Structural Determinants of Economic Performance in the Roman World (SDEP)

Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. The decline and even collapse of complex societies in the Americas, Africa and the Eurasian continent has been related to catastrophic shifts in temperature and precipitation. Other scholars, however, see climate change as potentially hastening endogenous processes of political, economic and demographic decline, but argue that complex societies did not fall victim to climate alone. In other words, a debate has arisen concerning the nature and scope of climatic forces on human society and the extent of resilience within complex societies to deal with adverse changes in natural circumstances. The debate so far has shown that the role of long-term climate change and short-term climatic events in the history of mankind can no longer be denied. At the same time, the realization has also emerged that further study must go beyond global patterns and general answers. Diversity governs both climate change and human society. Hence, furthering our understanding of the role of climate in human history requires complex theories that combine on the one hand recent paleoclimatic models that recognize the high extent of temporal and spatial variation and, on the other, models of societal change that allow for the complexity of societal response to internal and external forces.
Our conference will focus on the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, which all have in common a sparsity of empirical data that limits our understanding of the endogenous and exogenous variables responsible for societal change and our ability to empirically establish the causal links between them. Lacking precise and secure historic data on weather, harvests, prices, population, health and mortality, historical reconstructions run the risk of being overwhelmed by impressive quantities of long-term paleoclimatic proxy-data. Due to the sparsity of societal data, early economies may appear to be more subjected to environmental forces than later pre-industrial societies. The challenge is to bring both perspectives together in models that allow an evenly balanced analysis of the link between climate and society.

This project proposes a similar comparative study of long-distance trade in three of history’s largest and most influential economic trade systems: that of Greco-Roman Antiquity, of the Arab and Turkish Middle Ages and of medieval Europe. While it is true that long-distance trade never drew more than a fraction of what pre-industrial societies produced and exchanged (subsistence agriculture, local crafts, domestic trade, retail trade, and non-market extraction and distribution always far outweighed long-distance trade in quantity and value), long-distance trade integrates regional economies, helps to spread new technologies, and stimulates the development of monetary institutions that enhance the liquidity of economic resources. As such it creates a higher level of interaction that interconnects and lifts economic systems.

Clearly, the Greco-Roman world, medieval Europe and Arab/Turkish medieval economy were not the only ‘super-size trading systems’ in history, but they are related and interconnected more strongly than was the case, for instance, for Han China and the Roman Empire, or Yuan China and the Mamluk sultanate. They shared similar basic economic institutions (such as private property rights, contracts, coinage, …) that were supported, at least in theory, by legal systems imposed by political rulers, but because differed strongly in terms of culture, religion and political institutions, these basic institutions were embedded in profoundly different social rule complexes.

On Tuesday 15. December Prof. Emanuel Mayer will teach a seminar at the History Department of Ghent University on *The Aesthetics of Commerce in the Roman Empire: Middle Class Pride and the Commodification of Art.* Prof. Mayer is the author of *The Ancient Middle Classes* (Harvard UP 2012), in which he discusses the transformation of Roman urbanism from agrotowns to commercial cities and the subsequent rise of broad commercial classes, which found their own forms of cultural expression. In his seminar, Prof. Mayer will inter alia focus on the use of material/visual culture for the purpose of writing social history.

Speakers are:

Kristof Vermote: The 'macula servitutis' of Roman freedmen
Emanuel Mayer: Caravan Cities. Urbanism and International Trade in the Ancient World
Kristof Vermote (UGent) works on a PhD thesis titled "Identity and stigmatization: the case of the Roman freedman. A qualitative analysis of the socialization and stratification of and the interaction between freed and freeborn Romans".

Prof.dr. Mayer (Yale-NUS, Singapore) published Rom ist dort wo der Kaiser ist (Romano-Germanic Central Museum 2002) and The Ancient Middle Classes (Harvard University Press 2012. He is currently writing a book that explores the social and cultural consequences of long distance trade between the Mediterranean and India.

The economic success of the Roman Empire was unparalleled in the West until the early modern period. While favourable natural conditions, capital accumulation, technology and political stability all contributed, ultimately economic performance depended on people' s the ability to mobilize, train and co-ordinate human work efforts. In Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, the authors discuss recent new insights, ideas and interpretations on the role of labour and human resources in the Roman economy. They study the various ways in which work was mobilised and organised and how these processes were regulated. However, wWork as a production factor, however, is not the exclusive focus of this volume. Throughout the chapters, the contributors also provide an analysis of work as a social and cultural phenomenon in Ancient Rome.

Pre-industrial societies were all dominated by agricultural production. What distinguishes them is the importance of the non-agrarian sector of the economy against that agricultural background. While not escaping the limits of an organic economy, the Romans stand out for having developed a wide range of manufacturing businesses and services (e.g. construction, fuel supply, metal-and pottery production). This development stimulated the widespread and large-scale extraction of raw materials like stones, ores, clay and wood. Compared to other premodern economies, raw material consumption rates in the Roman world were thus high. The way in which both renewable (wood) and non-renewable (stone, minerals, metal, clay) resources were exploited is an important determinant for the functioning and longevity of a pre-industrial economic system. Even in a territory as large as the Roman Empire, such activities put considerable pressure on the land. Strategies of resource-exploitation and conservation were thus essential in dealing successfully with this situation in the long-term. The question of how the Romans dealt with the uncertainty of natural reserves and the unpredictability of consumption is very much at the core of the debate on the non-agricultural ancient economy. The issue revolves around whether their decisions and actions merely reflect a 'substitution of resource sources' mentality – that is, exploiting a particular resource until depletion, after which new possibilities were simply explored further afield – or if optimal extraction strategies may be identified. In other words, how rational were the Romans in their exploitation of raw materials, and to which extent did they counteract over-exploitation for economic and ecological reasons? With this panel, we would like to explore if, when, where and how the Romans pursued a harmonious balance between the limited availability of a particular resource and the law of supply and demand. We are hereby particularly interested in identifying measures that show environmental concerns in their management strategies. This may be through specific case studies on both smaller and larger territorial scales, or by reflecting on the issue on a more theoretical level. We especially welcome proposals that focus on innovative approaches and/or draw on inter-disciplinary datasets (geo-and bioarchaeology, paleoecology, etc.).