The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (review)

As its title indicates, this innovative work is a study of the basic economic structures of the Roman Empire in comparison with those of other premodern empires. Bang argues that an analytical comparison of this type is necessary for the Roman economy (57)—especially since the misleading developmental model of the transition from the ancient to the medieval and early modern economies of Western Europe has been most frequently used as the standard of measurement for Roman "development." He rightly contends that the constant comparisons of ancient and modern are not conducive to a better understanding of ancient economies, including Rome's. Given the quality and quantity of the surviving evidence, he argues that it is more fruitful to measure the Roman Empire against similar premodern empires—like that of Mughal India (ca. 1530–1740).

The main problem in the Roman case, as Bang realizes, is the absence of a whole range of quantitative data needed to answer basic questions of economic history. Like many other researchers, he therefore has recourse to the device of parametric modeling of gross domestic product (GDP), the amount of tribute or tax collected by the state, and the size of the state budget relative to the annual income of the Empire (see Chapter 2, especially Table 2.1, 87–88). On this basis, Bang is able to postulate the likely share of the whole economy that was dominated or controlled by the state and, by default, what was left to the private sector. One result of his efforts (in Chapter 1) is a lively defense of the Finleyan model of the ancient economy as a premodern system bounded and defined by overriding social constraints.¹ Bang therefore rejects the idea, whether of Roman historians like Pleket or modern economists like Temin, that the economy of the Empire was basically "modern" in type, characterized by large conglomerates of interconnected price-setting markets.²

Instead, the author argues, the tributary requirements of both Mughal India and imperial Rome usurped so much of the available surplus in the economy that they left relatively little to the private sphere. Two consequences follow for the Roman Empire, as well as for Mughal India: First, the class of traders and merchants could never develop sufficient wealth and power to challenge the landed service aristocracies tied to the state. Second, the instruments of tribute governed by the state tended to be driving forces in economic development, both in the geographical placement of its main centers and in the modes of investment.

In the second half of the book, Bang turns to investigate the markets in both empires. Employing mainly Egyptian price series (which seem to be less than conclusive on the matter), he argues that a lack of market integration caused prices and supplies in these economies—which were characterized by bottlenecks, imbalances, and asymmetries—to shift erratically (139). The result, which can be seen in both the Mughal and Roman worlds (Chapter 5), was the recourse of merchants and traders to a "'bazaar" economy in which friends, families, and various associations became the main conduits of information and supply. Rather than failing to achieve a spurious modernity, these precapitalist economic entrepreneurs were actually "going with the flow" and working successfully within the confines of their peculiar type of market.

Bang's aim is to construct a new framework for explicating the economy of the Roman Empire (292)—a model which, as he is at pains to emphasize, is not a weak compromise between primitivist and modernist reconstructions of the economic past. He offers a portrait of the Roman economy that is not "a failed version of modernity or an agrarian economy approaching mechanization," but something to be understood on its own terms. Despite the author's boast of being the first to essay this kind of comparison, his analytical confrontation of the Roman Mediterranean with the economy of the Mughal...