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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2021
Three recently published books raise the question of labor in the Roman Empire. The present article aims to investigate the sources privileged by historians, the scale of observation on which their analysis is situated, and the theoretical assumptions that guide them. These reflections show that there are multiple ways of writing labor history, currently divided into different subfields which do not always communicate with one another. Thanks to new readings of ancient literature and epigraphy, and the contribution of papyri and archaeology, the traditional history of work and trades has been widely renewed. An important line of questioning examines the reasons for the high degree of trade specialization in the Roman Empire, as well as the existence of a true division of labor. Archaeology helps us understand the technologies and processes of production, making it possible to establish a typology of the socioprofessional identities, from employers to employees, that existed in the shops and workshops of the Roman world. A quite different approach investigates the organization of labor from a macroeconomic perspective, seeing it as a force mobilized by employers: comparisons between the productivity of slaves and that of free workers have been replaced by analyses of the transaction costs of free hired labor versus servile manpower. Finally, debate continues between historians who consider that the labor market of the Roman Empire was limited by clientelist networks and servile labor, and those who describe a free-market economy where labor had become a commodity.
This article was translated from the French by Rodney Coward and edited by Chloe Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.
This review article centers on three books: Arnaldo Marcone, ed., Storia del lavoro in Italia, vol. 1, L’età romana. Liberi, semiliberi e schiavi in una società premoderna (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2016); Cameron Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Christian Laes and Koenraad Verboven, eds., Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World (Leyden: Brill, 2016).
1 On the contrasting importance attached to work by ancient as opposed to modern societies, see Dominique Méda, Le travail. Une valeur en voie de disparition (Paris: Aubier, 1995), or again Méda, Le travail (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004). In her treatment of ancient societies, in particular the question of the devalorization of work and its non-valorization in ancient Greece, Méda’s bibliography is confined to research published between the 1950s and the 1970s.
2 Alessandro Cristofori, “La documentazione,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 35–76, here pp. 66–75, clearly notes the “fundamental importance of archaeological sources for labor history” in antiquity; however, apart from certain welcome exceptions, the Italian volume shows few signs of being influenced by these sources, unlike Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions.
3 Christian Laes and Koenraad Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions: What’s in a Name?” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 1–19, here p. 6.
4 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Work and Nature in Ancient Greece” [1955], in Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort (1983; repr. New York: Zone Books, 2006), 275–92, here pp. 275–77. For Rome, see Aldo Schiavone, “La struttura nascosta. Una grammatica dell’economia romana,” in Storia di Roma, vol. 4, Caratteri e morfologie, ed. Aldo Schiavone (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 7–69, here p. 11. On premodern Europe, see Alain Guerreau, “Avant le marché, les marchés : en Europe, xiiie–xviie siècle (note critique),” Annales HSS 56, no. 6 (2001): 1129–75, here pp. 1157–59, which returns to the notion that there is no abstract term in Latin denoting work. This idea is still far from being abandoned, as can be seen in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, or in Léopold Migeotte, “Les philosophes grecs et le travail dans l’Antiquité,” and Jean-Marie Salamito, “Travail et travailleurs dans l’œuvre de saint Augustin,” both in Le travail dans l’histoire de la pensée occidentale, ed. Daniel Mercure and Jan Spurk (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003), respectively 11–32 and 33–59. These authors continue to defend the anachronistic character of this notion in antiquity while developing interesting perspectives on the new, Christian view of crafts, particularly as expressed by Saint Augustine.
5 Mauro De Nardis, “Terminologia e concetto di ‘lavoro’ in età romana,” and Alessandro Cristofori, “Lavoro e identità sociale,” both in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, respectively 79–90, here pp. 79–81, and 149–74, here p. 161. The idea had already been voiced in Cristofori’s important book, Non arma uirumque. Le occupazioni nell’epigrafia del Piceno (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo, 2004), 89. Pierfrancesco Porena, “Il lavoro infantile,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 663–85, here pp. 663–64, also notes that “the two terms/concepts—labor and childhood—in their generic meaning, are absent from the thought and practice of [Roman] social life.”
