This edited volume maps regional urbanisation patterns across the Roman empire (first century bce – third century ce). The publication is one of the outcomes of the ERC-funded research project ‘An Empire of 2,000 Cities: Urban Networks and Economic Integration in the Roman Empire’ conducted between 2013–2018. It comprises sixteen contributions of a wide geographic and chronological remit. Almost all areas of the Roman West are discussed (with the important exception of Britain, only partially treated in the contribution by F. Pellegrino), alongside some important regions in the east: Macedonia, Thrace and Asia Minor. The central aim of the project is to establish the shapes of urban hierarchies and to shed new light on levels of economic integration in the empire by applying a regional approach. Individual contributions tend to focus on select aspects of the development of urban networks, ranging from climactic factors, city-size distributions, the role of small towns, population density, to pre-Roman patterns of urbanisation. Despite this thematic diversity, the volume as a whole succeeds in showcasing the value of studying urbanisation processes at the level of large groups of settlements. It assembles a rich array of insights into the character of provincial urbanisation and offers a more comprehensive and precise overview than other recent studies of cities in the Roman empire (see e.g. R. Laurence et al., The City in the Roman West c. 250 bc – c. ad 250 [2011]; R. Raja, Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces [2012]; A.K. Bowman and A. Wilson [edd.], Settlement, Urbanization, and Population [2011]). Scholars with interest in urbanisation will find most of the contributions in this volume useful overviews of the available data for particular regions.
The editors’ introduction places the book within a rich tradition of urban studies and sets out the key objective: to establish a ‘general shape of regional urban patterns and hierarchies’ (p. 3). Drawing upon insights from individual papers, the introduction builds a coherent picture of the long-term development of regional networks of cities, their economic dependence on hinterlands and economic integration. It discusses the role of pre-Roman urban patterns and the extent of their continuity after the incorporation into the empire, and how the empire's political economy shaped individual regional urban systems according to newly established connective networks. Two main points emerge (pp. 18–27): the preservation of existing settlements and the creation of new cities depended largely on Rome's need for local authorities to collect taxes and maintain order. The regional approach to urbanisation sheds light on the distribution of city and territory size, on connectivity networks and on economic functions of towns as central places. These three factors are, in turn, key for assessing and explaining levels of economic integration.
The first four papers focus on cities in continental Europe, especially Gaul. M. Fernández-Götz examines pre-Roman urbanisation in temperate Europe by investigating the cycles of development of iron-age oppida and their eventual transformation after the Roman conquest of Gaul, Britain and Germania. F. Pellegrino attempts, at the most macro-scale of all contributions, to calculate the sizes and distribution of cities across north-western Europe. F. Baret turns to spatial analysis of the Massif Central where he identifies secondary towns and studies their role and distribution in relation to ciuitas capitals. The next paper by F. Trément et al. uses a core-periphery model to investigate road networks, small towns and regional development in the territory of the Aruerni, in a higher resolution than any other paper in the volume.
A further three papers present urbanisation patterns in parts of Italy and Spain. O. Rodríguez Gutiérrez discusses urban developments in the Iberian peninsula in the context of Roman policies from the Republican to the Flavian period. F. Vermeulen offers a particularly rich analysis of cities in central Adriatic Italy, where he showcases the usefulness of intensive urban surveys for understanding regional diversity in urban patterns. De Ligt provides a comprehensive account of the gradual and yet profound transformation of the urban network in Sicily from the late Hellenistic era to the third century ce.
The next three papers highlight aspects of urbanisation in north Africa, which, alongside Gaul, is the most thoroughly analysed region in the volume. M. Hobson categorises north African towns according to their autonomy, monumentality and built-up area to draw our attention to the interface of climatic factors and Rome's policies in shaping distinct clusters and bands of settlements. D. Stone calls for a new approach to studying longue durée trajectories of urbanism in North Africa by focusing on differences in urban regional patterns between Central and Northern Tripolitania, Byzacena, Zeugitana and Mauretania Caesariensis, with particular focus on cities’ relationship with export production and rural settlements. P. Scheding takes as his subjects not urban landscapes per se, but the role of the relationship between city, hinterland and micro-region in shaping interactions of local elites in the hinterland of Carthage (the territories of Thugga and Thuburbo Maius). His contribution also includes perhaps the most useful discussion of the problem of using ‘city’ as the primary unit of analysis in the entire volume.
