05-30-2010, 11:10 AM
That will be very, very difficult. The problem is that the most basic information is not available. Number of people living in the Roman Empire? 60-80 million, there's quite a margin of error. Level of taxation? Perhaps 10%, but the official statistics for Judaea indicate an impossible 18.6%.
Another problem is the lack of integration of the economy. If you want to make a model, there must be some interdependence between the variables. A bad harvest must be connected to higher prices in a larger area. But transport was too expensive to make those connections possible. If there was a food crisis in Antioch, it was possible that there were normal prices in Laodicea, 100 km away.
An indication of the poor integration of the ancient economy is the distribution of oil lamps. 90% of the lamps excavated in Spain were produced in Spain; yet Spain was very closely connected to both Africa and Italy. Another interesting result is that coins, minted in Italy, took about a century to reach Rome.
In the seventies and eighties, the debate was dominated by the "primitivists", who stressed that the Roman economy ought to be analyzed as fundamentally underdeveloped; one article, which (correctly, in my view) tried to stress that there were modernizing elements, was Keith Hopkins, "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C-AD. 400)" in the Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980) 101-25. It is sobering that the author immediately starts with admitting that "This essay is speculative and tentative". It is even worse, the argument about the shipwrecks is nonsense; yet it is one of the few good articles I can recommend.
I am afraid that the classical approach to analyze an economic system, simply is impossible. We lack the figures, and the ancient economy was insufficiently integrated.
Another problem is the lack of integration of the economy. If you want to make a model, there must be some interdependence between the variables. A bad harvest must be connected to higher prices in a larger area. But transport was too expensive to make those connections possible. If there was a food crisis in Antioch, it was possible that there were normal prices in Laodicea, 100 km away.
An indication of the poor integration of the ancient economy is the distribution of oil lamps. 90% of the lamps excavated in Spain were produced in Spain; yet Spain was very closely connected to both Africa and Italy. Another interesting result is that coins, minted in Italy, took about a century to reach Rome.
In the seventies and eighties, the debate was dominated by the "primitivists", who stressed that the Roman economy ought to be analyzed as fundamentally underdeveloped; one article, which (correctly, in my view) tried to stress that there were modernizing elements, was Keith Hopkins, "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C-AD. 400)" in the Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980) 101-25. It is sobering that the author immediately starts with admitting that "This essay is speculative and tentative". It is even worse, the argument about the shipwrecks is nonsense; yet it is one of the few good articles I can recommend.
I am afraid that the classical approach to analyze an economic system, simply is impossible. We lack the figures, and the ancient economy was insufficiently integrated.
