4. Size of GDP: Scheidel and Friesen 2009. Direction of GDP trends: Scheidel 2009b, with Wilson 2009 and 2014, who not unreasonably casts doubt on the relevance of various proxies. For different interpretations of the economic expansion of the late republican period, see Scheidel 2007b and Kay 2014.
5. On Roman technology, see the survey by Oleson 2008, and specifically Schneider 2007 for its economic dimension. Antikythera device: Alexander Jones 2017. Steam engine: Bresson 2006. See Scheidel 2009b: 69 for the nature and abatement of innovation. For overseas exploration and trade, see chapter 11 in this volume.
6. To the best of my knowledge, Schiavone 2000: 180–86, 190 is the only professional ancient historian to have pondered the possibility of political and economic change at a critical juncture that he locates in the 80s to 60s BCE, when substantial resources came to be concentrated in Italy and the old sociopolitical order was under pressure but transformative change was averted by imperial predation and the stabilization of aristocratic dominance. This counterfactual has little to commend it. From an economics perspective, Koyama 2017a notes that a turn toward a machine culture to satisfy labor demands would have required an absence of slave labor, which is not a plausible counterfactual (given that the imperial elite owned several million slaves), and that conditions were not at all conducive to the emergence of a culture of science or bourgeois values. (Cf. also Tridimas 2018 for ancient Greece’s failure to industrialize, which he blames on energy costs, small polity size, and hegemonic attitudes.) Alternative history novels have come up with scenarios of a Roman empire that either experienced industrialization already in antiquity (H. Dale 2017) or survived into our time (Mitchell 1984: significant technological progress without full industrialization; Silverberg 2003: essentially a replay of historical innovation).
7. For China, see chapter 10 in this volume. For the evolution of modern views of the nature of the later Roman empire (from the late third century CE), compare Arnold Jones 1964, Garnsey and Humfress 2001, and Kelly 2004.
8. http://www.romaneconomy.ox.ac.uk/, with the manifesto by Bowman and Wilson 2009. Neoclassical economics: Temin 2012, and numerous papers by Morris Silver. For criticism, see Scheidel 2014: 28–29; Bang 2015. Terpstra 2019: ch. 4 advances a more nuanced view.
9. State institutions and economy: see, e.g., Lo Cascio 2006; Wilson and Bowman 2018, 27–132, and esp. Lo Cascio 2018. Taxes and trade: Hopkins 1980, 2002. Abatement: Wickham 2005: 62–80, 693–824. For the dualism of markets and state demand (predation), see briefly Scheidel 2012: 7–10.
10. For the Roman tax system, see Scheidel 2015a, 2015d. For the logic of abatement, see Monson and Scheidel 2015a. For Chinese taxation, see chapter 10 in this volume. The notion that imperial Rome was a high tax regime (Bowman 2018) is a fantasy that confuses nominal and effective tax rates, and is incompatible with what we know about the limits of public spending (see Scheidel 2015a: 243–44 for a central state share of 5–7 percent of GDP, plus local taxes).
11. Predation: Bang 2007, 2008, 2012. For China, see chapter 11 in this volume. Inequality: Scheidel 2017: 63–80.
12. For the Ming measures and other state interventions, see chapter 13 in this volume. Late Roman empire: Arnold Jones 1964, with Gwynn 2008. For a comparative perspective, see Haldon 2012. See also Terpstra 2019: ch. 7 for institutional stagnation and preference for the status quo under the mature Roman empire.
13. Mughals: Bang 2008. Ottomans: Vries 2002: 115.
14. Insofar as more productively competitive and inclusive societies had developed in the ancient Mediterranean, they were concentrated among the participatory city-states and federated polities (koina) of classical and early Hellenistic Greece (see esp. Mackil 2013 and Ober 2015, and cf. also Raaflaub 2018)—potentially promising experiments that did not survive Roman conquest.
15. Laiou 2002: 1153, 1164; Oikonomides 2002: 1020. Oikonomides 2002: 973–74, 990–1026 (command economy), 1026–58, esp. 1042–48 (privileges).
16. Innovations: Laiou 2002: 1152–53. Concessions: Laiou 2002: 1156–59; Oikonomides 2002: 1050–55; Jacoby 2008.
17. Thus also J. Hall 1996: 55–56.
18. See chapter 9 in this volume and Gelasius, Tractatus 4 (second set of quotes), from Dagron 2003: 182. Politicization: Dagron 2003: 302–3.
19. See chapter 5 in this volume.
20. See chapter 5 in this volume.
21. Van Zanden 2009a: 45–49; see also chapter 10 in this volume.
22. Strayer 1970: 26.
23. Quotes: E. Jones 2003: 110 (and more generally 110–17, 245); Mokyr 2007: 28; Mokyr 2017: 215.
24. Quotes: Baechler 1975: 76 (and see 76–77, 113 for the importance of a single culture); Hall 1988: 35; van Zanden 2009a: 68. See also J. Hall 1996: 65.
25. E. Jones 2003: 115–17; van Zanden 2009a: 90.
26. Language: E. Jones 2003: 112–13; and cf. Mokyr 2017: 170. Pacification: Mann 1986: 377, followed by J. Hall 1988: 32 and van Zanden 2009a: 36, 45. Trade: Hall 1986: 125. Transnational body: Mitterauer 2003: 154–55. See in general Hall 1985: 123–26. E. Jones (2003: 112) also deems “limited diversity” in religion preferable to “infinite splintering.”
27. Mokyr 2002: 76; Mokyr 2007: 28–29 (quote: 29); Mokyr 2017: 179–224, esp. 215 for the counterfactual.
28. P. Stein 1999: 40–41 (survival), 43–68 (revival up to the thirteenth century), 71–101 (spread up to the seventeenth century).
