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7 - New Approaches to the Urban Population and Urbanization Rate of the Roman Empire, AD 1 to 200

from Part II - Variability and Missing Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2022

By
J. W. Hanson
Edited by
Myles Lavan ,
Daniel Jew  and
Bart Danon
Myles Lavan
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Daniel Jew
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore
Bart Danon
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

Although we have made great strides in the last few years in our understanding of the size of the urban population of the Roman Empire, there is still some uncertainty about how to extrapolate from the sample of sites for which we have evidence to the total number of sites that we know existed, with obvious implications for our view of the urbanization rate. In this chapter, I investigate whether we can use probabilistic approaches not only to shed new light on the size of the urban population and urbanization rate (and how they changed over time), but also to assess our degree of confidence about them. This exercise suggests that, although the size of the urban population was reasonably large by historical standards, it grew extremely slowly in comparative terms, with a minimum doubling time of just over 600 years. This indicates a constant urbanization rate, with about a fifth of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire living in cities for most of the Imperial period.

Keywords

Urbanismurban populationurbanization ratetotal populationgrowth ratesRoman Empirecity sizeinhabited areapopulation densityEurope
Type
Chapter
Information
The Uncertain Past
Probability in Ancient History
 , pp. 271 - 296
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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