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Historians have long asserted that during and after the Hannibalic
War, the Roman Republic's need to conscript men for long-term
military service helped bring about the demise of Italy's small
farms and that the misery of impoverished citizens then became fuel
for the social and political conflagrations of the late republic.
Nathan Rosenstein challenges this claim, showing how Rome
reconciled the needs of war and agriculture throughout the middle
republic. The key, Rosenstein argues, lies in recognizing the
critical role of family formation. By analyzing models of families'
needs for agricultural labor over their life cycles, he shows that
families often had a surplus of manpower to meet the demands of
military conscription. Did, then, Roman imperialism play any role
in the social crisis of the later second century B.C.? Rosenstein
argues that Roman warfare had critical demographic consequences
that have gone unrecognized by previous historians: heavy military
mortality paradoxically helped sustain a dramatic increase in the
birthrate, ultimately leading to overpopulation and landlessness.
This volume is a unique, multi-authored social history of war from
the third millennium B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E. in the
Mediterranean, the Near East, and Europe (Egypt, Achaemenid Persia,
Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the
Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World, and early Medieval
Europe), with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs)
and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The product of a
colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, this volume
offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military
organization in their complex interactions with social, economic,
and political structures as well as cultural practices.
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