Our images of the Roman Empire are dominated by the monuments and lifestyles of wealthy urban elites. An important new history shifts our attention to the 90% of Rome’s population whose brutally exploited labor made it all possible.
Review of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes (Princeton University Press, 2025)
Our image of Rome, with its efficient infrastructures and splendid architectural works, is inextricably linked to the names of the emperors, generals, and wealthy senators who ordered (and paid for) their construction and management. In this framework, the economic complexity of the Roman Empire seems to be the result of the action of a few powerful and wealthy men with command over a multitude of anonymous workers.
It is no coincidence that the most effective representation of Roman economic dynamism is the centralized landed estate. In the Roman world, the easiest way to maximize production and exchange was through increased exploitation by the employer of the people who did the actual work, whether they were free workers or slaves. From this perspective, whatever form of inequality the Roman system created was the natural consequence of its inherently precapitalist economy.
Surviving Rome offers us a very different vision of Rome’s economic life. It shifts the focus from macroeconomic indicators of growth to ordinary people, showing us how they actually lived, worked, and died during the four centuries separating the period of the Late Republic (first century BCE) from that of the Middle Empire (third century CE). It does not tell the macro story of the empire’s economic rise and decline but gives us instead many micro stories of peasants and slaves — men, women and their children — who had to wrest a living from a hard and complex world as farmers, herders, spinners, potters, or part-time shopkeepers.
This book by Kim Bowes is not a tale of prosperous and happy people. On the contrary, it describes the lives of working Romans who produced and consumed a massive variety of goods, contributing to an oppressive economic system that forced the majority of the population to increase production so as to cope with the pressures of compulsive consumption and resulting indebtedness. Their social conditions echo many aspects of the experience of working classes under contemporary capitalism.
History From Below
Kim Bowes is an American archaeologist and currently professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a renowned specialist in the areas of material culture and the economy of the Roman world. She has written extensively on housing, the social significance of money, debt, and saving, as well as on numerous aspects of everyday life in the ancient world. Bowes has a scholarly passion for the poor, especially the rural poor.
Between 2009 and 2014, she directed the first systematic archaeological study of Roman peasants ever undertaken. The Roman Peasant Project, 2009–2014: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor examines archaeological data from non-elite rural sites in southern Tuscany to reveal how local peasants organized their housing, diet, farms, and agricultural strategies, including labor mobility and market transactions.
The results suggest that peasant smallholders rather than large landowners dominated the countryside via specialized sites dispersed throughout the rural landscape. This pattern of “distributed habitations” allowed peasants to settle the territory and maximize the use of diverse land parcels. Agriculture was not simply aimed at cereal harvesting for subsistence: in fact, peasants intensified their agrarian production by integrating crop rotation of cereals and legumes with relevant investment in animal husbandry. Animals were used for plowing but also became a key component of the peasant diet in their later years.
Such diverse levels of consumption, with cereals, vegetables, fruits, and meat all part of the diet, supports the idea that the countryside did not merely produce for the parasitic consumer city, where the elites usually dwelled and invested their accumulated wealth. It also constituted an important pool of rural aggregate demand in itself.
The excavated data show that city and countryside were not fixed in a relationship of dependency. Rather, they were unified in complex networks of manufacturing and consumption of various types of goods, including ceramics, glass, leather, and textiles. Labor moved quite freely between diverse locations, with peasants commuting from their rural dwellings to their scattered fields on an everyday basis. They also occasionally moved to nearby rural and urban markets where they sold their harvests in exchange for money that could be used to buy food they could not produce directly as well as pottery and artisanal goods.
The project led by Bowes proposes a flexible, economically driven picture of the peasants who populated the Roman countryside. These peasants displayed a high level of social differentiation and consumed a potentially diverse diet that integrated proteins. Their agricultural organization relied on various types of land tenure and a mixed labor regime involving all the household’s members. Exchanges took place in a monetized economy with free access to and intervention in external markets.
