Rome's Economic Revolution

Kay examines the economic change in Rome between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC. He focuses on how the increased inflow of bullion and expansion of the availability of credit resulted in real per capita economic growth in the Italian peninsula, radically changing the composition and scale of the Roman economy.

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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.