This book is the first to be published by a newly established research network based at the universities of Ghent, Brussels and Leuven and founded in order to identify the causes of ‘economic growth and development in the Roman world’. The starting point for this volume is a familiar one in studies of Roman-period economics. The editors assert that the ancient sources, whether literary or archaeological, are insufficient on their own to successfully reconstruct the functioning of the Roman economy. Theories, models and comparative history, therefore, may be useful in helping to find possible solutions to the problems presented by fragmentary evidence. After a brief introductory chapter, the book falls into two halves each containing four chapters. The first half of the book aims to introduce theoretical frameworks and models useful for approaching the Roman economy, while the second half presents specific case studies intended to demonstrate the validity of the various approaches.

As the title of the book suggests, the research group takes much of its inspiration from the research agenda set out almost a decade ago by the editors of the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007). This view of ancient economic history, borrowing much of its conceptual machinery from development economics and from Douglass North's New Institutional Economics, holds that past economies should be judged along the two related axes of structure and performance. Performance relates to an economy's ability to achieve both aggregate and per capita growth, ideally to be measured in quantitative terms. The analysis of structure usually involves an examination of the ways in which the configuration of society enabled or constrained such economic performance. For some, this new conceptual order represents a promising path leading to fertile new territory, allowing modernists and primitivists finally to put an end to the sometimes extreme and unhelpful polarization of views experienced over the last decades. For others, the ideological and semantic structure of development economics is representative of a hegemonic discourse that is heavily implicated in the modern world's current structures of power and imperialism; its application to classical studies, a field that has drawn so successfully on post-colonial theory in recent years, is seen as highly inappropriate.

Koenraad Verboven gives a small degree of acknowledgement to such concerns in his contribution to the first part of the book, asking himself whether or not the New Institutional Economics (henceforth NIE) can live up to its expectations in ancient economic history. In spite of his declared subject matter, however, V. examines only very briefly the recent criticisms of NIE and its potential possibilities. Ultimately, he concludes that in order to be useful NIE should be combined with other bodies of theory taken from across the gamut of the social sciences. Few, one imagines, would argue with this conclusion, but V.’s dismissive treatment of the criticisms of NIE (either as badly out of date, or as being conceived only by ‘hostile neo-Marxists’ who can at best only mount ad hominem attacks) makes clear that he does not regard all available approaches as equally relevant or valid. As scholars, we select theories and models which help us to make the best sense of the surviving evidence, and these selections need to be both logically consistent and ethically justifiable. The troubling associations with economic imperialism, neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, inherent in both the conceptual framework and ideological outlook of development economics and NIE, mean that their selection by academics in any field, not just ancient history, is something which deserves to be problematized in much greater depth than is the case here.

Elsewhere in the first part of the book the reader is introduced to comparative history by ancient historian Paul Erdkamp, search equilibrium models by economist George Grantham and complex adaptive systems by archaeologist Jeroen Poblome. Both Grantham and Poblome make the perceptive criticism that a number of recent works by ancient historians have been overly deterministic, relying heavily on a limited number of exogenous variables in order to explain economic and societal change (demography, climate, the prevalence of disease etc.). The common solution found by Grantham and Poblome, however, is to assert that change was simply an inherent property of the socio-economic system. Turning the problem on its head in this way, however, also defers the responsibility of devising explanations unique to each specific historical context. Grantham's starting assumption, that the Roman economy was a market economy, leads him to the conclusion that there would have been frequent shifts between different states of internal equilibrium. Poblome, on the other hand, comes dangerously close to the functionalism of adaptive efficiency that NIE has been so heavily criticized for. The model he recommends comes very close to being a straight resurrection of systems theory, once made popular in the field of archaeology through the work of Colin Renfrew and also criticized for its functionalism in the 1980s. Presumably in order to address such criticisms, Poblome adds elements from the theory of thermodynamic economics (originally developed by N. Georgescu-Roegen), which holds that industrial capitalism is constantly exhausting the planet's finite resources and therefore never exists in a state of perfect equilibrium. Thermodynamic economic theory is self-evidently less appropriate to more sustainable agrarian societies, but this fact does not detract greatly from the remainder of Poblome's contribution, which is a solid interim report on the economically relevant results of the Sagalassos archaeological project.

In Part Two, it is Dennis Kehoe's chapter that comes closest to applying any of the theoretical frameworks that have been suggested in the first half of the book. Kehoe examines the way in which the political and legal institutions of the Roman Empire influenced the distribution of wealth in rural and urban contexts. He is of the natural persuasion to focus on the more positive influences of Rome's institutions rather than the negative. Some of his criticisms of a Malthusian approach to the Roman economy echo the passages in earlier chapters, and he successfully demonstrates how security of tenure and fixed rents on imperial estates, as well as the grain supply provided by the annona and other municipal institutions, could have logically combined to lessen the food insecurity of both rural peasants and city dwellers. Wim Broekaert looks at the connectivity of the Roman community on Delos during the late Republic by examining connections between individuals and families named in the available epigraphic corpus. The network analysis seems ill-suited to explain why the magistri from different groups often acted together as a unit of twelve, the strongest conclusion being that the community represented in the epigraphy was an extremely tight-knit one. Finally, the chapters by Annalisa Marzano and Anne Kolb contain little overt theory. Marzano argues that productive villas could have been both a stimulus to economic growth and an indication of the existence of favourable economic conditions, concluding that the élite social world within which villa owners were embedded was more significant economically than whether or not a slave or tenant labour force was employed in production. Kolb wraps up the volume by considering a small body of inscriptions relevant to the topic of ancient technology.

While avid followers of the debate over method in ancient economic history will no doubt find something of relevance here, one hopes that this research group will go on to develop more of a distinct identity of its own in future publications.