The debate over the nature of the ancient Mediterranean economy shows no signs of slowing down, or rather, the debate over Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy, which has remained the single most stimulating book in ancient historical studies for the past thirty-five years. Finley emphasized the fundamental importance of traditional social values, such as rank and status, in motivating ostensibly economic activities in the ancient world. In reaction, these days many historians and archaeologists have promoted a more modernizing perspective on the economy of the Roman Empire by adopting notably optimistic assessments of growth, market integration, and economic rationality. Peter Bang's book is a stern but sensible rebuke against the revival of such modernism.

In the first two chapters Bang provides an excellent survey and critique of competing interpretations of the economy of the Roman Empire. Many of those interpretations used comparisons with the economies of states in early modern Europe. Bang pointedly dissents: “It is time … to abandon the tyranny of Europe over Rome” (p. 59). Instead, he suggests that better comparative models would be the “giant, multiethnic agrarian empires” of late medieval and early modern Asia, such as Ming and Ch'ing China, the Ottoman empire, and, in particular, Mughal India. The focus of Bang's comparison between the Roman Empire and the Mughal Empire is “the process of tribute extraction and mobilisation of peasant surplus production” (62). He argues that the expenditures of the Roman government and the income of wealthy elites such as senators took up one-third of the disposable surplus. As a result, Bang concludes, any economic integration in the Roman Empire was a byproduct of the collection, transportation, and spending of imperial taxes, imperial rents, and aristocratic incomes, not the outcome of pure market exchange. The primary role of much interregional trade was instead to convert some of this extracted agrarian surplus into money that could be stored for use later and elsewhere.

In the next three chapters Bang discusses the nature of the movement of commodities in the Roman world. His depiction of this flow of resources becomes a litany of obstacles: slow and expensive transportation, “chronic bottlenecks, imbalances and asymmetries in the supply of available information and goods” (139), the inability of general legal institutions to supersede local customs. As a comparative model for the functioning of markets in the Roman Empire Bang suggests the bazaar, which was characteristic of other complex agrarian societies such as the Mughal Empire. In the trading environment of a bazaar, Roman merchants coped with low transparency, the unpredictability of supply and demand, and volatile prices by developing social relationships. They joined religious communities in order to establish partnerships and ties of reciprocity; they invested largely through members of their extended households, including slaves. Merchants could then transform these social relationships into commercial strategies “that allowed them to co-exist with the risks and often to turn them to their advantage” (199).

Bang's gentle rebuke to the staleness of current discussions of the Roman economy is most welcome. His comparisons with Mughal India now offer an effective new model based on features of a bazaar economy. As an added benefit, by developing this new paradigm he makes the Roman economy itself accessible for deployment in comparative models for studying other pre- and early modern agrarian economies.