Market Integration and Globalization on the Late Roman Lower Danube, 4th–7th Centuries CE

The story of the Late Roman lower Danube, comprising parts of modern Romania and Bulgaria, is likely a familiar one to modern readers: an empire, stretched thin, struggles to maintain a strategically important border—a militarized frontier supported by a complex network of long-distance trade. This dissertation begins by asking: What drove that trade (i.e., did dirigisme or market forces predominate, and how did the two affect each other), how extensive was it, and what were the social consequences?

In answering these questions, the particular imperial economic logic influencing the movement of goods—wholly distinct from the logic influencing the market-driven movement of goods—comes to the fore as an object of analysis. 

One of the central problems stymieing analyses of Roman economic integration has been a problem of commensurability, with subjective assessments leading archaeologists and historians to talk at cross purposes. To achieve some clarity, I devise an empirical methodology using transport amphora assemblages from 26 sites over three periods from the 4th to early 7th century CE. Supplementary data file 3 summarizes all these data, and files 4, 5, and 6 catalogue new amphora data collected from the sites of Novae, Odessos, Marcianopolis, and Tuida. For each assemblage, I assess the total possible provincial trade linkages for which trade actually occurred in a given period, an econometric measurement known as trade-thickness. Supplementary data files 1 and 2 present trade-thickness and Herfindahl-Hirschman index (another econometric designed to assess market shares) calculations. Statistical analyses of trade-thickness and market shares reveal a number of trends in the distribution of imported goods that shine a light on Roman imperial economics and economic logic, and by extension, human activity and experience on an embattled frontier.I argue that the framework of globalization is essential to assessing how macro-level economic trends within an empire impact micro-level human experience, and vice versa. This framework allows me to identify, and to a certain degree quantify, the overwhelming economic force of the Late Roman state, its economic logic, and its relationship to free-market activity, profiteering, and corruption. By identifying specific markers of luxury consumption, social differentiation emerges starkly as a feature of life on the Roman frontier, a world structured by disparities not only between individuals, but between settlements as well. The landscape of the Roman imperial periphery was characterized by exploitation on both a systemic and a personal level, and the image that emerges in my analysis is that of a region whose economic integration was propped up almost exclusively by state mandate, with the sole intent of maintaining an ideologically crucial, failing border.

By answering these questions, I aim to contribute not only a new empirical methodology and an analysis of newly-published data, but also a critical historical understanding of the economics of a globalizing empire, its material traces, and the lived experience of connectedness within that empire.