Land and Labour

Modern scholarship dealing with the economy of the ancient world has developed rapidly in recent decades. Studies of ancient economic structures and history have in many respects achieve standards as a discipline comparable to those of economic history, using models and scenarios exactly as it is frequently seen in studies of later periods with better sources. The best example is perhaps the historical demography of Roman Italy. It was a "marginal field of research until the early 1990s", but is now one of the key subjects in the study of Roman economy with a lively debate between the followers of a low count reconstruction of the demographic development in Roman Italy versus the scholars who favour a high count. Furthermore, quantitative studies have become serious scholarship and are no longer despised as only number games' as is apparent, for instance, from the new Oxford Roman Economy Project.' This is due to the great amount of published archaeological material such as terra sigillata, amphorae and shipwrecks. It is also illustrated by the shift from the predominant orthodoxy of the primitivism in the 1970s and 1980s to theoretical and methodological orientations inspired by the so-called New Institutional Economics and a diversity of approaches. But it has also rightly been pointed out that "the struggle between primitivists' and modernists', which still, a century later, continues to haunt scholarly discussions, often under the revealing name of minimalists and maximalists, signifying that the problem has often wrongly been reduced to one of quantities, mainly of trade. All the chapters of this book were originally published as articles or contributions to proceedings of different conferences between 1990 and 2010.