Rome was an exceedingly large city at the start of the Roman Empire, and it required massive grain imports to feed its population. We argue that Roman merchants organized these imports and that they used a variety of mechanisms to deal with the informational problems of long-distance trade at...

We examine monetization in the early Roman Empire by considering money as a unit of account. Widespread use of prices indicates widespread monetization. A consistent set of prices for wheat indicates that this monetization encouraged trade to grow across the Mediterranean. This argument is...