In their own time, the Romans had a clear sense that the acquisition of empire had wrought profound change, not only on republican politics, but also on social and economic life. Increasing riches, imports of slaves and suffering peasant smallholders were combined by contemporary observers into a story of moral decline and corruption. The allure of wealth had made the Romans forget their old hardened ways and grow soft, spendthrift and selfish. A generation ago, Keith Hopkins remodelled this version of Roman history into an ironic sociological analysis showing how peasant soldiers had fought to obtain their own displacements. While they were away on military service, aristocrats had bought their lands with the spoils of war and cultivated the holdings with slaves conquered by the peasants themselves during the endless campaigns of the Roman army. The new slave-based villa agriculture generated higher yields and economic growth. Later Neville Morley followed in Hopkins’ tracks to show how the city of Rome, as the quintessential consumer city subsisting on rents and taxes, had nevertheless triggered a dynamic economic response in much of Italy. Meanwhile, debates have focused on the demography of Roman Italy and on the question of growth in the empire more widely. Discussion of the latter issue has mainly been concentrated on the early and high Empire. But this is probably a mistake. If one is in search of growth, especially in per capita income, it is difficult to find a better potential candidate than Italy in the middle and late Republic. After all, during this period of accelerating conquest enormous amounts of wealth and slave-labour poured into the peninsula. Should any society in the Greco-Roman world have been able to overcome the narrow constraints imposed by pre-industrial technology on per capita incomes, it must have been conquering Italy.

This insight is both the starting point and great strength of Philip Kay's Rome's Economic Revolution. Through eleven well laid out and clearly organized chapters, the economy of republican Italy is analysed in its various aspects, and in a balanced and even-handed manner. The three chapters in Part 1 survey the rising income from conquest and empire in the forms of plunder, taxes and mining, with the silver of Spain and the rich tribute from Asia Minor playing a key rôle. In Part 3, we move to the application of funds, with discussions of investment in agriculture, trade, finance as well as building and construction. The central phenomena here are the expansion of slave-based villa agriculture, with a significant export of wine developing from central and southern Italy, and the rise of Delos as an eastern Mediterranean centre of the slave trade and Italian finance. In between, Part 2 deals with the issue of liquidity. A huge expansion in the coining of silver and in the availability of credit provided the necessary instruments to mobilize the spoils of empire and put them to good use. Plunder, if you like, could become capital.

At heart, K.'s is a monetarist explanation (6) of the republican ‘economic revolution’. But this is not a study where modern economic theory is intensively and rigorously mobilized to analyse the ancient past. Rather, the reader is engaged through a pragmatic language, informed by the business community, from which the author has long professional experience. As such it works well enough, though perhaps with a tinge of anachronism at times, most notably in the penultimate chapter, entitled ‘After the Credit Crunch’ to evoke the recent global financial crisis. K. suggests that the Mithridatic wars, and their destructive impact on Italian businessmen engaged in the exploitation of the Roman East, disrupted the development of Roman finance and prevented the emergence of something like a Roman ‘corporate’ bank. Similarly in discussion of Delos, the Roman businessmen are described in a language of banking and trade. But much of their activities was directly linked to the process of imperial taxation and slaving — in short, force and exploitation. Of course, it is not really surprising that the language of business tends to disguise the operation of power and violence. And I do not really intend this as a serious objection, only a minor quibble because empire and conquest are present throughout as the underlying, most significant catalyst in K.'s understanding of the economic transformation (279). But the analysis could have gained if the language of violence and force had been more firmly integrated with the language of business and economics.

Be that as it may, K. then concludes with a set of attempts to quantify the development of the economy of republican Italy. Of course, these are by necessity highly speculative; but K. does manage to construct a sophisticated and persuasive quantitative scenario showing that growth in per capita income would have been the most likely outcome to the acquisition of empire. Much, though, in these cases depends on the underlying assumptions and premises fed into the calculation. Even so, the results may be very revealing about the parameters shaping an economy like the Roman. This reader, for instance, was struck in perusing K.'s computations by just how large a slave population was necessary to sustain this Roman economic revolution. Moreover, K. confines his quantitative model to Italy. However, the economy of Italy was precisely not isolated, but was stimulated by the forceful and continuous confiscation and transfer of resources and people from other areas. Capital may have accumulated in Italy in 146 b.c., but it was certainly destroyed in both Corinth and Carthage and the living standards of their surviving populations would have been greatly reduced. Significant growth in the classical Mediterranean could occur only within very narrow limits. Such was the Roman economic revolution — here well surveyed and expertly discussed by Philip Kay.