23 - The Early Roman Empire: The State and the Economy

Summary

introduction

Many scholars envision a modest increase of the GDP of the Roman empire during the first two centuries of the Principate or, for certain regions, even since the second century bc, and some of the contributors to this volume share this view. Some also believe that the increase in GDP in the regions outside Italy, particularly but not only in the western ones, during the first two centuries of the Principate, was primarily the outcome of an increase in population, even if a quantitative estimate of any such increase is obviously beyond our reach for most parts of the empire. For those regions where slim literary and documentary evidence exists, such as Egypt, the size of the population remains a controversial issue. However, the evidence of land surveys in several parts of the empire seems to point to the spread of cultivation and settlement to new areas and the extension of cultivation in previously inhabited areas, while the diffusion of new urban centers and the enlargement of existing ones also suggest demographic growth. The Antonine Plague must have caused a marked decrease in population and consequently a decrease in GDP.

There is less consensus on whether this surmised growth of GDP in the whole of the empire between the Augustan and the Antonine periods was matched by growth in per capita income. Per capita growth can be postulated, by looking at comparative evidence, for the period after the Antonine Plague as an effect of the slackening of population pressure in some areas of the empire and the resulting gain in contractual power by the peasants.