6 Yan Thomas, “Travail incorporé dans une matière première, travail d’usage et travail comme marchandise. Le droit comme matrice des catégories économiques à Rome,” in Mentalités et choix économiques des Romains, ed. Jean Andreau, Jérôme France, and Sylvie Pittia (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2004), 201–25, here p. 212: “Roman jurists … based their calculations on work envisaged as perfectly autonomous and constructed as an object in itself”; Yan Thomas, “L’‘usage’ et les ‘fruits’ de l’esclave. Opérations juridiques romaines sur le travail,” Enquête 7 (1999): 203–30. While these articles are cited in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, the authors do not appear to grasp the most fundamental contribution contained in them: the assertion that the concept of work existed in ancient Rome.
7 Clara Berrendonner, “Mercennarius dans les sources littéraires,” in Vocabulaire et expressions de l’économie dans le monde antique, ed. Jean Andreau and Véronique Chankowski (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2007), 211–31, examines Roman account books and analyzes the calculations concerning the slave and free operae required for tasks on estates. Greek accounts from Egypt demonstrate the same preoccupations. On the organization of the accounts of the Appianus estate compared with Roman accounts from Italy, see Dominic Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century A. D. Egypt: The Heroninos Archive and the Appianus Estate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Gérard Minaud, “Rationalité modulable des comptabilités,” Topoi. Orient-Occident 12/13, no. 1 (2005): 271–81. On Roman accounts from Italy, see Gérard Minaud, La comptabilité à Rome. Essai d’histoire économique sur la pensée comptable commerciale et privée dans le monde antique romain (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2005).
8 Laes and Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions,” 1–6.
9 Jesper Carlsen, “Le attività agricole e dell’allevamento,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 225–64, offers a rigorous, precise catalog of these agricultural occupations.
10 On the broad definition of the concept of “artisanal activities” in Roman antiquity, an expression I continue to use out of convenience, see the criticism in Nicolas Monteix, “De ‘l’artisanat’ aux métiers. Quelques réflexions sur les savoir-faire du monde romain à partir de l’exemple pompéien,” in Les savoirs professionnels des gens de métier. Études sur le monde du travail dans les sociétés urbaines de l’Empire romain, ed. Nicolas Monteix and Nicolas Tran (Naples: Centre Jean Bérard, 2011), 7–26.
11 Chiara D’Aloja, “Il lavoro femminile,” and Porena, “Il lavoro infantile,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, respectively 639–62 and 663–85.
12 The figure given here is considerably higher than that of two hundred proposed by Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga and Laurens E. Tacoma, “The Value of Labour: Diocletian’s Prices Edict,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 104–32, here p. 108, which in reality only represents artisanal activities. The survey presented in Kai Ruffing, Die berufliche Spezialisierung in Handel und Handwerk. Untersuchungen zu ihrer Entwicklung und zu ihren Bedingungen in der römischen Kaiserzeit im östlichen Mittelmeerraum auf der Grundlage griechischen Inschriften und Papyri, 2 vols. (Rahden: M. Leidorf, 2008), which focuses on the Orient, recapitulates all the earlier research. On methodological considerations regarding the evaluation of the number of Roman crafts, trades, and professions, see Edmond Frézouls, “Les noms de métiers dans l’épigraphie de la Gaule et de la Germanie romaine,” Ktèma 16 (1991): 33–72.
13 Despite Arnaldo Marcone’s refusal in his article, “La storia degli studi,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 17–34, here p. 31, to believe in the possibility of a division of labor in Rome, the idea is rightly defended by Seth G. Bernard, “Workers in the Roman Imperial Building Industry,” and Miko Flohr, “Constructing Occupational Identities in the Roman World,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, respectively 62–86, here p. 74, and 147–72, here pp. 158–59.
