This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period. Combining a wide range of research traditions from all over Europe and utilizing evidence from Italy, the western provinces, and the Greek-speaking east, this edited collection is divided into four sections. It first considers the scholarly history of Roman crafts and trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world, and on Italy and France. Chapters discuss how scholarly thinking about Roman craftsmen and traders was influenced by historical and intellectual developments in the modern world, and how different (national) research traditions followed different trajectories throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second section highlights the economic strategies of craftsmen and traders, examining strategies of long-distance traders and the phenomenon of specialization, and presenting case studies of leather-working and bread-baking. In the third section, the human factor in urban crafts and trade-including the role of apprenticeship, gender, freedmen, and professional associations-is analysed, and the volume ends by exploring the position of crafts in urban space, considering the evidence for artisanal clustering in the archaeological and papyrological record, and providing case studies of the development of commercial landscapes at Aquincum on the Danube and at Sagalassos in Pisidia.

Andrew Wilson is Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at the University of Oxford.

Miko Flohr is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for History at Leiden University.

Contributors:

Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki

Wim Broekaert, Ghent University

Jean-Pierre Brun, Collège de France

Alessandro Christofori, University of Bologna

Kerstin Dross-Krüpe, Kassel University

Miko Flohr, Leiden University

Christel Freu, Laval University

Penelope Goodman, University of Leeds

Orsolya Láng, Aquincum Museum

Lena Larsson Lovén, University of Gothenburg

Nicolas Monteix, University of Rouen

Jeroen Poblome, University of Leuven

Candace Rice, University of Edinburgh

Kai Ruffing, Kassel University

Carla Salvaterra, University of Bologna

Nicolas Tran, Institut Universitaire de France

Carol Van Driel-Murray, Leiden University

Andrew Wilson, University of Oxford