From Field to Economic Theory
In the aftermath of The Roman Peasant Project, Bowes published an important theoretical essay that sharply criticizes cliometric approaches to the study of the Roman economy. In “When Kuznets Went to Rome,” she argues that macroeconomic studies seeking to reconstruct aggregate or per capita GDP, indices of inequality, or wage levels do not reveal the actual economic well-being of the Roman population (or of working people in general before the Industrial Revolution).
Since these studies assume unchanging consumption levels for subsistence, they teleologically demonstrate the mildly stationary quality of all premodern economies (including the Roman one) when compared to industrially driven growth. In essence, they ideologically reiterate the dominant historical paradigm of progressive growth as the principal economic engine of any historical societies, thus retrospectively applying a contemporary political dynamic to the past.
As Bowes insists, aggregate growth figures or comparable estimates used as economic proxies do not say much about the needs and opportunities of Roman working people, just as they do not reveal the genuine conditions of the contemporary working class. Such forms of macro-data simply restate the metahistorical teleology of “rise and decline” in the apparently more neutral and acceptable idiom of economics.
To correct this simplistic narrative, Bowes proposes to examine actual consumption at household level. This shift allows scholars to show that in the premodern world, the working majority had multiple potential sources of income and produced significant surpluses to access the market. Not only does this reveal that the supposedly pervasive “subsistence trap” was in fact a historiographical invention — it also uncovers a picture of complex strategies and life experiences that deserve to be understood.
Hustling for a Living
Surviving Rome goes a step further than her previous studies. In this new book, Bowes combines the rigorous theoretical approach developed in “When Kuznets Went to Rome” with the massive collection of data undertaken during The Peasant Project. The result is a magnificent account of how the 90 percent of the population of the Roman Empire — somewhere between fifty and sixy million people, depending on the estimate — lived, worked, and died during the period she covers.
The message of the book is straightforward: the Roman Empire had a dynamic market economy. Romans produced and consumed agrarian, artisanal, and industrial goods in large quantities. Exchanges occurred at local, regional, and interregional levels, driven by imperial infrastructures and with a high degree of monetization all the way down to remote rural areas.
In Bowes’s reconstruction, the driving force of the Roman economy was neither the Roman state and its apparatuses — such as the army or the financial administration — nor the superrich senatorial landowners running their estates. It was the ordinary working people with their specialized production, high levels of demand, and varied consumption pattern. The social imperative of the 90 percent to access commodities for improving their well-being and status — what Bowes calls the costs of social inclusion — was key to the genesis and expansion of a consumer revolution.
The notion of a consumer revolution is not new to the study of the Roman economy. In her superb work Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa, Lesley Dossey used this concept to explain the massive social and economic development of the African countryside in late antiquity. In Dossey’s interpretation, the fourth century CE witnessed an enormous growth in peasant demand. African peasants did not merely produce for urban dwellers — they also used the market to increase their own incomes and consequently their consumption levels.
Bowes applies the idea of a consumer revolution to the first and second centuries CE. She extends its transformative effect to the Early and Middle Roman Empire, when the economy reached its point of maximum expansion in terms of production and exchange of bulk commodities.
However, Bowes dislikes diachronic comparisons between the macroeconomic indicators of the Roman and modern economies, as well as simplistic analogies between past and present. She examines instead a number of differences and one key similarity in the inherent structures of the two economies.
Household Production
The Roman economy differs significantly from the modern capitalist one in two main aspects. First of all, while wages were ubiquitous in the Roman world, they rarely sufficed to cover a family’s basic needs by themselves, serving instead as an additional but occasional source of income.
In contrast with the industrial world where there has been a continuous struggle between capital and labor, the agrarian economy of ancient subaltern groups did not work according to what E. P. Thompson called the cash nexus. This is an economic mechanism that involves a relationship between wage levels and living standards as well as conflicts between employer and employee over what are considered to be fair wages.
Since working Romans could not count on wages as the backbone of their household economy, they continued to rely on agriculture and homemade artisanal and textile production. This does not mean that they did not operate in a market economy; indeed, they were fully integrated into its structures. But they participated in the cycles of supply and demand through expanding their household production more than by selling their labor to someone else.