14 On the economic interpretation of “horizontal” and “vertical” specializations under the empire, see Kai Ruffing, “Driving Forces for Specialization: Market, Location Factors, Productivity Improvements,” in Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World, ed. Andrew Wilson and Miko Flohr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 115–31; Ruffing, Die berufliche Spezialisierung in Handel und Handwerk, 206–15. Regarding Augustan Italy, Elio Lo Cascio, “Urbanization as a Proxy of Demographic and Economic Growth,” in Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems, ed. Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87–106, estimates the proportion of city-dwellers at between 20 and 40 percent of the population of Italy. For estimates concerning other regions, see Andrew Wilson, “City Sizes and Urbanization in the Roman Empire,” in Settlement, Urbanization, and Population, ed. Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 161–95, here p. 162, and the other—rather prudent—propositions in the same volume. Wilson, another author who makes the connection between urbanization and the division of labor, recalls that well-excavated medium-sized cities in Italy or Africa, such as Pompeii, Sabratha, or Timgad, had populations of 10,000, or even more. Thus, in the most highly urbanized Roman provinces, the levels of urban concentration and population were equivalent to those of the most urbanized European countries in the early modern period.
15 Luca Fezzi mentions the “professionalization of the ruling classes” in “Il politico in azione : oratore e giurista,” and refers to their going on “strike” (sciopero) in “Forme di protesta dei lavoratori nel mondo romano,” both in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, respectively 446–64, here p. 462, and 204–22, here p. 218.
16 Giovanna Coppola, Cultura e potere. Il lavoro intellettuale nel mondo romano (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1994), analyzes the long-term evolution of the intellectual professions, but her thesis that these were monopolized by the late Roman state should be approached with circumspection. For a recent perspective on ancient debates concerning the professionalization of intellectual occupations, which can be compared instructively with that of technical professions, see Christel Freu, “Lucien à la lumière des papyrus : un philosophe en apprentissage dans l’Hermotimus 80–82,” Cahiers des Études Anciennes 54 (2017): 11–38.
17 Richard Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 79–117, not cited in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, criticized the research of Hans-Georg Pflaum, Abrégé des procurateurs équestres (Paris: De Boccard, 1974) into the rules for promotion in the equestrian orders, as well as a similar study on senators in Werner Eck, “Beförderungskriterien innerhalb der senatorischen Laufbahn, dargestellt an der Zeit von 69 bis 138 n. Chr.,” in Principat, vol. 2, bk. 1 of Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Geschichte und Kultur Roms in Spiegel der neueren Forschung, ed. Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 158–228. For Saller, the senators and equestrians remained veritable amateurs, without specific training, and their promotion was more a matter of imperial patronage than of strict career-path rules. In his opinion the early Roman Empire cannot be compared for instance to the Chinese Empire, with its professional bureaucracy, though the situation doubtless changed in late antiquity. Subsequent to this debate, following the work of Ségolène Demougin, the French school has tended to side with Pflaum.
18 Laes and Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions,” 3, recall this point: “Ancient aristocrats never considered cultic duties or political office-holding as ‘their job.’ ”
19 The professionalization of the Roman army is the subject of the contribution by Marco Rocco, “Il mestiere di soldato,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 543–80. For a decisive refutation of the notion that, in Rome, soldiering could be considered a form of wage labor, see Jean-Michel Carrié, “The Soldier,” in The Romans [1989], ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 100–137, here p. 111: “Even though that army had become permanent, professional, provincial, and local, and even though citizenship had been emptied of its political content, this mixture of men never behaved like mercenaries.”
20 Neville Morley, “Narrative Economy,” in Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies: Archaeology, Comparative History, Models and Institutions, ed. Peter F. Bang, Mamoru Ikeguchi, and Harmut G. Ziche (Bari: Edipuglia, 2006), 27–47, here p. 38, describes the “excess of meaning” (emphasis in original) of the “grand narrative.” On the importance of comparative perspectives in labor history, see Laes and Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions,” 17–19, and the use made in Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, of Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). From this perspective, Roman artisans could be comparable to those in eighteenth-century French cities, who were confronted with fluctuating demand for their production, and resorted widely to contracting out work. The standardization of Roman productions is nevertheless a distinctive feature of this ancient economy.
21 Arjan Zuiderhoek, “Sorting Out Labour in the Roman Provinces: Some Reflections on Labour and Institutions in Asia Minor,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 20–35.
22 Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Paul Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143–67.
23 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 49 ff. and 79–101, proposes to categorize Roman modes of production as either “typical” or “atypical.”
