As Jean-François Chemain states in his introduction, the object of this monograph is to examine the Roman economy in peninsular Italy during the five centuries of the Republic. It is divided into three sections, the first dealing briefly with the geography and the peoples of Italy before the rise of Rome, and the second and third sections with Rome's society and economy before and after the Second Punic War. In general, the maps and illustrations are first rate, but it would have been helpful to have included page references for the primary sources listed in the bibliography.

The book is of course presumably written to appeal principally to a Francophone audience and so, to some extent, fills a gap in the market; for example, Andreau's recent L’Économie du monde romain (2010) had a narrower focus on the city of Rome itself and covered a wider period from archaic times to the fourth century a.d. But it is unclear whether the volume under review is aimed at students, at experienced scholars or at a wider audience. I suspect that the first category is intended because each section is divided into a number of chapters and numerous subsections, each dealing with a different topic, which suggests that its main purpose is to allow students easily to dip in and out of the volume. The problem with the resulting series of descriptive vignettes is that they do not allow C. to develop a coherent argument as to how or why the Roman republican economy progressed as it did. C. does talk of the ‘runaway development of the Roman economy’ in the second century b.c. (138) and correctly concludes that the Romans’ success in war resulted in an influx of land, booty and tribute which in turn led to the development of agriculture, manufacturing and ‘services’ (167–8), but there is little attempt to connect the dots and explain in more detail how warfare might have produced these effects. Indeed, by the end of the volume, this reviewer was not entirely clear how C. felt that the size and composition of the Roman economy in 27 b.c. differed from earlier periods of the Republic. Perhaps a more fulsome, rather than a two-page, conclusion to the book or the inclusion of a summary at the end of each chapter might have allowed a clearer argument to be developed.

There are more serious issues. To begin with, the secondary sources which C. cites are principally written in French, with Andreau, Nicolet, Morel and Tchernia (rightly) looming large. However, while this Anglophone reviewer found the references to some of the more recondite French scholarship useful, this approach does mean that the narrative which C. produces is somewhat unbalanced. For much of the scholarship in English, German and Italian that should be very relevant receives no mention (there are, for example, no citations of the work of Coarelli or indeed of that of any Italian archaeologists). Secondly, C. claims that he wishes to produce ‘a synthesis of more recent research’ (7), but the only citations of scholarship produced in English, German and Italian since 2000 are to a few articles in the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007) and to A. Wilson, JRS 92 (2002), 1–32. This means that a number of important studies which have appeared over the last fifteen years or so simply do not figure in C.’s account. For instance, there is no sign of the work by Scheidel, Rathbone, de Ligt, Rosenstein, Erdkamp, Roselaar and others which has advanced the debate over demography, the ager publicus and the role of peasants in the second century b.c. and resulted in a more nuanced version of Hopkins's theory of the deracination of free Roman peasants and their replacement by slaves (a theory which, by the way, C. summarises without citing its origin). Similarly, although C. mentions, early on, the primitivist/modernist debate, he does not touch (even briefly) on more recent attempts to develop different methodologies for and approaches to analysing ancient evidence of economic performance, such as those discussed in Scheidel and Von Reden's The Ancient Economy (2002) and in Bowman and Wilson's Quantifying the Roman Economy (2009). Finally, C.’s coverage of key features of the early Roman economy is uneven. As an example, the volume contains an excellent seven pages on the evolution of law (145–51), but only seven lines on aqueducts (136). Surely the latter deserve more extensive discussion, both as major and enormously expensive civic undertakings (and the implications thereof) and, arguably, as proxies for population growth in the city of Rome.

In sum, a well-produced volume that is in parts very interesting but which could have been so much more useful if recent foreign scholarship had been considered and a clearer argument pursued.