The second relevant difference is that ordinary Romans were hardly ever capable of accumulating savings. Unlike peasants and artisans during the “industrious revolution” of the eighteenth century, who amassed savings through delayed marriages and growing industriousness, the Roman 90 percent had fewer chances to expand their incomes and put some money aside to offset the inherent risks of an agrarian economy with its fluctuating yields.
Bowes argues that both the Roman and the late capitalist economy did share a common feature: precarity. Precarity in both contexts meant that people could or can easily move from getting by (or sometimes even doing very well) to falling below the subsistence line. The consumer revolution imposed on the Roman population a compulsive tendency to consumption.
We should not see this as an indicator of an “affluent society” in the sense that J. K. Galbraith articulated in his 1958 book of that title. Rather, it evinced a society where it was extremely expensive and hard to live and (at times) even to survive. As Bowes observes, much like modern Americans, the Roman 90 percent were perennially in debt, with precarity as their constant companion.
The Economy of the Many
Studies on the Roman economy have mainly focused on uncovering the mechanisms that collected resources from the population, aiming to figure out how institutions such as the state or markets made use of the money and distributed or traded goods. Debate has revolved around different forms of tax collection based on cash or payment in kind, the gathering and transfer of agricultural rents, and the role of the unified monetary system in facilitating transactions between institutional partners, as well as on how institutions enabled access to the market.
Interest in the working population has been limited to establishing what type of land tenure system and associated labor regime — tenancy, wage labor, or slavery — was most likely to increase production and improve the efficiency of the imperial economy. In essence, studies have concentrated more on how landowners organized production and how institutions helped them to transfer or exchange goods than on how working people managed their lives.
Surviving Rome adopts a different vantage point. Just as in other preindustrial societies, the great majority of people in the Roman world — around nine-tenths of the population — lived and worked in the countryside. If one wants to understand how that society worked, and whether or not its people were doing well, one has to look at the peasants rather than the much more documented and visible elites.
Peasants accounted for the bulk of the 90 percent, but these people were never full-time farmers. The timeless vision of the peasant who made a living by working (with the help of his family) a small-owned plot is a myth that Roman writers created to celebrate the moral value of the ideal Roman citizen.
Across the vast territory from the modern-day Netherlands to Egypt, Roman peasants were anything but romantic or conservative while devising their economic strategies. They had multiple potential sources of income derived from a countryside that was fully entrenched in a complex system of exchange.
Sometimes peasants owned several parcels of land. However, since the supply of land was never sufficient, they more frequently leased their plots from large or middle landowners. The double status of small owners and tenants required from the peasant household a complex planning of labor resources that had to account for the seasonal necessities of agriculture, such as crop rotation and harvest. Peasants also had to take account of the simultaneous exigencies of ceramic factories, craft industries, or trade in agrarian and textile goods on the local market.
Shortages and Surpluses
This combination of several activities could result in labor shortages. In turn, that offered job opportunities for external wage laborers who were usually recruited among part-time herders or landless peasants. At times, however, the variable composition of the household could also give rise to a labor surplus, making it necessary for some household members to work for wages on someone else’s estate.
This economic dynamism leads Bowes to argue that the ratio between land, labor, and production was not predetermined by some overarching economic law but rather influenced by peasant activity and historical contingency. In essence, depending on the situation, a peasant, his wife, and his children could act as smallholders, tenants, wage laborers, part-time herders, traders, or textile and pottery workers — sometimes all of the above.
The ability of peasants to handle all of these activities debunks two other mistaken beliefs. First of all, in spite of widespread illiteracy among the rural population, working families were still able to deal with complex computations and keep detailed records of their taxes, rents, public and private obligations, and so on. Like the poor in contemporary society, working Romans could be highly skilled in numbers without needing to read or write.