24 On the revolution in building techniques subsequent to the appearance of opus caementicium (so-called “Roman concrete”) in the second century BCE, and its implications for the workforce, at first consisting essentially of slave labor, see the classic presentation in Pierre Gros, Architecture et société à Rome et en Italie centro-méridionale aux deux derniers siècles de la République (Brussels: Latomus, 1978), 42, and the nuanced observations in Bernard, “Workers in the Roman Imperial Building Industry,” 75–76, which discusses the earlier literature on the topic.
25 Andrew I. Wilson, “Large-Scale Manufacturing, Standardization, and Trade,” in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 393–417, here pp. 393–94; Jean-Paul Morel, “Les céramiques hellénistiques et romaines et les problèmes de ‘marchés,’” in L’économie antique, une économie de marché ? ed. Yves Roman and Julie Dalaison (Lyon: Société des amis de Jacob Spon, 2008), 161–89, describes how standardized tablewares were widely distributed throughout and beyond the imperium romanum: Campanian A and B during the republic; Italic, Gaulish, and above all African red slipware under the early empire and in late antiquity. See also Maurice Picon, “Production artisanale et manufacturière à l’époque romaine. À propos de L’histoire brisée d’Aldo Schiavone,” in Roman and Dalaison, L’économie antique, 191–214.
26 Mat Immerzeel, “A Day at the Sarcophagus Workshop,” Visual Resources 19, no. 1 (2003): 43–55.
27 On this fullery, with reflections on the relations between the size of these establishments, the clothing trade, and urban demand, see Miko Flohr, The World of the Fullo: Work, Economy, and Society in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 74–95. According to Jean-Yves Empereur and Maurice Picon, “La reconnaissance des productions des ateliers céramiques : l’exemple de la Maréotide,” Cahiers de la céramique égyptienne 3 (1993): 145–52, here pp. 145–47, the “largest pottery kiln in antiquity,” dating from the Roman period and with a chamber floor measuring 9.6 meters in diameter, was discovered in a suburb of the empire’s second city, Alexandria, on the southern banks of Lake Mariut.
28 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 16.
29 Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat, Esclave en Grèce et à Rome (Paris: Hachette, 2006), 74–85; Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48–49.
30 Cristofori, “La documentazione,” 36 and 72–75, rightly recalls that iconography should not always be taken too literally; Nicolas Tran, Dominus Tabernae. Le statut de travail des artisans et des commerçants de l’Occident romain, i er siècle av. J.-C.–iii e siècle ap. J.-C. (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013), 116–44.
31 Nicolas Monteix, “Perceptions of Technical Culture among Pompeian Élites, Considering the Cupids Frieze of the Casa dei Vettii,” in Antike Wirtschaft und ihre kulturelle Prägung/The Cultural Shaping of the Ancient Economy, ed. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sabine Föllinger, and Kai Ruffing (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016), 199–221 (with a bibliography on the Pompeian iconography). For another critical perspective on the iconography of working practices, see Jean-Claude Béal, “La dignité des artisans. Les images d’artisans sur les monuments funéraires de Gaule romaine,” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 26, no. 2 (2000): 149–82, which makes a distinction between Italian and Gaulish iconography, the latter apparently owing more to entrepreneurs and investors than to the artisans themselves.
32 See Francesco Maria De Robertis, Lavoro e lavoratori nel mondo romano (Bari: Adriatica editrice, 1963), 21–48, for the analysis of “popular” thinking on work, which he contrasts, pp. 49–47, with an aristocratic or “aulic” conception (ambiente aulico).
33 Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leyden: Brill, 2012), 55–98; Lis and Soly, “Work, Identity and Self-Representation in the Roman Empire and the West-European Middle Ages: Different Interplays between the Social and the Cultural,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 262–89. However, according to Cristofori, Non arma uirumque, 93–103, and Tran, Dominus Tabernae, 16, mentions of the deceased’s profession on epitaphs from the Roman period are rare, corresponding to between 5 and 10 percent of inscriptions, found primarily in the main urban centers and solely in the case of certain professions.
34 Tran, Dominus Taberna; Nicolas Tran, “Ars and Doctrina: The Socioeconomic Identity of Roman Skilled Workers (First Century BC–Third Century AD),” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 246–61.
