Peter Fibiger Bang
From Occident to Orient and back again? The Roman Empire between "primitive" capitalism and agrarian empires.

The article exploits the concepts of Occident and Orient to understand the development in the study of the economy of the Roman Empire within the last 30 years. It is argued that the present modernising trends should be avoided in the study of Roman trade during the Early Empire. The imperial framework seems much too important for the structuring of the institutional organisation of the trading system to allow the many recent comparisons to early modern Europe. The European dynamic seems to have rested on the very absence of a universal empire, Roman style. Therefore we should rather try to establish comparisons with some of history’s large agrarian empires. All share the basic characteristic that mercantile sections of society were never allowed a decisive saying in the political decision making process because the empires did not depend on mercantile wealth to the same extent as did the European nation states. Furthermore they were also among the most productive and urbanised societies until well into the early modern period. Accordingly they should not be viewed in terms of failure to adhere to the European standard but rather seen as providing the conditions which made them so relatively rich.