Katelijn Vandorpe

Koenraad Verboven

Véronique Chankowski

This volume contains essays based on the papers presented at the international colloquium "Banks, Loans and Financial Archives in the Ancient World", held in Ghent and Brussels in 2006 in honour of R. Bogaert. Specialists of various fields and periods have contributed studies on banking and finance in the Ancient World (including the Near East) and 18th-century England, each applying his or her own research strategies, methodologies and traditions. A common ground was found transcending the boundaries between disciplines as diverse as Assyriology, social and economic history, Roman law, epigraphy, papyrology and economics. The result of this collaborative effort is a consistent study that takes up many of the challenges posed by recent discoveries and new insights concerning the 'nature' of the ancient economy. As such, it will prove a substantial contribution to the ongoing effort to better understand the genesis, development and role of money, credit and financial mediation in the Ancient World.

Bankers, Loans, and Archives in the Ancient World : Studies in Honour of Raymond Bogaert

Pistoi Dia Tèn Technèn

Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines, however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.

Building a New Approach to Ancient Economic History

Complexity Economics

Paul Erdkamp

Joseph G. Manning

Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. This book contributes to the multi-disciplinary debate between scholars working on climate and society from various backgrounds. The chronological boundaries of the book are set by the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic on the one end and the rise of early-modern states in global political and economic exchange on the other. In order to stimulate comparison across the boundaries of modern periodization, this book ends with demography and climate change in early-modern and modern Italy, a society whose empirical data allows the kind of statistical analysis that is impossible for ancient societies. The book highlights the role of human agency, and the complex interactions between the natural environment and the socio-cultural, political, demographic, and economic infrastructure of any given society. It is intended for a wide audience of scholars and students in ancient economic history, specifically Rome and Late Antiquity.

Diversity in Collapse and Resilience

Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East

Economic Aspects of Amicitia and Patronage in the Late Republic

The Economy of Friends

Olivier Hekster

The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire discusses ways in which notions, practice and the ideology of justice impacted on the Roman Empire through three main themes: the emperor and justice, justice in a dispersed empire and differentiation of justice.

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Gent, June 21-24, 2017)

The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire

Arjan Zuiderhoek

Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpin of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth - as well as the fate - of nations. Yet was it always thus? The Roman economy was large, complex, and sophisticated, but in terms of its structural properties did it look anything like the economies we know and are familiar with today? Through consideration of the allocation and uses of capital and credit and the role of innovation in the Roman world, the individual essays comprising this volume go straight to the heart of the matter, exploring such questions as how capital in its various forms was generated, allocated, and employed in the Roman economy; whether the Romans had markets for capital goods and credit; and whether investment in capital led to innovation and productivity growth. Their authors consider multiple aspects of capital use in agriculture, water management, trade, and urban production, and of credit provision, finance, and human capital, covering different periods of Roman history and ranging geographically across Italy and elsewhere in the Roman world. Utilizing many different types of written and archaeological evidence, and employing a range of modern theoretical perspectives and methodologies, the contributors, an expert international team of historians and archaeologists, have produced the first book-length contribution to focus exclusively on (physical and financial) capital in the Roman world; a volume that is aimed not only at specialists in the field, but also at economic historians and archaeologists specializing in other periods and places.

Koenraad Verboven

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