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Pliny's Roman Economy - Natural History, Innovation, and Growth (Hardcover)
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Pliny's Roman Economy - Natural History, Innovation, and Growth (Hardcover)
Series: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The first comprehensive study of Pliny the Elder's economic
thought-and its implications for understanding the Roman Empire's
constrained innovation and economic growth The elder Pliny's
Natural History (77 CE), an astonishing compilation of 20,000
"things worth knowing," was avowedly intended to be a repository of
ancient Mediterranean knowledge for the use of craftsmen and
farmers, but this 37-book, 400,000-word work was too expensive,
unwieldy, and impractically organized to be of utilitarian value.
Yet, as Richard Saller shows, the Natural History offers more
insights into Roman ideas about economic growth than any other
ancient source. Pliny's Roman Economy is the first comprehensive
study of Pliny's economic thought and its implications for
understanding the economy of the Roman Empire. As Saller reveals,
Pliny sometimes anticipates modern economic theory, while at other
times his ideas suggest why Rome produced very few major inventions
that resulted in sustained economic growth. On one hand, Pliny
believed that new knowledge came by accident or divine
intervention, not by human initiative; research and development was
a foreign concept. When he lists 136 great inventions, they are
mostly prehistoric and don't include a single one from
Rome-offering a commentary on Roman innovation and displaying a
reverence for the past that contrasts with the attitudes of the
eighteenth-century encyclopedists credited with contributing to the
Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Pliny shrewdly recognized
that Rome's lack of competition from other states suppressed
incentives for innovation. Pliny's understanding should be noted
because, as Saller shows, recent efforts to use scientific evidence
about the ancient climate to measure the Roman economy are flawed.
By exploring Pliny's ideas about discovery, innovation, and growth,
Pliny's Roman Economy makes an important new contribution to the
ongoing debate about economic growth in ancient Rome.
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