This book, a translation of the second half of an even more massive French work published in 2003, provides a detailed account of the first 350 years of Roman rule in the Near East (covering modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan). The first five chapters examine the Hellenistic background of the region, the establishment of Roman control, and the subsequent development of provinces and client states up to the early third century AD. The following five chapters deal with civic life and urban development, the countryside, the urban economy, culture change, and the complex religious landscape of the region, while a final chapter looks forward into an episode of temporary instability in the mid-third century AD. Throughout the volume, Maurice Sartre draws on a wealth of literary sources, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence to create a synthesis of the properties of political, military, economic, and ideological power in this region when—for the only time in history—it was firmly embedded within a pan-Mediterranean empire. In this period, government sought to extract surplus without pursuing far-reaching change or homogenization, and cultural hybridization accompanied the spread of Greek language and elite styles.

Readers of this JOURNAL will be most interested in the two chapters on economic conditions. Rural production, the subject of chapter 7, underpinned the regional economy. Parts of Syria have yielded the ruins of hundreds of ancient stone-built villages that afford a unique glimpse of rural living conditions. Textual sources record the existence of imperial estates (most notably encompassing the famous cedar forests of Lebanon), whereas evidence of temple estates is missing. Private landownership appears to have been the dominant mode of land tenure. Stratification in landed wealth is often hard to document and was subject to considerable geographical variation, from strong concentration of property in the hands of urban elites in some areas to lesser degrees of inequality in more self-contained village communities in other parts of the region. Labor regimes are almost completely unknown outside Palestine, where we encounter various kinds of tenants and wage laborers. Given ecological constraints, the water supply was a critical variable, and Sartre collects evidence for irrigation in large valleys and oases. Roman rule brought a measure of change in production: while grains had long been local staples, olives were first introduced on a grand scale in this period, and viticulture also expanded. Sedentary farmers continued their uneasy co-existence with the nomads that inhabited the marginal peripheries.

Chapter 8 shifts the focus to the urban economy, providing long lists of products associated with local artisans: textiles, purple dye, glass, and pottery loom large in the record. Roman rule intensified the process of monetization that had commenced in the preceding Hellenistic period, as imperial denominations and local currencies circulated side by side. Ports and a network of paved roads facilitated the transfer of goods: at the same time, long-term peace and the consequent reduction of transaction costs, as well as the supply demands of the Roman military, may have been even more vital factors that Sartre does not expressly consider. Patterns of trade are tentatively reconstructed from the distribution of archaeological finds. The region as a whole did not export large quantities of foodstuffs, and tangible evidence of trade is largely limited to durable objects such as ceramics and building stone. Moreover, the region served as a conduit for the international luxury trade, by ship and caravan, from Iran, Arabia, India, and China into the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, any attempt at economic analysis is missing from these chapters: Sartre's account is empirical and source-driven to the extent that it borders on antiquarian, eschewing any consideration of broader interpretive frameworks such as Keith Hopkins's “taxes-and-trade model” which holds that Roman provincial economies were stimulated by reciprocal flows of taxed and traded resources and has been taken up by Nigel Pollard (Soldiers, Cities, and Civilians in Roman Syria, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000: 171–250). Tentative quantification, which features prominently in Ze'ev Safrai's The Economy of Roman Palestine (London: Routledge, 1994), is likewise conspicuous by its absence. Because of their limitations, these chapters are useful above all as quarries for future interpretation.

Endowed with 272 pages of endnotes and bibliography, this work digests a prodigious amount of primary evidence and modern scholarship, and will long serve as an invaluable resource for academic audiences. However, those looking for an up-to-date survey of the region may also want to consider Kevin Butcher's splendid Roman Syria and the Near East (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), which is not only similarly comprehensive and erudite but adds another dimension by offering five times as many illustrations as Sartre's book.