Rome's Economic Revolution

In this volume, Philip Kay examines economic change in Rome and Italy between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC. He argues that increased inflows of bullion, in particular silver, combined with an expansion of the availability of credit to produce significant growth in monetary liquidity. This, in turn, stimulated market developments, such as investment farming, trade, construction, and manufacturing, and radically changed the composition and scale of the Roman economy. Using a wide range of evidence and scholarly investigation, Kay demonstrates how Rome, in the second and first centuries BC, became a coherent economic entity experiencing real per capita economic growth. Without an understanding of this economic revolution, the contemporaneous political and cultural changes in Roman society cannot be fully comprehended or explained.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ; LIST OF FIGURES ; LIST OF TABLES ; ABBREVIATIONS ; INTRODUCTION ; 1. Rome and its economy at the time of the Second Punic War ; PART I: SOURCES OF REVENUE ; 2. Indemnities and booty ; 3. Mining revenues ; 4. State finance and the lex Sempronia de provincia Asia ; PART II: THE ROMAN MONEY SUPPLY ; 5. Cashing in the plunder ; 6. Credit and financial intermediation ; PART III: THE APPLICATION OF FUNDS ; 7. Investment farming and agricultural exploitation ; 8. Trade, capital, and interconnected markets ; 9. The creation of 'material complexity' ; 10. After the credit crunch ; PART IV: QUANTIFICATION ; 11. Forecasting the past ; SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX OF LITERARY SOURCES ; GENERAL INDEX