Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2009
Summary
This book explores central areas of the Roman economy, and ways in which they connect and interact.
In a vast and unwieldy domain like the Roman empire, the speed of communication by sea and the number of shipping movements were obviously important for the processes of government as well as for the economy. What we know of message-speeds is usually disjointed. But more systematic results can be gained from Egyptian documents, which provide thousands of precisely dated co-ordinates identifying the emperor in power. When the emperor changes, the co-ordinates can show how soon this essential fact became known in one of Rome's eastern provinces, and how long the news took to spread inside the province. The results in the period when the evidence is fullest mainly suggest dependence on commercial shipping, with news getting through faster the more closely its date happened to coincide with two main shipping movements in the year. Seasonal differences are very striking in the pattern from the Flavians onwards, and the arrival of news apparently depended on a limited number of shipping-links. The transit-times of government decrees sent to Africa under the later Empire again suggest two main shipping movements during the year (chapter I).
This has some relevance to inter-regional trade. Can substantial trade flows be inferred by arguing that government taxation drew money out of provinces with large tax bills to an extent which only increase in trade could have corrected?
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- Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990