29. Merchants: P. Stein 1999: 106 (quote), and Hilaire 1986. For merchant institutions in general, see Greif 2006. For the English system, see chapters 10 and 12 in this volume. Quote: P. Stein 1999: 2.
30. Adams 2007; Banniard 2013: 75–85; R. Wright 2016: 15, 17, 21.
31. R. Wright 2013: 118–21; R. Wright 2016: 21–23. See Barrow 2015: 170–235 for the education of the medieval clergy. Schools in general were commonly attached to churches (176–78).
32. Josephus, Jewish War 6.5.3. Parallels with Jesus, son of Joseph (or God), in the oldest gospel: Mark 13.1–2 (prophecy), 15.1 (handover), 15.5 (silence), 15.15 (torture).
33. For the counterfactual of no Christianity, see Demandt 1999: 77–78 and Demandt 2011: 101–8. For Marcionism, see Moll 2010. The rationale behind the Constantinian policy shift has been endlessly debated: see Girardet 2006 for a guide to the relevant sources and scholarship. Eire 2006a develops the counterfactual of Christianity without the crucifixion or without divinity, and its consequences for European development. Despite some earlier claims, it is doubtful that Jewish proselytizing had great potential: see Baumgarten 1999: 471–76 for the debate.
34. John 14.5.
35. See chapters 2 (Samnites) and 3 (Greek and Carthaginian capacities) in this volume.
36. The Seleucid king Antiochos IV successfully invaded Egypt in 170 and 168 BCE but was stymied by Roman intervention. In 40–38 BCE, the Parthians briefly overran Syria and Judea as Rome was distracted by civil war. For the obstacles Middle Eastern powers encountered in controlling their eastern Mediterranean peripheries, see chapter 3 in this volume.
37. See Netz forthcoming for the spatial concentration of Greek learning and literature production.
38. Feeney 2016, esp. 45–151 (translation), 122–51 (empire), 173–78 (historians).
39. Woolf 1994: 91–92; Mullen 2013: 161–63 on the penetration of Greco-Gallic texts. Strabo, Geography 4.1.5 claimed that under Greek influence, Gauls wrote their contracts in Greek, which is impossible to verify (Mullen 2013: 162). Caesar twice refers to use of Greek writing in Gaul, a claim that, whatever its veracity, must at least have seemed plausible to his readers: Woolf 1994: 90.
40. See Woolf 1994: 92–93 on coinage.
41. Ibid., 89, 94.
42. See briefly Netz forthcoming, and in greater detail in his planned history of ancient Greek mathematics. From this perspective, the Greeks may very well have done more for us than the Romans ever did. Yet it is easy to exaggerate: Russo 2004, an often conjectural argument regarding a Greek scientific revolution in the third century BCE and
its impact on European science from the Renaissance onward, shows the limits of this approach. (Most of the “Roman” science similarly celebrated by Carrier 2017 was in fact Greek.)
43. For Carthage and the Hellenistic states, see chapter 3 in this volume.
44. Actual based on figure 1.4. Counterfactual 1 takes account of the favorable conditions of the Roman Warm Period whereas the other two are (even) more crudely schematic.
45. Even if the Roman empire had never existed, mid-first-millennium-CE Europe would hardly have been a stateless environment akin to Norse Iceland, Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2019) symbolic counterpoint to state formation in post-Roman Europe. They also tend to overestimate the impact of Roman governmental practice on early medieval state formation, which was characterized above all by a secular shift away from centralized state power: see chapter 7 in this volume.
46. I consider this process more fundamental than the flooding of the English Channel in the sixth millennium BCE that turned Britain into an island, thus sheltering it from European competitors. Large-scale imperial state formation on the continent would presumably have outweighed this advantage, as it did during the Roman period.
TECHNICAL NOTE TO CHAPTER ONE
1. McEvedy and Jones 1978. For more ambitious collaborative simulation efforts, see Kaplan et al. 2011; Klein Goldewijk et al. 2011.
2. McEvedy and Jones 1978: 21–22, and my own calculations based on their country values; Frier 2000: 814, table 6 offers 61 million, whereas Scheidel 2007a: 48, table 3.1 considers 59–72 million. Even higher totals are certainly possible. For ancient Greece, see Hansen 2006.
3. McEvedy and Jones 1978: 167, with Bielenstein 1987: 12 (Han census).
4. McEvedy and Jones 1978: 353–54. For skepticism about net growth in that period, see the survey in J. Cohen 1995: 400–401. More recently, see note 2. This position is also consistent with ecologically informed historiography that increasingly takes account of the impact of climate change and epidemics: see, e.g., Harper 2017 for western Eurasia. The Black Death produced a more compressed sequence of demographic contraction and recovery in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries: Malanima 2009: 7–9.
5. Although they do distinguish between China proper and China including Xinjang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and Taiwan, low population densities in the latter areas for much of history (and in some cases even today) limit the usefulness of this breakdown. In South Asia, to make matters worse, they lump together India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh into a single unit: McEvedy and Jones 1978: 167, 171, 183.
6. 140 CE: Bielenstein 1987: 194, map 2.
7. For what it is worth, the British census of India in 1871–1872 suggests that while a slightly larger proportion of the total population was concentrated in the Ganges and Indus basins (Punjab, North West Provinces, Oude, and Bengal) than it is today, the overall distribution was already very similar to the current one: Memorandum 1875. Needless to say, this tells us little about conditions one or two millennia ago.
8. Degree of error: I. Morris 2013b uses similar criteria to justify a more ambitious quantitative comparative exercise.
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