Further reading^*

Summary

There is no single up-to-date study of the Roman economy in English. Chapters 18–28 of W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge 2007; henceforth CEHGRW) cover the development of the Roman economy from its beginnings into late antiquity. M. I. Finley's classic The Ancient Economy, first published in 1973, expanded in 1985 and now available in an updated edition with a foreword by I. Morris (Berkeley 1999), is still required reading for its coherent (if contested) vision of the Greco-Roman economy as a whole. M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2nd edn. revised by P. Fraser, Oxford 1957) and A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (3 vols., Oxford 1964) are ambitious works that focus more specifically on particular periods of Roman economic history. P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (London 1987), chapters 3–5 offer a convenient overview, and C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford 2005) traces the ending of the Roman economy. Recent treatments in other languages include H.-J. Drexhage, H. Konen and K. Ruffing, Die Wirtschaft des Römischen Reiches (1.-3.Jahrhundert): Eine Einführung (Berlin 2002) and J. Andreau, L’économie du monde romain (Paris 2010). W. Scheidel and S. von Reden (eds.), The Ancient Economy (Edinburgh 2002) reprint important contributions to this field and provide a more wide-ranging bibliographical essay (272–8). The most comprehensive relevant bibliography, with close to 3,400 titles, can be found in the aforementioned CEHGRW (769–917).

W. V. Harris, “Between archaic and modern: some current problems in the history of the Roman economy,” in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Inscribed Economy: Production and Distribution in the Roman Empire in the Light of instrumentum domesticum (Ann Arbor 1993), 11–29 discusses the state of research, as do I. Morris, “The ancient economy twenty years after The Ancient Economy,” Classical Philology 89 (1994), 351–66 and J. Andreau, “Twenty years after Moses I. Finley's The Ancient Economy” in Scheidel and von Reden's aforementioned collection (33–49). In their introduction to J. G. Manning and I. Morris (eds.), The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford 2005), 1–44, the editors consider different approaches to the study of ancient economies.