T. is a leading economic historian and economist, who has recently turned his attention to the ancient economy, arguing in a series of papers that the Roman empire was a market economy. Those papers are reworked here into a monograph in which T. applies modern tools of economic analysis to the Roman world. Undoubtedly his strength lies in his knowledge of economic theory and his ability to apply this knowledge to the study of the Roman economy. There are few, if any, ancient historians with an expertise in modern economic theory to rival that of T., although he is right to acknowledge in the preface (p. x) that there has been something of a movement towards the acceptance of modern economic concepts in the study of the ancient world in the past few years, a trend perhaps best exemplified by the dominant position played by New Institutional Economics (NIE) in The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007). At times, however, T. curiously ignores recent work on the Roman economy; in Chapter 5, for example, he claims that few people have thought how institutional strategies could be employed to overcome problems of information flow in the ancient world, and in the opening chapter (pp. 4–5; see also 114–15), he takes Finley's ‘primitivist’ view of the Roman economy as the starting point of his argument, a viewpoint that could hardly be described as the current orthodoxy among ancient historians. Furthermore, while T. is clearly a master of his field, he is on less secure ground when addressing the ancient evidence for the Roman economy; ancient sources are only rarely used and when they are, the context and nature of the passages employed are not always fully explored, nor is the social and cultural complexity of the Roman world always appreciated.

In the first chapter, T. sets out the five main points that he intends to demonstrate in the book: first, that economics can provide useful insights into ancient history; second, that Rome had a market economy; third, that the so-called ‘Pax Romana’ stimulated Mediterranean trade; fourth, that ordinary Romans lived well; and finally, that this is a ‘progress report’, as we are learning new things about the Roman economy all the time. Some of these points, such as the benefits of economic analysis, the political unification of the Mediterranean encouraging trade and the continuing dynamism of research into the Roman economy, particularly in the fields of archaeology and quantification, are largely uncontroversial. The other claims – that Rome had a market economy and that ordinary Romans lived well – are more difficult to substantiate and are currently the subject of intense debate among researchers of the Roman economy.

That there were markets and market exchange in the Roman empire is in itself unlikely to be contested; it is T.’s insistence that these markets were tied together in a series of interdependent Mediterranean-wide markets that is likely to meet with some resistance. For example, in Chapter 2 T. challenges the claim of Erdkamp (The Grain Market in the Roman Empire [2005]) that the Roman grain market operated within restricted, isolated markets. T. argues that wheat prices around the Mediterranean were determined by those at Rome, with wheat valued by the price it could fetch in the city, minus the transportation cost of getting it to Rome; prices would therefore get progressively cheaper as one moved further away from the imperial capital. T. tests his hypothesis using a set of known wheat prices from varied locations, but this dataset is small (consisting of six prices) and chronologically diverse (three of the six prices are from the Republican period), and the context in which the prices appear requires more analysis than is afforded here. Furthermore, T. overstates the stability of the grain trade while understating the level of state intervention. Nero's reaction to the spoiling of grain and the burning of grain ships (Tac. Ann. 15.18) was, for example, more likely to be a carefully stage-managed response designed to stem any fear about the state of the grain supply, and although it is true, as T. notes, that the grain distributions accounted for only a proportion of the grain consumed in Rome (perhaps somewhere between one quarter and one half), the state also regularly intervened in prices in the city, as well as providing incentives to merchants to ship grain to Rome. While T. acknowledges these interventions, their importance and the potential impact that they had on the market is downplayed. Finally, there is no need to assume that the grain trade in the entirety of the Mediterranean was linked to Rome; many areas likely had local, independent markets, while some strong grain-producing regions in favourable positions for transportation were tied more closely to the market in the imperial capital, something touched upon by T. but without further development (p. 51).

Part 1, focusing on prices, continues with a discussion of agricultural commodity prices in Hellenistic Babylon. T. argues convincingly that these prices, documented in an archive of astronomical cuneiform tablets and covering a period of 400 years, were market prices rather than set prices, but while interesting, this does not provide support for T.’s overall argument that the Roman world was part of an integrated market; rather, this provides evidence of a local market in a Hellenistic city state. The final chapter in this section concerns price behaviour in the Roman empire, considering price changes and inflation across the first four centuries a.d.

Part 2 is a study of individual Roman markets in grain, labour, land and finance. The chapter on the grain trade considers how Roman merchants developed a system of legal, social and cultural institutions in order to deal with the problem of asymmetric information, reducing transaction costs far enough to make a grain market viable. T. then turns to the labour market, arguing that free hired labour was widespread in the early Roman empire, with workers free to change their economic activities, and wages being commensurate with skills. However, although there was certainly mobility of people as well as goods within the Roman empire, it is unlikely that mobility was so high as to encourage an equalisation of wages, and again it is perhaps more appropriate to think of local labour markets. Slaves were integrated into the labour force, and T. focuses in particular on the ‘openness’ of Roman slavery, with the practice of manumission encouraging slaves to hope for freedom and incorporation into society. This may be true, but this does not make slavery akin to indentured service (pp. 125–6), since manumission was an arbitrary process over which slaves had no control, and freedmen were far from the ‘self-made men’ posited by T. (p. 133). On the contrary, as T. claims elsewhere (quoting Saller on the point twice, pp. 132–3; 138), ex-slaves were often better placed than the free poor to make a success of themselves, because prior to manumission they may have been trained and set up in a business. Furthermore, T. notes the phenomenon of free people selling themselves into slavery, interpreting this as a point in favour of the openness of Roman slavery and likening slavery to the apprenticeship system of early modern Europe, but failing to develop further the implications of this for the position of the free poor in the labour market. The final two chapters in this section consider land ownership and financial intermediation respectively, demonstrating a thriving market for land and the presence of a sophisticated financial system.

Part 3 discusses the implications of the preceding chapters for our wider understanding of the Roman economy, particularly for the now familiar issue of economic growth in the Roman world. The first chapter presents a review of growth theory, while the following chapter considers the possibility of economic growth within the Roman empire, arguing that while Rome remained subject to Malthusian constraints, delays within the Malthusian model, possibly of centuries rather than decades, allowed for some economic growth and rising standards of living. The final chapter investigates the possibility of estimating a per capita GDP for the Roman empire.

This is an ambitious book and one that will surely stimulate debate and prompt further research into the nature of the Roman economy, perhaps encouraging more ancient historians to make use of the modern tools of economic analysis in their research.