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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
  • Edited by Myles Lavan, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Daniel Jew, National University of Singapore, Bart Danon, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    The Uncertain Past
    Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022, pp 271-296

  • 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.