The last few papers concerning the Roman West turn to Pannonia, Dalmatia and Dacia. D. Donev takes as his point of departure ‘small municipia’ in the Balkan peninsula and middle Danube. These rather unusual cities have left very few surviving epigraphic and archaeological traces, but can be associated with the administration of large and sparsely populated territories. Although the correlation is to an extent hypothetical, Donev offers a plausible observation that very low population density can be matched with extensive territories controlled by relatively insignificant urban centres. D. Mladenović investigates how the military presence and fluvial environment affected the development and design of Pannonian cities.
The remaining contributionss focus on the eastern regions. M. Karambinis follows the methodology employed in his previous study of urbanisation in central and southern Greece to establish hierarchical urban patterns in Macedonia and Thrace, based on city-size distribution, monumentalisation and coin minting (M. Karambinis, Journal of Greek Archaeology 3 [2018], 269–339). He demonstrates local variations in urbanisation, with new cities emerging in northern parts of Macedonia, but proposes a thinning out of the urban system as the overall pattern of development in the area. R. Willet maps the distribution and estimates the sizes of self-governing cities in Asia Minor. His contribution also critically discusses the rank-size theory (adopted less discriminately by some other papers) that interprets the prevalence of middle-size cities as a symptom of poor inter-city economic integration, and proposes an alternative explanation that focuses on such factors as distribution of natural resources, market activities and connective networks. F. Kolb's detailed analysis of urban features in select settlements in Lycia draws our attention to the very long process of development of hierarchical relations between Lycian towns from the Archaic to the Roman period.
The volume raises an important question of scale. What constitutes a region is not strictly defined anywhere in the publication, and different contributions exhibit a range of scales of analysis, from a single ciuitas to an assembly of provinces. By accommodating such diversity, the volume illuminates how the type of observations can vary between papers depending on the adopted scale. The multiplicity of scales yields the most interesting results when a high-resolution picture at the level of a ciuitas is combined with a more comprehensive view at a sub-provincial scale. For example, the Massif Central and the ciuitas of the Aruerni or select areas of Africa Proconsularis and the hinterland of Carthage receive attention from scholars operating at different scales, which makes them some of the best illuminated regions in the entire volume.
This study collects and analyses a vast body of valuable primary data from many previous studies. Some of the contributions, for example, on Sicily (Chapter 8), Macedon and Thrace (Chapter 14) and Asia Minor (Chapter 15) include detailed appendices that constitute a useful scholarly aid for anyone interested in further reading of the collected material on individual cities. It is perhaps a pity that there is not more consistency in the presentation of this information across all the papers. Most chapters contain good-quality maps, graphs and tables with the distribution of cities and their estimate of sizes, but they do not always include appendices that list their sources. To access such information the reader might have to consult the primary studies that were undertaken for the purpose of some of the contributions (e.g. for Chapter 3, see F. Pellegrino, The Urbanization of the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire [2018], unpublished thesis at Leiden University: http://hdl.handle.net/1887/66262; F. Vermeulen, From the Mountains to the Sea. The Roman Colonisation and Urbanisation of Central Adriatic Italy [2017]).
The volume deploys a composite definition of the city as a juridically and functionally defined phenomenon. This flexible approach allows the contributions to encompass a wide range of settlements, including relatively small ones, which played important roles in local and regional urban networks despite lacking legal autonomy. The downside of this solution is the occasional confusion of urban centres (urbes) with political communities (ciuitates). Some of the strongest contributions (e.g. de Ligt, Vermeulen and Trément et al.) avoid this problem by narrowing the definition of the city to an urban phenomenon and only discuss legal categories in order to identify urban centres. On the other hand, a few other studies seem to blur the distinction between urbs and ciuitas. They risk distracting from the key objective of establishing regional urban patterns by incorporating related but distinct problems, for example, promotions of ciuitates to more prestigious statuses or ambitions of local elites, into their discussion.
This volume successfully champions the ‘regional perspective’ as a fruitful way to analyse the process of urbanisation in the Roman period. The adoption of multiple scales allows the publication to account for the diversity of urban developments, while paying due attention to both pan-imperial and region-specific factors. The publication makes it evident that a number of important insights would have been missed if urbanisation studies remained limited to research on single cities. The larger scale and the systemic context provided by the volume allow for more complex observations about economic integration and about the nature of contacts between individual cities. The volume's key conclusions about provincial urbanisation and the data it assembles will pave the way for further work on cities in the Roman world.
