Dimitri Van Limbergen

Sadi Maréchal

Wim De Clercq

The Resilience ofthe Roman Empire discusses therelationship between population and regional development in the Roman worldfrom the perspective of archaeology. By adapting a comparative approach, thefocus of the volume lies on exploring the various ways in which regionalcommunities actively responded to population growth or decline in order to keepgoing on the land available to them. The starting point of the theoreticalframework for the case studies is the agricultural intensification modelsdeveloped by Thomas Malthus and Ester Boserup. In order to advance the debateon the validity of these models for identifying the societal and economicpathways of the Roman world, the contributors incorporate the concepts ofresilience and diversity into their approach, and shift attention from thelongue-durée to how people managed to sustain themselves over shorter periodsof time. The aim of the volume is not to discard the theories of Malthus andBoserup, but rather to deconstruct overly strict Malthusian or Boserupianscenarios, and as such introduce novel and more layered ways of thinking byexploring resilience and variability in human responses to populationgrowth/decline in the Roman world.

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