Whatever the other forms of economic activity in which the Roman world engaged, there can be no doubt that the exploitation of land and natural resources represented by far the largest sector of the Roman economy in terms of output, and that food accounted for the largest proportion of private sector consumption demand. It was therefore, as Arjan Zuiderhoek rightly says in his introduction, an ‘odd and fundamental omission’ that the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007) did not contain a ‘separate and sustained analysis’ of agriculture and natural resource exploitation since ‘land and agriculture, and the conflicts surrounding them, shaped Roman institutions and moulded the ideological outlook of, in particular, the social and political elites’ (3). To some extent, recent studies such as The Italians on the Land (2009), Public Land in the Roman Republic (2010) and The Roman Agricultural Economy (2014) have helped to remedy the under-representation of agricultural production in the Cambridge Economic History, and Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources builds on those works and complements them.

The contributions to this volume (which originated in a 2011 conference organized by the Roman Society Research Center, based at Ghent University) cover such diverse subjects as macro-economic frameworks, zooarchaeological evidence in animal husbandry and the local economy of Palmyra. Read as a whole, the book provides an interestingly kaleidoscopic view of issues related to land and natural resources from the second century b.c. to Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Zuiderhoek's introduction will be particularly useful to the newcomer to Roman economic history, since it provides a clear summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the main theoretical models used for analysing the ancient economy: market, substantivist, demographic and new institutional economic (‘NIE’). In ch. 2, Paul Erdkamp sets out some persuasive arguments for believing that the Roman economy may have been able to escape Malthusian constraints because market integration allowed structurally under-employed agricultural workers to perform unskilled non-agrarian seasonal work, such as stevedoring and land transportation in major urban centres or textile work in rural households. The rest of the book is divided into three parts, of which the first (chs 3–9) deals with ownership and control of land and water, with papers by Kyle Harper, Elio Lo Cascio, Laurens Tacoma, Dennis Kehoe, Éva Jakab, Christer Bruun and Yuri Marano; it is arguably the most successful section of the book because of the quality of the articles, including three which provide the legal context for much of what is discussed elsewhere in the volume. Part 2 is entitled ‘Organization and Modes of Exploitation’ (chs 10–14, by Alessandro Launaro, Annalisa Marzano, Matthew Hobson, Julia Hoffman-Salz and Michael MacKinnon); while Part 3 (chs 15–17) concentrates on the exploitation and processing of natural resources (salt by Isabella Tsigarida, quarrying by Alfred Hirt and gold by Fernando López Sánchez). The concluding ch. 18 provides a useful summary by the editors of the arguments presented by the contributors.

Space constraints do not allow for discussion of all fifteen individual contributions, but a few of the papers should be highlighted. In his chapter, Harper cleverly uses quantitative evidence to reject the accumulation thesis that during the Empire the best agricultural land was increasingly owned by a plutocracy of wealthy families. In fact, he argues, the evidence shows that large-scale holdings did not change much between the Principate and Late Antiquity. Lo Cascio, in nine tightly-argued pages, rejects the view that the emperor was the dominant force in the imperial economy, suggesting that he behaved no differently from any other major landowner and managed his properties ‘to respond to the demands of the market’ (64). The only major differences were ones of scale, which allowed investments, such as in mines and quarries, that were beyond the scope of other wealthy members of the élite. In ch. 6, Kehoe argues that, because small farmers and tenants on both imperial and private estates were the largest group of producers in the Empire, the Roman government sought to shape legal institutions that protected this group's interests. Other particularly interesting contributions, for this reviewer at least, include Marzano on the sheer variety of production on villa estates and Marano on water management in Ostrogothic Italy.

One feature which this volume shares with the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World is a common theoretical approach. Its editors asked contributors ‘to take into (critical) consideration a NIE perspective while writing their chapters’ (4), with the central question being ‘did Roman society have an institutional set-up that encouraged the efficient exploitation of land and natural resources?’ (12). Given the general absence of reliable statistics in the Roman world, NIE is a potentially fruitful way in which to analyse the ownership and exploitation of land and natural resources. This is because NIE focuses on the institutional configurations of an economy (in a broad sense, the ‘rules of the game’ that individual economic actors play and, in particular, the hidden costs of economic activity —‘transaction costs’) and has a strong interest in economic performance. A key tenet of NIE is that a detailed historical study of (formal and informal) institutions is necessary to explain economic development. It is, therefore, perhaps somewhat disappointing that, despite editorial encouragement, only a few of the contributors of the specialized studies in this volume appear overtly to have taken NIE into consideration in their papers. (The small number of references to NIE in the index of the book is telling: there are only twelve and four of these are to the introduction.) For example, Bruun's otherwise excellent chapter, on water use and productivity in Roman agriculture, would have benefited from a full assessment of the possible economic impact of what was originally a peculiarly Roman legal institution, rural servitude, which is discussed at some length (145–9). The editors may not have imposed a ‘party-line’ on contributors but, when a NIE approach is followed, the result can be stimulating. Jakab's chapter on property rights is a good example of what can be achieved through (as she herself describes it) ‘an experimental application of the main methods and ideas of NIE to the changes in the legal environment of ownership in Roman law’ (114). She goes on to identify privatization under the lex agraria of 111 b.c. and the concept of possessio as key developments which promoted economic growth through ‘a more effective allocation of natural resources’ in a constantly evolving institutional environment (and she also, by the way, gives her own interpretation of the significance of rural servitude). The editors make a heroic attempt in their concluding chapter to provide a NIE slant to some of the articles that ostensibly lack one, but one is left with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps a number of the contributors did not buy into this analytical approach at all.

The above concern (and a minor one that the book contains an unusually high number of typographical errors) should not be seen to detract overly much from the generally high quality of the articles in a volume which is an important and welcome addition to the study of the Roman economy.