Although there have been numerous studies of individual cities or groups
of cities, there has never been a study of the urbanism of the Roman
world as a whole, meaning that we have been poorly informed not only
about the number of cities and how they were distributed and changed
over time, but also about their sizes and populations, monumentality,
and civic status. This book provides a new account of the urbanism of
the Roman world between 100 BC and AD 300. To do so, it draws on a
combination of textual sources and archaeological material to provide a
new catalogue of cities, calculates new estimates of their areas and
uses a range of population densities to estimate their populations, and
brings together available information about their monumentality and
civic status for the first time. This evidence demonstrates that,
although there were relatively few cities, many had considerable sizes
and populations, substantial amounts of monumentality, and held various
kinds of civic status. This indicates that there was significant
economic growth in this period, including both extensive and intensive
economic growth, which resulted from an influx of wealth through
conquest and the intrinsic changes that came with Roman rule (including
the expansion of urbanism). This evidence also suggests that there was a
system that was characterized by areas of intense urban demand, which
was met through an efficient system for the extraction of necessity and
luxury goods from immediate hinterlands and an effective system for
bringing these items from further afield. The disruption of these links
seems to have put this system under considerable strain towards the end
of this period and may have been sufficient to cause its ultimate
collapse. This appears to have been in marked contrast to the medieval
and early modern periods, when urbanism was more able to respond to
changes in supply and demand.
