Abstract
This essay considers what’s emphasised and what’s left out of a Roman economic history à la Piketty. In particular, and echoing some of Piketty’s critics, it suggests that another history of the 1%—Piketty’s focus as well as that of many of the essays in this volume—misses an opportunity to interrogate the well-being and economic strategies of the non-elite majority. Posing the Rawlsian question about the status of the worst off, rather than the best, forces us to confront some weaknesses of Piketty’s model, including the assumption of an economically static pre-modernity, and capital as a thing rather than a process. Rawlsian theory also leads us to ask whether the clear inequalities in the Roman world, as described in this volume, were balanced by improved conditions for the majority. The essay briefly re-examines the role of consumption, largely ignored by Piketty but emphasised in many of the articles here, as one possible path to a post-Pikettian ancient economics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Piketty 2014, 1.
- 3.
- 4.
Scheidel 2017.
- 5.
- 6.
Piketty 2014, 94.
- 7.
Piketty’s data sources must be excavated from the technical appendix to the book, available online: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendix.pdf, p. 12. Maddison is Maddison 2010.
- 8.
- 9.
Bowes 2021.
- 10.
Piketty 2014, 106–7.
- 11.
- 12.
Saller 1984.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Cook 2015, 15–16.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Piketty 2014, Fig. 2.4.
- 19.
Adams 2014.
- 20.
- 21.
Rawls 1971.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
For example, on the capital and investment by elites, Erdkamp, Verboven and Zuiderhoek 2020.
- 25.
Piketty 2014, 631–2.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
McCloskey 2016, 632.
- 29.
Fülle 1997.
- 30.
- 31.
Vries 2008.
Bibliography
Adams, Thomas Jessen. 2014. “The Theater of Inequality.” Nonsite.org 12.
Bowes, Kim. 2021. “When Kuznets Went to Rome: Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 2.1: 7–40.
Bowes, Kim, Emanuele Vaccaro, Stephen Collins-Elliot and Cam Grey. 2021. “Non-Agricultural Production, Markets, and Trade.” In The Roman Peasant Project 2009-2015: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor, edited by Kim Bowes, 543–66. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Cook, Eli. 2015. “The Progress and Poverty of Thomas Piketty.” Raritan 35 (2): 1–19.
Cook, Eli. 2020. “Naturalizing Inequality.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1.2: 338–78.
Erdkamp, Paul. 2016. “Economic Growth in the Roman Mediterranean World: An Early Good-Bye to Malthus?” Explorations in Economic History 60: 1–20.
Erdkamp, Paul, Koenraad Verboven and Arjan Zuiderhoek, eds. 2020. Capital, Investment, and Innovation in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Flohr, Miko. 2017. “Quantifying Pompeii: Population, Inequality and the Urban Economy.” In The Economy of Pompeii, edited by Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson, 53–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fülle, Gunnar. 1997. “The Internal Organization of the Arretine Terra Sigillata Industry: Problems of Evidence and Interpretation.” Journal of Roman Studies 87: 111–55.
Gates, Bill. 2014. “Why Inequality Matters. My Thoughts on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” GatesNotes, October 13, 2014. https://www.gatesnotes.com/books/why-inequality-matters-capital-in-21st-century-review.
Gissurarson, Hannes. 2019. “Redistribution in Theory and Practice: A Critique of Rawls and Piketty.” Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines 25.1. https://doi.org/10.1515/jeeh-2019-0004.
Helen, Tapio. 1975. Organization of Roman Brick Production in the First and Second Centuries A. D.: An Interpretation of Roman Brick Stamps. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Hitchner, W. Bruce. 2009. “‘The Advantages of Wealth and Luxury:’ The Case for Economic Growth in the Roman Empire.” In The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, edited by J.G. Manning and Ian Morris, 207–22. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Homburg, Stefan. 2015. “Critical Remarks on Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Applied Economics 47.14: 1401–6.
