultural calendar, and therefore the demand for labour in the countryside, as well as the price of grain. Fluctuating grain prices in [End Page 751] relation to the harvest must have affected consumer spending power, although the year-round distribution of free grain to around 200,000 inhabitants of Rome (sufficient to feed at least 300,000 people) may have gone further towards mitigating the...