35 Bernard, “Workers in the Roman Imperial Building Industry,” 65 and 72–73, recalls the method applied by Janet DeLaine, “The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome,” special issue, Journal of Roman Archaeology 25 (1997): the latter author proposed to calculate job times through a reasoned, critical comparison with those of the best-known building projects from other historical periods. For further references, see the relevant articles in Arqueología de la construcción, vols. 1–4 (2008–2016), in particular the chapter by Simon Barker and Ben Russell, “Labour Figures for Roman Stone-Working: Pitfalls and Potential,” in Los procesos constructivos en el mundo romano: la economía de las obras, ed. Stefano Camporeale, Hélène Dessales, and Antonio Pizzo, vol. 3 of Arqueología de la construcción (Madrid/Mérida: Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas/Instituto de arqueología de Mérida, 2012), 83–94.
36 In this context, the term microhistory refers not to microstoria as a clearly identified historiographical current, but to an article by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Microhistories of Roman Trade,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27, no. 2 (2014): 584–88, apropos of the books by Monteix and Tran. In his book, Dominus Tabernae, 12–13, Tran explains his position as follows: “[the micro-economic approach] implies a gaze centered not on the components of the overall equilibrium of the Roman economy but on the individuals who were its actors: on their behaviors, and on the underlying mental dispositions behind their actions.”
37 Elizabeth A. Murphy, “Roman Workers and Their Workplaces: Some Archaeological Thoughts on the Organization of Workshop Labour in Ceramic Production,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 133–46. On p. 141, “Yvelines” does not refer to a site in southern France but to a French département [county] close to Paris.
38 Flohr, “Constructing Occupational Identities in the Roman World.”
39 On the visibility of skilled work on ancient streets, see Flohr, “Constructing Occupational Identities in the Roman World”; on funerary monuments, see Jean-Paul Morel, “Paroles de travailleurs antiques : le dit, l’écrit, le montré,” in Les travailleurs dans l’Antiquité : statuts et conditions, ed. Jean-Paul Morel (Paris: Éd. du Cths, 2011), 200–216; on professional associations, see Koenraad Verboven, “Guilds and the Organisation of Urban Populations during the Principate,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 173–202, which includes an abundant recent bibliography, and Orietta Dora Cordovana, “Le organizzazioni dei lavoratori,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 175–203, which refers to “associations of workers,” thereby deforming reality by seemingly comparing them to trade unions.
40 Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), called for an NIE-based approach in their introduction.
41 The notion of “human capital” is borrowed from the title of Richard Saller’s chapter “Human Capital and Economic Growth,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71–86, which examines what the author considers a low level of investment in professional training; the quotation is from Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 15.
42 Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work under Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 16. For a presentation of NIE theory by one of its principal exponents, see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tilly and Tilly’s textbook helps to clarify the points of convergence and divergence between—and even within—neoclassical, Marxist, and Institutionalist theories on questions concerning the relations between work and the labor market. For these authors, NIE theory remains very close to neoclassical theory.
43 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 17; Zuiderhoek, “Sorting Out Labour.”
44 Cameron Hawkins, “Contracts, Coercion, and the Boundaries of the Roman Artisanal Firm,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 36–61, here p. 37, considers that the concept of the “firm” is broad enough to be applied to Roman artisanal concerns but refuses to envisage the existence of large integrated firms in the Roman world; see also Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 79–101, here p. 75, for the definition of an integrated firm. But this is to distort the concept of the firm set out by Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4 (1937): 386–405, and restated by the same author in The Firm, the Market and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 33–55, here p. 36. Although the existence of integrated firms in Roman trade has recently been demonstrated in Wim Broekaert, “Vertical Integration in the Roman Economy: A Response to Morris Silver,” Ancient Society 42 (2012): 109–25, small units continued to “represent the norm” among artisanal enterprises according to Flohr, “Constructing Occupational Identities in the Roman World,” 149–50.
45 Sheilagh Ogilvie, “‘Whatever Is, Is Right’? Economic Institutions in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Economic History Review 60, no. 4 (2007): 649–84; Jinyu Liu, “Group Membership, Trust Networks, and Social Capital: A Critical Analysis,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 203–26, here pp. 204–6.
