Roman History

A bumper edition this time, by way of apology for COVID-necessitated absenteeism in the autumn issue. The focus is on three pillars of social history – the economy (stupid), law, and religion. First up is Saskia Roselaar's second monograph, Italy's Economic Revolution. Roselaar sets out to trace the contribution made by economics to Italy's integration in the Roman Republic, focusing on the period after the ‘conquest’ of Italy (post 268 bce). Doing so necessitates two distinct steps: assessing, first, how economic contacts developed in this period, and second, whether and to what extent those contacts furthered the wider unification of Italy under Roman hegemony. Roselaar is influenced by New Institutional Economics (hereafter NIE), now ubiquitous in studies of the ancient economy. Her title may be an homage to Philip Kay's Rome's Economic Revolution, but the book itself is a challenge to that work, which in Roselaar's view neglects almost entirely the agency of the Italians in the period's economic transformation. For Roselaar, the Italians were as much the drivers of change as the Romans; indeed, it is this repeated conviction that unifies her chapters.