A remarkable change in modern scholarship of the ancient economy in general and the Roman economy in particular can be witnessed in recent decades. The stalemate between ‘modernists’ and ‘primitivists’ or ‘maximalists’ versus ‘minimalists’ has been replaced by new theoretical and methodological orientations. An increasing number of studies have been inspired by the New Institutional Economics, and quantitative studies are no longer despised as only ‘number games’. The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World [2007] is surely the best known example of the first trend, while the ‘Oxford Roman Economy Project’ attempts to analyse those areas of the Roman economy where there exist enough archaeological and textual data to enable quantitative studies.

F.'s volume is published in the new monograph series ‘Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy’, but the book is not a quantitative analysis. It is a case study of fulling in Roman Italy, and F. stresses several times that the approach is on structure and on the micro level, focusing on the everyday work and a contextual analysis of the material: ‘The central focus in this book has been on the ties between work, economy, and society as much as it has been on fulling, fullones, and fullonicae’ (p. 350).

The study originates from F.'s Dutch dissertation and consists of six chapters and a short epilogue. The introduction contextualises the study in the scholarly tradition and presents the rather scanty source material. While fullones and fullonica are mentioned only in a few literary texts and legal sources, they appear in 50 published inscriptions from Italy. Most important, however, is the archaeological evidence, and F. identifies in total 22 fullonicae in the Italian peninsula after a very careful discussion. He rejects several workshops identified by other scholars, because they fail to meet his ‘conservative’ criteria for identifying fulleries. Their distribution is, not surprisingly, very uneven with eleven workshops at Pompeii, six at Ostia, three at Rome and one in Herculaneum and Florence.

The title of Chapter 2, ‘The Economy of Fulling’, is accurate as it analyses the economic contexts of the textile production that is one of the book's five key themes. The wide variation in their economic background is emphasised, and F. identifies three types of workshops on the basis of fulling stalls and basins: small and medium-sized fullonicae and large so-called ‘industrial’ fulleries in Ostia, Rome and Florence. It is noticeable that the latter differ considerably in their organisation from the small scale workshops and medium-sized fullonicae in other Italian cities. The third chapter is a lengthy and detailed narrative of the fulling processes and its various phases that are reflected by the design of the workshops. Chapter 4 looks at the urban environment and argues convincingly that the alleged dirty character of the fullonicae needs reconsideration. They were integrated in the urban space, and the price of land or the rent seems to have determined their location.

The second part of the book consists of the fifth and sixth chapters and analyses the life of the people working in the fulleries. Following other recent analyses of Roman working women and men F. stresses the occupational identity of the fullones. Being a fullo was a respectable profession in Roman society with a multifaceted social and cultural image. This is, for instance, confirmed by the inscriptions related to associations of fullones involved in religious activities. These associations are also attested in relatively small cities in Italy, in which no fullonicae have been yet identified, but the problem of their local political influence is more difficult to answer. Although fullones appear in the Pompeian electoral slogans it is based on weak premises to postulate that a successful fullo may have acquired local political offices.

Some shortcomings must, however, also be noted. F.'s analysis is in many respects speculative. ‘It is possible’, ‘it is not unlikely’ or ‘it cannot be excluded’ can be found on almost every page more than once, and common sense arguments are frequently used in the second part on the social life of the people working and living in the fulleries. Furthermore, the discussion of management and leadership of the workshops lacks the nuanced analysis found in most other chapters. A full discussion of the passages in the Digest, in which fullers are mentioned, is missing, and this seems unfortunate since they contain much information relevant to this study. It is clear than the Roman jurists perceived the fullo as an institor – translated as a ‘personal agent’ by F. (p. 275) – but the problem of their apprentices also mentioned in the Digest is not discussed. Surprisingly there is no reference to the most thorough analysis of Roman business managers by J.-J. Aubert (Business Managers in Ancient Rome. A Social and Economic Study of Institores, 200 bc – ad 250 [1994]). F. seems to define rationality only as ‘the efficiency of the production process’ (p. 98) without any discussion or references to the important discourse in recent decades on (bounded) rationality in Roman agriculture and legal policy as stressed by, among others, D.P. Kehoe in several important studies (e.g. Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire [2007]). Finally, the German historian and epigraphist G. Alföldy never used a ‘marxist, structuralist approach’ (p. 244 n. 13). His Römische Sozialgeschichte was a rather traditional overview of Roman social history which used a ‘Stände-Schichten-Modell’.

The book is well written and well documented with more than 1,000 footnotes, 23 pages of bibliography, 137 figures and 22 plans, but the quality of many photographs in black and white is poor. F.'s study is stimulating, but it will certainly also be questioned. The use of terminology such as ‘industrial’ fullonicae is provoking, but the strength of the book is the accurate and detailed contextual analysis of the material remains of the fullonicae combined with the inscriptions and a few literary sources. The qualitative approach makes the book an important contribution to the study of Roman social and economic history and should be an example to be followed by other studies of a single urban occupation.