Gibbon was right: The decline and fall of the roman economy

Agricultural Production in Roman Italy

“…This trend has been taken as evidence for the selective breeding of animals in response to growing market demand for meat (Jongman 2007;Kron 2002;. However, this interpretation is not straightforward.…”

Missing persons? Models of Mediterranean Regional Survey and Ancient Populations

“…In other words, real growth requires both population and per capita income to increase simultaneously. Looking across the Roman Empire as a whole, both Jongman (2007) and Hitchner (2005) assume growing population during the late republican and early imperial period and seek to identify proxies through which to measure rising income, for example, numbers of shipwrecks and levels of meat consumption. Each of these proxies contributes to an overall model of the Roman economy which emphasizes increasing scale and complexity.…”

“…Both Jongman (2007) and Hitchner (2005) work at highly generalized levels taking the Roman Empire as a whole. It is therefore possible, indeed likely, that not all areas experienced demographic and economic trends in the same way.…”

“…In comparison, the farmers of Roman Italy appear to have struggled to acquire sufficient material culture to make themselves visible to survey. If more people shared in more wealth than ever before, becoming more specialized producers and more powerful consumers (Jongman 2007), it is difficult to explain why survey struggles to find them. Thus, inter-regional comparison promotes consideration of potential similarities and differences: did a more 'cellular' Greek economy promote greater local urban-rural integration?…”

A Historiography of the Study of the Roman Economy: Economic Growth, Development, and Neoliberalism

“…In order to achieve this, an overriding concern has become the quantification of past economic growth, pursued through the measurement of per capita income, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, more recently, the evaluation of living standards through other statistical modes of interrogation, such as the Human Development Index (HDI) (Allen 2009;Millett 2001: 20;Scheidel 2010a;b;2012a). The hegemony of this new system of logic has structured the discourse on the Roman economy in a very distinct way: for the neo-primitivists on the one hand, the Roman empire is apparently now to be viewed as analogous to a 'developing nation', and explanations for the failure of its economy to achieve the kind of 'significant growth' which supposedly could have improved living standards, are to be sought in the structural obstacles provided by its institutions and the cultural mind-set of its population (Jongman 2007a;b;Saller 2002;Scheidel et al 2007b). On the other hand the modernists, for whom formal neoclassical economics remains entirely relevant and who have been increasingly welcomed back into the centre of discussion, continue to maintain that the Roman world should not be confused with a range of 'primitive' societies whose institutions wreck incentives and stifle ree-market performance (Silver 1995;2007: 191;Temin 2001;2013).…”