A number of difficulties were inherent to pre-industrial trade, one of the foremost being the matter of long-distance communication. As Taco Terpstra states in his introductory paragraph, Roman trade operated in an imperfect system: both in terms of communication and with regard to a legal system which did not enforce private contracts. This book sets out to examine how trading communities, described as ‘small but far-reaching groups defined by their members’ shared geographical origin' (2), circumvented some of the difficulties of this imperfect system in order to facilitate the trade process.

Ch. 1 draws from the well-known Murecine Tablets to discuss the use of law in Puteoli. T. argues convincingly through the evidence from various tablets that businessmen and traders in Puteoli relied on formal legal institutions to mitigate disputes. T.'s challenge to Koenraad Verboven's argument (The Economy of Friends: Economic Aspects of Amicitia and Patronage in the Late Republic (2002)) that amicitia and patronage were the primary guiding force in business transactions is particularly useful in supporting his wider arguments on the importance of ethnic trading communities (28–31).

Ch. 2 continues its focus on Puteoli, but moves to discuss interactions between local Puteolans and outside businessmen. Here T. highlights a very important and poorly discussed question: could trade contracts be enforced through legal measures, ensuring some degree of good business practice when trading with unknown associates, or did traders depend on reputation-based networks to regulate the behaviour of traders (55)? In addressing this issue, he turns to comparative history and looks briefly at twelfth- and thirteenth-century Florence and later American traders in Mexican California. Abner Cohen's work (in C. Meillassoux (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (1971)) on trading diasporas would have usefully added to this discussion. T. concludes that while foreign merchants engaged with Roman law for contracts and litigations, enforcement hinged on the social control provided by groups of foreign traders resident in Puteoli.

Ideas of self-regulating communities continue in ch. 3 as the book moves to Ostia. The chapter opens with a discussion of Maghribi traders known from Cairo Geniza documents. These documents provide strong evidence that the Maghribis formed a coalition in which mutual information sharing served to regulate the behaviour of members through reputation. This discussion is key to T.'s overall arguments, but perhaps would have made more sense either in the introduction or conclusion, as it is applicable to more than just the Ostian evidence. The chapter goes on to examine the so-called Piazzale delle Corporazioni, a crucial structure for all scholars of Roman trade. T. seems unduly tentative in identifying the stalls in the piazzale as stationes like those of the Tyrians at Puteoli, an argument that I have previously made elsewhere (Bollettino di archeologia on line I / Volume speciale B / B11 / 1, 2010), but such an identification provides excellent support for his arguments.

Ch. 4 examines the evidence for communities of foreign traders in Rome. While it can be difficult to disentangle diplomatic communities from trading communities, T. argues convincingly that the Forum Iulium and the Sacra Via both housed concentrations of structures used by foreign mercantile communities The pattern of trading communities allied by geographical origin is thus the same in Rome as in Puteoli and Ostia.

The final (fifth) chapter turns to Asia to examine whether or not similar foreign communities existed outside of Italy. The question of how traders outside of Italy operated within different legal systems is an interesting one, and T. concludes that while the influence of Roman law increased over time, the state still did not enforce private contracts. Traders therefore relied on reputation and trust facilitated by the same types of foreign communities found in Italy. While the conclusion is logical, the evidence itself is less convincing as it only concerns groups of Romans (here Italians) while representatives from other places across the Roman world are missing.

Within the five case studies presented in this work, we see similar evidence that ethnic trading communities developed as a way to work around some of the logistical difficulties of Roman trade. T. makes the important distinction between local traders and long-distance traders, a difference which is crucial in understanding the function of foreign trading communities, particularly concerning communication, though local trade associations surely functioned similarly in terms of creating a reputation-based network. His main conclusions are that trading communities based on geographical provenance served two main purposes: they facilitated communication between trading partners and created a reputation-based network that provided social and institutional pressure to maintain good business behaviour. This is an important movement away from the prevailing idea amongst scholars that these issues were dealt with predominantly through the use of dependent labour (92).

The main weakness of the book lies in the presentation of the material. It reads like a doctoral thesis; the organization of the book by case study detracts from the force of the important arguments that T. is making. Similarly, while the use of comparative history in this topic is critical, the placement of comparative case studies is not as effective as it could be. In addition, the readability of the book would have been much improved by the inclusion of tables and additional maps. There are only four figures, three of which are plans and one of which is a map of Roman Asia Minor. Tables highlighting key information from the Murecine Tablets and tables or an appendix of inscriptions with information such as date and findspot would have been particularly useful. Overall, however, this book contains a thought-provoking collection of material related to Roman trading communities and is a significant contribution to the study of Roman trade.