12.C Institutions and Economic Relations in the Roman Empire: Consumption, Supply, and Coordination

Abstract

The global history of inter-imperial trade and transcontinental connectivity is the story of networks and relationships, their varying geographical extent and interlinkages, the institutional structures that allowed for different types of transactions to be carried out across them, and the way these changed over time. This chapter sketches the Roman part of that history. I approach the Roman economy as a set of coordinated behaviors that resulted in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. In premodern economies, the cost of transporting goods over long distances and the difficulty of obtaining reliable information about potential partners represented significant constraints on the quantity and complexity of economic transactions that could take place, and therefore on the economy as a whole. Peter Bang characterizes the ancient economy as a peasant economy of hardsided cells that needed to be punctured in order to generate long-distance flows of goods.1 Nevertheless, a variety of archaeological proxies seem to suggest that, in the period under consideration here (300 –300 ), more goods were traveling across longer distances than before and that the Mediterranean world saw some economic growth (though there remains some debate as to how intensive versus extensive that growth was and how integrated the economy truly was).2 Rather than focusing on the abstract questions of economic growth or integration, I focus on the structures that allowed for more extensive economic coordination. By economic coordination I mean action taken in the expectation that others would take complementary action, be that production and consumption or cooperation in production and distribution. Coordination requires social relationships (weak and strong), so in line with the approaches of this volume I examine the economy as a series of interactions embedded within social networks and shaped by institutions. Although technological development and the construction of infrastructure played important roles in the Roman economy (for which, see ch. 8.A, sections VII and IV respectively), I set these aside for the present to focus on the social structures and networks that knit people together across the Roman world and allowed people, goods, and