Roman technological progress in comparative context: The Roman Empire, Medieval Europe and Imperial China

Institutions, Trade, and Growth: The Ancient Greek Case of Proxenia

“…This difference has an intuitive characterization: every city has access to proxenia, and they mostly use it to ease access to centers of economic and non-economic power (rather than minor nodes), reinforcing a hierarchy of prominent and interconnected cores on top of a large and sparse network periphery. The Fame index, instead, does suggest that more famous cities may be more active granters of proxenia, likely reflecting idiosyncratic practices by important religious centers that are well known (Mack 2015;Terpstra 2019). Though not reported, using square-rooted weights, not controlling for territory size, excluding regional and dialectal fixed effects, and clustering at the dialectal, rather than regional, level, all left results qualitatively unchanged.…”

“…Recent scholarship contends that ancient Mediterranean economies achieved a prolonged period of intensive economic growth. 2 Evidence from Greece (Ober 2015;Bresson 2016), Rome (Temin 2013;Harper 2017;Terpstra 2020), and the whole basin (Scheidel 2007;Manning 2018;Terpstra 2019;De Callataÿ 2005) points strongly in the direction of intensive growth taking place in the first millennium BCE, up to the peak of the early Roman Empire (circa 150 CE). The literature suggests models of Smithian growth (Temin 2013;Ober 2015;Erdkamp 2016;Terpstra 2019), whose reliance on market integration and commercial expansion make proxeny a particularly interesting innovation to consider.…”

“…Woolmer (2015) discusses proxeny, together with asylia (see Table 1) and other privileges, as tools that poleis could use to attract merchants to their markets, a point shared by others (Walbank 1978;Burke 1992;Reger 2007). Terpstra (2019) argues that proxeny grants could have helped foreign traders operate in Greek markets.…”

“…Third, "public friends" could also share information on local conditions and introduce a visitor to trusted networks of knowledge and business. Lastly, Terpstra (2019) proposes that proxenoi could act as conveyers of an intercommunity enforcement mechanism: as he was often in contact with both the granting city and his community, a "public friend" could reduce information asymmetries.…”

La Península Dorada. Fuentes literarias para el estudio de los recursos auríferos de "Iberia/Hispania"

“…En alguno de sus trabajos, aún sin publicar, destacan mediante el análisis epigráfico una gran concentración de estas propiedades en el noroeste peninsular, hecho que podría vincularse con la explotación de las minas de oro de la región, un producto bajo el control directo del emperador (Pérez González, 2017: 37-70). Por último, resulta interesante mencionar los análisis realizados sobre la polución del plomo conservado en el hielo ártico, como consecuencia de su empleo en la industria minera, notándose un incremento de los procesos mineros a partir de la explotación de la Península por parte de cartagineses y romanos (Rosman, Chisholm, Hong, Candelone, Boutron, 1997: 3413-3416;McConnell, Wilson, Stohl, Arienzo, Chellman, Eckhardt, Thompson, Pollard, Steffensen, 2018: 5726-5731;Terpstra, 2019).…”