46 Zuiderhoek, “Sorting Out Labour,” 23–24, here p. 23 (emphasis in original).
47 These questions are addressed in François Lerouxel, Le marché du crédit dans le monde romain (Égypte et Campanie) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2016): the creation in Egypt between 69 and 72 CE of a new property registry—the bibliotheke enkteseon—enabled better guarantees based on mortgaged real estate and thereby led to a significant increase in the volume of credit transactions. On the increase in trade stimulated by the diffusion of Roman commercial law, see also Elio Lo Cascio, “The Role of the State in the Roman Economy: Making Use of New Institutional Economics,” in Bang, Ikeguchi, and Ziche, Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies, 215–34.
48 David M. Ratzan, “Transaction Costs and Contract in Roman Egypt: A Case Study in Negotiating the Right of Repossession,” in Law and Transaction Costs in the Ancient Economy, ed. Dennis Kehoe, David Ratzan, and Uri Yiftach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 185–230; Christel Freu, “Nec eum laboris sui mercede defrudes (Ambrose of Milan, De Tobia, 24, 92). Lire l’inégalité sociale tardo-antique dans les conflits de travail et leur résolution,” in La richesse, la pauvreté et l’exclusion de la christianisation à la chrétienté en Occident (iv e–xii e siècle), ed. Stéphane Gioanni, Sylvie Joye, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).
49 Liu, “Group Membership, Trust Networks, and Social Capital,” underscores the disparities of wealth and influence between professional associations.
50 Fezzi, “Forme di protesta,” 214–16, borrows the notion of “allegiance” from the important article by Andrea Giardina, “Lavoro e storia sociale. Antagonismi e alleanze dall’ellenismo al tardoantico,” Opus 1 (1982): 115–46. The conclusions in Peter Garnsey, “Les travailleurs du bâtiment de Sardes et l’économie urbaine du Bas-Empire,” in L’origine des richesses dépensées dans la ville antique, ed. Philippe Leveau (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1985), 147–56, concur with those of Giardina. In her criticism of NIE, Ogilvie, “‘Whatever Is, Is Right’?” 662–65, correctly rehabilitates conflict and power dynamics as ways of accounting for historical phenomena that cannot always be explained solely by the quest for efficiency.
51 Laes and Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions,” 5–6, point this out, following Tilly and Tilly, Work under Capitalism, 22–23.
52 Bernard, “Workers in the Roman Imperial Building Industry.”
53 Hélène Cuvigny, “Travailler pour l’empereur. Artisans et tâcherons au Mons Claudianus,” Les nouvelles de l’archéologie 143 (2016): 8–12.
54 On the work of freedmen, see Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 130–91.
55 See the pioneering chapter on child labor by Keith R. Bradley, “Child Labour in the Roman World” [1985], in Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 103–24; Christian Laes, “Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity,” Ancient Society 38 (2008): 235–83; Laes, Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148–221. On the way child slaves were put to work see Porena, “Il lavoro infantile,” 670–85, which finds cases of child slaves working before the age of five, the limit given by the jurist Ulpian in the third century CE (Digest 7.7.6.1). For slaves placed in apprenticeships see Jean Straus, “Les contrats d’apprentissage et d’enseignement relatifs à des esclaves dans la documentation papyrologique grecque d’Égypte,” in En marge du Serment hippocratique. Contrats et serments dans le monde gréco-romain, ed. Marie-Hélène Marganne and Antonio Ricciardetto (Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2017), 119–34; and Christel Freu, “Apprendre et exercer un métier dans l’Égypte romaine (ier–vie siècle apr. J.-C.),” in Tran and Monteix, Les savoirs professionnel, 27–40, here p. 29. The only two examples of non-slave girls placed in apprenticeships by their parents correspond to cases in which their meager wages were meant to help their families repay a debt.