Secondly, they managed their daily transactions in a very rational way by thinking in terms of monetary value. It is true that the countryside suffered from a structural scarcity of coinage as peasants were constantly in need of cash. But as Rory Naismith has put it in his fascinating Making Money in the Early Middle Ages, the shortage of coins in day-to-day trades did not prevent ordinary people from measuring the value of land, livestock, and market goods (or even more intangible commodities like honor and spiritual devotion) in monetary units. Monetary accounting was a significant economic mode for those who lived in the countryside.
Bowes offers as an example of this economic rationality two stories of peasants in first-century Egypt. Epimachus owned several small plots near Hermopolis in the Nile Valley, actively managing his farm with the help of four or five slaves and daily wage laborers. The dispersed nature of his holdings and reliance on wage labor likely necessitated complex accounting. He employed a slave named Didymus to keep detailed books, starting each month with receipts that were organized chronologically while recording daily expenses. The receipts and expenses were then balanced, carrying over any profit or deficit to the next month.
Soterichos, a tenant farmer, and his family retained their leases, receipts for rent and poll taxes, debt release documents, a donkey purchase receipt, and compensation for grass eaten by their cattle. Although they were not literate in Greek, they effectively managed leases and loans, insisted on payment receipts, and kept these documents for years after they expired. These two stories about peasant families reflect, at the micro-level, the broader economic history of the Roman Empire.
An Injured Working Class
One of the book’s most impressive chapters tackles the destructive effects of labor on the health of working people. The Roman period saw some of the most intensive exploitation of the countryside before the mechanization of agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. The massive expansion of agricultural surplus production and the relentless drive to increase consumption had a huge impact on the working population.
An enormous amount of new data from human skeletons has revealed the dangerous consequences of living in a world where the human body was the principal productive machine. The labor imposed on workers seriously damaged their health. Their bodies contain telling indicators of unprecedentedly high levels of stress and injuries. Working Romans may have had access to better food, wheel-made pots, and nice clothes, but they paid a high price in exchange for minimal benefits.
While all Roman workers suffered from labor overload, the 90 percent did not constitute a monolith. Members of the rural majority were impacted more seriously than their urban counterparts. People living and working in cities like ancient London, Carthage, or Rome itself benefited from a more varied diet, including meat, cheese, legumes, and fish. This stable source of protein helped urban laborers to bear the burden of many hours of hard work.
Workers in the countryside had neither comparable variety nor a stable source of proteins: they ate meat that was less rich in protein, and they rarely had access to fish. Those employed in specialized industries, such as mines, or in agriculture were doing arduous labor that required them to consume almost four thousand calories per day. If they could not acquire such daily rations — and they rarely could — their bodies would be seriously damaged.
Even worse was the situation for adolescents of both sexes, as the combination of a heavy labor regime with insufficient proteins and vitamins severely constrained their growth. Most working people who survived this precarious childhood bore the injuries of heavy labor throughout their lives.
Free and Unfree Labor
In terms of the impact on popular health, the difference between town and countryside was more relevant than the legal distinction between free workers and slaves. Poor free workers and slaves did similar jobs, especially in specialized industries like the grim mines and in the countryside. They received comparable wages and they had similar diets.
The skeletons of enslaved people appear identical to those of the poor working free. These findings suggest that Roman slavery did not supply a distinct category of laborers to the Roman economy. While such similarities do not diminish the brutality of slavery, they show that the experience of heavy labor not only made free and unfree workers physically indistinguishable but also made them part of a single social group.
Surviving Rome tells us how market forces and an oppressive imperial system forced working people to become protagonists in a vicious and dangerous cycle. While examining this process, Bowes stresses as its main engine the tenacious effort of the poor to be socially included, although she recognizes that it was the accumulation strategies of the elites that forced working people to engage in multiple jobs to hustle for a living.
When discussing class, Bowes prefers the categories of Pierre Bourdieu to those of Karl Marx. However, just as was the case for Bourdieu’s empirical work on the Algerian peasantry, her relinking of production and consumption from below actually strengthens the message of the book. In the Roman past, as in the contemporary capitalist present, working people were the ones who paid the price for a world full of things.