Settlement Scale and Economic Networks in the Roman Empire

Abstract The demand created by city populations for food, water, building materials, fuel, and other commodities must have had a tremendous impact on their immediate surroundings and the functioning of the Roman economy. But what effect did the population sizes of settlements have on trade, the flow of economic information, and the degree of economic integration in the Roman Empire? This chapter explores this question from the perspective of settlement scaling theory using computational modelling, which is made possible thanks to two important recent developments: (1) the development of sophisticated computational models for how the attributes of settlements change as the numbers of individuals who reside in them increase, and (2) the development of credible estimates of the numbers of residents in settlements for the Roman world in the imperial period, including the Eastern Mediterranean. By using simulation to test a wide range of hypothetical scenarios against archaeologically observed tableware distribution patterns, we are able to propose a new viable theory for tableware trade in the Roman East for this period. This consists of two elements: (1) commercial actors and businesses active in the tableware trade followed a sublinear scaling relationship known from commercial sectors such as transportation, warehousing, and retail, confirming our impression that traders were more akin to middlemen; and (2) a tableware production capacity reflective of the population size of a major urban centre was a crucial factor determining the shape of the tableware’s inter-regional distribution.