A young ancient historian defends old ideas about the early Roman Empire in this polemical first book. The bazaar of the title is a market (or series of markets) with lots of volatility and very limited information, so that personal exchange (dealing with people you know) dominates anonymous exchange, prices fluctuate wildly, and it is impossible to make long-run plans. Marc Bloch (Feudal Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and Avner Greif (Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) described economies like this in Europe's Dark Age. Peter Fibiger Bang argues that the early Roman Empire at the height of its extent and power was the same kind of fragmented economy, operated through bazaars. He adopts the Marxist term of a “tributary” empire “without subscribing to the broader Marxist framework” (p. 10), and he supports Moses Finley (The Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) in emphasizing “the all-pervasive influence of social status which privileged political over entrepreneurial activities” (p. 33).

Bang notes prominently that I disagree: “Peter Temin argued that Finley was quite simply wrong, the economy of the Roman Empire represented just such a conglomeration [“an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets”]. This is an extraordinary claim. One might conceivably imagine that some markets had begun to be linked by middle- and long-distance trade. But to see the entire economy, spanning several continents, as organized by a set of interlinked markets is quite another matter. It is doubtful whether the mature eighteenth-century European economy, outside some restricted pockets, could be described in such terms” (p. 31).

The last sentence reveals Bang's unfortunate ignorance of European economic history. This lacuna in his education is apparent in his extensive treatment of Roman trade. He reports staples of early modern trade practices—reports from agents, family networks, need for supercargoes, etc.—as if they preclude long-distance trade. He quotes the boilerplate at the end of a typical agent letter saying that prices vary over time as evidence that planning is impossible, and he decries the Roman failure to develop bills of exchange without understanding that the Roman universal currency area obviated the need for such bills. Bang's ignorance extends to economic theory. He denies the presence of “Ricardian trade” by noting that complete specialization of Roman provinces did not take place (pp. 73–76). This is only a problem if Ricardo's original formulation is used and no notice is taken of two centuries of elaboration of comparative advantage. Bang's economic views are supported by frequent citations to Clifford Geertz (“Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” in C. Geertz, H. Geertz, and L. Roan, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979: 123–313) and Douglass North (Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Geertz was not an economist, and Bang appears not to have understood North.

Bang's contribution is a comparison of the Roman Empire with the Mughal Empire in early modern India. He chooses to look east for comparison because he finds a large empire, extensive bazaars, and no industrialization—unlike early modern Europe containing rival states, markets, and eventual industrialization. Bang implicitly follows Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton, 1997) and David Landes (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton, 1998) in attributing the Industrial Revolution to state rivalries, which is why he wants to compare Rome with another hegemonic empire. His comparison with India, however, is strained.

Bang's argument is circular: he assumes Rome is economically backward in order to prove that it is. He chooses India for comparison because it did not industrialize in the eighteenth century without asking why not. The obvious answer is that it did not have functioning markets and property rights. He notes that the Roman Empire, unlike the Mughal Empire, was based on private property, but he downplays the role of private property by arguing that property and political activity were intertwined (p. 97ff). Had Bang understood North, he would have explored this difference instead of disparaging it.

Bang also follows Finley in collapsing history into a few points. He rejects a millennium of European history for a discontinuity at the end of it, and he follows Finley in assuming static conditions in the ancient world. Bang states at the beginning of his book that, “The emphasis in this study is on the Roman Principate” (p. 11), that is, the early Roman Empire, although illustrations also would be drawn from adjacent periods. He describes prices in fourth-century Egypt to argue they lacked consistency and provided little indication of functioning markets in the Principate as a result. The prices in his table are in myriad denarii per artaba, implying that it took 100,000 denarii to buy a kilogram of wheat in the fourth century (p. 161). It required less than one denarius to buy a kilogram of wheat in the early Roman Empire, as Bang notes (pp. 90–91), suggesting strongly that conditions had changed.

And Bang is inconsistent. He argues that Roman taxes were very low, but that rapacious customs inspectors precluded trade. He argues that prices were so variable as to preclude planning, but reports the well-known observation that wheat prices were lower in Egypt than in Rome during the Principate. He argues for a comparison with Mughal India, but relies extensively on intermittent comparisons with early modern Europe. Bang's attempted comparison with Mughal India fails to make a case that we should speak of Roman bazaars instead of Roman markets.