Complexity Economics: Building a New Approach to Ancient Economic History 3030478971, 9783030478971

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Graphs
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: Finding a New Approach to Ancient Proxy Data
1 What This Book Is About
2 A Brief Survey of the Chapters
Bibliography
Part I: Theoretical Frameworks and Methodologies
Chapter 2: Playing by Whose Rules? Institutional Resilience, Conflict and Change in the Roman Economy
1 Framing the Problem
2 Institutions and Institutional Change
3 Social System Theory
4 Impact of Empire
4.1 Changing Designed Institutions
4.2 Changing Social Rule Sets
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Networks as Proxies: A Relational Approach Towards Economic Complexity in the Roman Period
1 Systems, Complexity and Networks
1.1 The Relational Approach: How to Model and Analyse Networks and to Measure Their Complexity
1.2 Example: A Riverine Transport Network from Roman Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
2 The Complex Network of the Roman Empire: A Macro-Perspective
2.1 “Complex” Debates on the Roman Economy
2.2 Modelling the Imperial Traffic System: The “ORBIS Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World”
2.3 A Network of Places and Commodities on the Basis of One Piece of Textual Evidence
2.4 Micro-Perspectives and Qualitative Approaches of Network Analysis
3 Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Evaluating the Potential of Computational Modelling for Informing Debates on Roman Economic Integration
1 Introduction
2 Temin’s Roman Market Economy
3 Critiques of Temin’s Approach
4 MERCURY as a Base-Model
5 Extending MERCURY with a Transport Costs Variable
6 Experiment Design
7 Results
8 Discussion and Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Visualising Roman Institutional Environments for Exchange as a Complex System
1 Introduction
2 Complexity and Economics
3 Visualising Complexity
4 Visualising Ancient Economies
5 Money in Roman Law: A Diagram of Complex Mechanism
6 Legal Institutions in a System of Multi-traditions: A Causal Loop Diagram
7 Conclusions
Bibliography
Part II: Urban Systems
Chapter 6: Social Complexity and Complexity Economics: Studying Socio-economic Systems at Düzen Tepe and Sagalassos (SW Turkey)
1 Introduction
2 A Framework of Socio-economic Complexity
3 Methodology
4 Results: Socio-economic Systems at Düzen Tepe and Sagalassos
4.1 Resource Procurement and Exploitation
4.2 Production Processes and Output
4.3 Structures of Exchange
5 Discussion: Approximating Socio-economic Complexity
Bibliography
Chapter 7: A Method for Estimating Roman Population Sizes from Urban Survey Contexts: An Application in Central Adriatic Italy
1 Introduction
2 Issues and Guidelines in Calculating Town Populations
3 Urban Survey Data from Central Adriatic Italy
3.1 Potentia
3.2 Trea
3.3 Private Architecture
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Complexity and Urban Hierarchy of Ancient Urbanism: The Cities of Roman Asia Minor
1 Complexity, Scaling and Cities
2 Towards Defining Cities in Asia Minor
3 Complexity and the Urban Pattern
4 Complexity Within the Cities: Spread of Public Buildings
5 The Urban Hierarchy
6 Towards Greater Complexity: A Discussion
Appendix: Figures
Bibliography
Part III: Epidemics
Chapter 9: Disease Proxies and the Diagnosis of the Late Antonine Economy
1 Price Proxies and Plague
2 Wages, the Military and Plague Mortality
3 Conclusion: On Proxies and Quantification
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Measuring and Comparing Economic Interaction Based on the Paths and Speed of Infections: The Case Study of the Spread of the Justinianic Plague and Black Death
1 Introduction
2 The Black Death
2.1 The Spread of the Black Death
2.2 How Did the Black Death Spread?
2.3 A Quantitative Approach to Study the Spread of the Black Death
3 The Justinianic Plague
3.1 The Spread of the Justinianic Plague
3.2 What Determined the Spread of the Justinianic Plague?
4 A Comparative Perspective
4.1 The Determinants of the Justinianic Plague, a Quantitative Perspective
4.2 A Comparative Perspective Over Time
4.3 A Comparative Discussion of the Differences in Speed of Transmission
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index