Rome's Economic Revolution (Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy) - Tapa dura

[Kay] presents an overall analysis of great power and often gives the best available account of important elements in the story ... He is the first scholar to have asked whether inflation ... negated the apparent economic growth of the second century. (W.V. Harris, Times Literary Supplement)

It will create a great deal of further interest and even more argument. (Peter Jones, Classics for All)

In this volume, Philip Kay examines economic change in Rome and Italy between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC. He argues that increased inflows of bullion, in particular silver, combined with an expansion of the availability of credit to produce significant growth in monetary liquidity. This, in turn, stimulated market developments, such as investment farming, trade, construction, and manufacturing, and radically changed the composition and scale of the Roman economy.

Using a wide range of evidence and scholarly investigation, Kay demonstrates how Rome, in the second and first centuries BC, became a coherent economic entity experiencing real per capita economic growth. Without an understanding of this economic revolution, the contemporaneous political and cultural changes in Roman society cannot be fully comprehended or explained.