What Can the Endogenous Institutions Literature Tell Us About Ancient Rome?

Abstract

A large and growing literature on “endogenous” institutions seeks to understand the circumstances under which institutions of particular types arise. One of the literature’s guiding principles is that, because institutions structure the incentives that members of a society face, if institutions are not well matched to a society’s circumstances—that is to say, not designed to inspire productive activities, broadly defined—the society will not thrive. We will discuss how this approach can help modern scholars understand the institutions of the Roman Empire, a society that clearly did thrive. The focus of this paper will be on the Roman imperial government’s policies that promoted the private ownership of land. These policies were crucial to the efforts of the Roman imperial government to create a class of landowners in the cities across the empire who would share in the burdens of ruling the empire. However, the extent to which landowners could dispose of their properties freely was limited by the overall constraints of an ancient agrarian economy and the fiscal requirements of the Roman state.