56 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 168–73 and 273–75. The salaries on which this study is based are taken from a text by Cicero and graffiti from Pompeii. Hawkins therefore fails to take into account Egyptian salaries, which were lower. On these data, see the prudent observations of Walter Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, no. 3 (2010): 425–62, here pp. 444–45; and the reserves formulated in Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), regarding the economic “rationality” of manumission. For Mouritsen, many other reasons lay behind the manumission of slaves of all ages and genders.
57 Fezzi, “Forme di protesta,” 216; Marcone, “La storia degli studi,” 30–32, expresses a point of view shared by Mauro De Nardis, “Imparare un mestiere : apprendistato, contratti di lavoro e salari,” in Marcone, Storia del lavoro in Italia, 131–48, here pp. 142–48.
58 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 174 ff.; Zuiderhoek, “Sorting Out Labour,” 24 and 30–31; Laes and Verboven, “Work, Labour, Professions,” 13–16, here p. 15, in answer to Peter Temin, The Roman Market Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
59 Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World, 206–47.
60 On hiring markets in Rome, see Claire Holleran, “Getting a Job: Finding Work in the City of Rome,” in Laes and Verboven, Work, Labour, and Professions, 87–103; Tilly and Tilly, Work under Capitalism, 2–3, recall that in even in the fully developed capitalist economy work continued to be done not only within but also outside the labor market, within relational and familial networks.
61 Christel Freu, “Labour Status and Economic Stratification in the Roman World: The Hierarchy of Wages in Egypt,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2015): 161–77, here pp. 173–75.
62 Groen-Vallinga and Tacoma, “The Value of Labour,” 106, nevertheless recalls the specific context in which this edict was formulated.
63 Christel Freu, “Disciplina, patrocinium, nomen: The Benefits of Apprenticeship in the Roman World,” in Flohr and Wilson, Urban Craftsmen and Traders, 183–99, is in accord with the thinking in Porena, “Il lavoro infantile,” 680.
64 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 136–46.
65 Groen-Vallinga and Tacoma, “The Value of Labour,” 116. On the work of Roman harvesters, see Brent Shaw, Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
66 The well-known Oxyrhynchus papyrus L3595, the lease to a pottery in Middle Egypt, dated to 243 CE and discussed in Murphy, “Roman Workers and Their Workplaces,” 142–43, is a commercial contract for one year. It provides that the largest number of workers will be employed from August to mid-May, before the firing of production between May and July.
67 Groen-Vallinga and Tacoma, “The Value of Labour,” 115, underscores this point, citing certain papyri. Beside the well-known Appianus archive studied in Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society, other account books and labor contracts attest, for the period from the second to the sixth centuries CE, to a combination of permanent and seasonal labor on estates. See Jairus Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Christel Freu, “Les salariés de la terre dans l’Antiquité tardive,” Antiquité tardive 21 (2013): 283–98, here pp. 292–98.
68 Hélène Cuvigny, “The Amount of Wages Paid to the Quarry-Workers at Mons Claudianus,” Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996): 139–45.
69 This contract was first published in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, III, 2.948 (TC. X) and revised by Hans-Christoph Noeske, “Studien zur Verwaltung und Bevölkerung der dakischen Goldbergwerke in römischer Zeit,” Bonner Jahrbücher 177 (1977): 271–415. The interpretation provided by De Nardis, “Imparare un mestiere,” 144–45, therefore needs to be reconsidered. Porena, “Il lavoro infantile,” 683, interprets it correctly.
70 Robert Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat (Paris: Fayard, 1995), considers this a characteristic of modern salaried labor.
71 Holleran, “Getting a Job,” 102.
72 Hawkins, Roman Artisans and the Urban Economy, 79–101. On possible—though non-systematic—subcontracting for Roman building projects, see Catherine Saliou, “Le déroulement du chantier à Rome et dans le monde romain durant la période républicaine et le Haut-Empire : une approche juridique,” in Camporeale, Dessales, and Pizzo, Arqueología de la construcción, 3:15–29, here 3:19–21.
73 In this connection, see the criticism of NIE by the historian and anthropologist Cristiano Viglietti, “Economia,” in Con i Romani. Un’antropologia della cultura antica, ed. Maurizio Bettini and William M. Short (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 215–48.
This is a translation of: Écrire l’histoire du travail aujourd’hui: Le cas de l’Empire romain (note critique)