Jongman, Willem. 2016. “Italian Urbanization and Roman Economic Growth.” In L’Italia dei Flavi, edited by Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi, Elio Lo Cascio and Elena Tassi Scandone, 105–7. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.
Kay, Philip. 2014. Rome’s Economic Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kron, Geoffrey. 2019. “Comparative Perspectives on Nutrition and Social Inequality in the Roman World.” In The Routledge Handbook of Diet and Nutrition in the Roman World, edited by Paul Erdkamp and Claire Holleran, 259–72. London: Routledge.
Lo Cascio, Elio and Paolo Malanima. 2009. “GDP in Pre-Modern Agrarian Economies (1-1820 AD).” Rivista di storia economica 25.3: 391–419.
Maddison, Angus. 2010. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2008 AD.” http://www.ggdc.net/MADDISON/oriindex.htm.
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2014. “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7.2: 73–115. https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v7i2.170.
McCloskey, Dierdre. 2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Potter, Michael. 2014. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century: A Critique of Thomas Piketty’s Political Economy.” Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform 21.1: 91–113.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Rogoff, Kenneth. 2014. “Where Is the Inequality Problem?” Project Syndicate. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/kenneth-rogoff-says-that-thomas-piketty-is-right-about-rich-countries--but-wrong-about-the-world.
Rothchild, Emma. 2021. “Where Is Capital?” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 2.2: 291–371.
Rowan, Erica. 2016. “Bioarchaeological Preservation and Non-Elite Diet in the Bay of Naples: An Analysis of the Food Remains from the Cardo V Sewer at the Roman Site of Herculaneum.” Environmental Archaeology 22.3: 318–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2016.1235077.
Saller, Richard. 1984. “Roman Dowry and the Devolution of Property in the Principate.” Classical Quarterly 34.1: 195–205.
Scheidel, Walter. 2009. “In Search of Roman Economic Growth.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 22: 46–70.
Scheidel, Walter. 2017. The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Scheidel, Walter and Steven Friesen. 2009. “The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire.” Journal of Roman Studies 99: 61–91.
Shaw, Brent. 2020. “Social Status and Economic Behavior: A Hidden History of the Equites?” Ancient Society 20: 153–202.
Stiglitz, Joseph. 2015. “New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth among Individuals: Part IV: Land and Credit.” National Bureau of Economic Research no. 21192. https://doi.org/10.3386/w21192.
Summers, Lawrence. 2014. “Thomas Piketty Is Right About the Past and Wrong About the Future.” The Atlantic, May 16, 2014.
Sunstein, Cass. 2014. “Why Worry About Inequality?” Bloomberg View, May 13 2014.
Vallier, Kevin. 2019. “Rawls, Piketty and the Critique of Welfare-State Capitalism.” Journal of Politics 18.1: 142–52.
Van Oyen, Astrid. 2020. “Innovation and Investment in the Roman Rural Economy through the Lens of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy).” Past and Present 248.1: 3–40.
Van Oyen, Astrid and Martin Pitts. 2017. “What Did Objects Do in the Roman World? Beyond Representation.” In Materializing Roman Histories, edited by Astrid Van Oyen and Martin Pitts, 3–19. Oxford: Oxbow.
Vries, Jan de. 2008. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, Andrew. 2002. “Machines, Power and the Ancient Economy.” Journal of Roman Studies 92: 1–32.
Wilson, Andrew. 2006. “The Economic Impact of Technological Advances in the Roman Construction Industry.” In Innovazione tecnica e progresso economico nel mondo romano, edited by Elio Lo Cascio, 225–36. Bari: Edipuglia.
Wolf, Martin. 2014. Review: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press Rrp£29.95/Belknap Press Rrp$39.95, 696 Pages.” Financial Times, April 15, 2014.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bowes, K. (2022). Reflection: Beyond Capital. In: Koedijk, M., Morley, N. (eds) Capital in Classical Antiquity. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93834-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93834-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-93833-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-93834-5
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)