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A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2012

Peter Temin
Peter Temin*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
*
ptemin@mit.edu
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Extract

The economy of the early Roman Empire has been an object of study for at least the last century. The discussion has been marked by continuing debate, known sometimes as the primitivist/modern debate and at other times as the Finley debate, following his famous Sather lectures, The Ancient Economy. This paper is a contribution to this debate, written by an economist rather than an ancient historian. My purpose is to define the concept of a ‘market economy’, and to see if it fits the evidence we have for the early Roman Empire.

Finley declared that, ‘ancient society did not have an economic system which was an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets’. He drew implicitly on research by Polanyi to oppose the views of Rostovtzeff within the field of ancient history and those of Fogel and Engerman in economic history, but he did not explicitly join their conceptual apparatuses. Morris has summarized the debate fuelled by Finley's dramatic lectures in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition and argued that the controversy is still vigorous today. I hope to clarify the issues in this debate and even resolve the debate for the period of the early Roman Empire.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 91 , November 2001 , pp. 169 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Peter Temin2001. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

*

I thank Roger Bagnall, Alan Bowman, Richard Eckaus, Joseph Manning, Ian Morris, Steven Ostrow, Walter Scheidel, and the Editor of this journal for helpful comments. All errors are mine alone.

References

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3 I. Morris, ‘Foreword’, in M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (updated edn, 1999), ix–xxxvi.

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5 Finley, op. cit. (n. 1), 27, 182.

6 Polanyi, op. cit. (n. 2, 1977), 35–6.

7 ibid., 40.

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