Roman taxation and economy

[Metalstrm]

I'm looking to model the Roman finance/economy mathematically, but not being a history student, have no idea where to look for resources. Are there any good books on the subject? The internet doesn't have much to say about taxes in ancient times, except a few percentages here and there. I would appreciate a more detailed study. This doesn't have to be 100% accurate - a theoretical model would suffice.

Thanks in advance.

[Jona Lendering]

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.

[elagababbalus]

I can only reiterate what Jona said. Given the paucity of evidence its essentially guesswork. The primitive transportation systems meant that economies were still very regional with some aspects of 'globalisation' where maritime trade was possible. The economy was essentially leveraged off of the needs of the state. For example farmers produced to pay taxes (frequently in kind) to meet government requirements. So its a very different beast to a modern economy.

The best that could be achieved could be a general model of how the trade flows worked and generalised assumptions of taxation (sadly the taxation rates differed from province to province and from time to time).

I would suggest the later roman empire has more data for example the Edict of Prices of Diocletian might give some idea of how much people expected to pay for goods and services.

I might suggest as background reading

Peter Fibiger Bang TRADE ANDEMPIRE—INSEARCH OF ORGANIZING CONCEPTS FORTHE
ROMANECONOMY Past and Present, no. 195 (May 2007)

Walter Schiedel has done a lot of roman economy stuff which might be useful that can be found at...

http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/papers/ ... eidel.html

I would also suggest:

McCormick Origins of the European Economy
Jones The Later Roman Empire

[Epictetus]

I'm looking to model the Roman finance/economy mathematically, but not being a history student, have no idea where to look for resources.

Interesting. I think the Roman economy is a fascinating topic. What specifically are you looking for? What is your model going to be like?

[Metalstrm]

Great! Many thanks for those resources; they look very informative. I'll have a detailed look soon.

The idea is not to create a model that retraces history, but one that fairly realistically models the relationships between resources, trade, and finances of the state and people of the ancient world. If I succeed I will write it as a computer program so that it could be used as an informative tool or as an economic model for ancient strategy games. I wish to know more for example, about this regionality you are talking about. How did trade and maritime links affect the prices in distant lands? I'm sure that an increase in availability of grain in Egypt led to a decrease in price in Rome for example, all other factors being equal. Its a huge task, I know, and I'm neither a historian nor an economist, but a mathematician with a great interest in ancient history. Where references and evidence are too scant to give as a decent picture, I will try and fill the gaps with realistic assumptions.

[Jona Lendering]

The idea is not to create a model that retraces history, but one that fairly realistically models the relationships between resources, trade, and finances of the state and people of the ancient world.

Abandon all hope, but I will try to help where possible.

[Metalstrm]

Hehe, thanks Jona (seriously). I still don't know where to begin at this point - I'm still in info collection mode. I guess I'll start by reading one of those books and getting the basics, proceeding from there.

[Epictetus]

This looks interesting. Evidently this Gerassimos George Aperghis worked on a model last year and presented it at a conference. I couldn't find anything else about it, though.

[Jona Lendering]

The Cambridge Economic History of the Graeco-Roman World is useful, although a bit tedious.

[Jona Lendering]

The current issue of the Journal of Roman Studies (99 [2009]) has an article by Scheidel and Friesen, "The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire". The summary promises more than I would've expected:

Different methods of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century c.e. produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that élites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income, while middling households (perhaps 10 per cent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.

[Epictetus]

That looks fascinating. I'm going to have to get that. The Roman Society normally has very good publications.

On an interesting side note, I believe that the top 1% of earners in a number of western countries control about 20% of total income. (Depends on how you measure it, though - is it pre-transfers or post-transfers?) So the number and economic strength of the elites were about the same then as now. The big difference looks to be in distribution in other income categories.

[Metalstrm]

Awesome thanks! I have some more questions which I'll be posting soon hopefully

[Eleatic Guest]

Are there any good books on the subject?

The current major work is The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World which positively reevaluates the ancient economy within the limits of pre-industrial modes of production, that is agricultural societies. You will also find plenty of free online articles by Walter Scheidel on the interrelatedness between demography and state finances.

Somewhat older, but IMO still the best overview article is R. Goldsmith - An Estimate of the Size and Structure of the National Product of the Early Roman Empire in Review of Income and Wealth.

[Eleatic Guest]

I have found altogether four articles which aim at estimating the Roman GDP. The three already posted above (Hopkins 1980, Goldsmith 1984, Scheidel 2009) plus Temin, Peter: "Estimating GDP in the Early Roman Empire", in: Lo Cascio, Elio: Innovazione tecnica e progresso economico nel mondo romano, 2006

The estimations are as follows (out of top of my mind):
Hopkins 1980: 9 to 12 billion sesterces
Goldsmith 1984: 20 billion
Temin 2006: 10 billion
Scheidel 2009: 20 billion

Needless to say, that all authors are at pains stressing the point that these are not more but very rough estimations based on often very conjectural premises, and that further works needs to be done to refine their models.

[Eleatic Guest]

A fifth and sixth: Elio Lo Cascio, in particular, seems important as proponent of the high count for the Roman population.

P. F. Bang, The Roman Bazaar (2008), 86–91
E. Lo Cascio and P. Malanima, ‘GDP in pre-modern agrarian economies (1–1820 AD): a revision of the estimates’, Rivista di Storia Economica (forthcoming)