This paper argues that there was enough buying and selling (emptio venditio) in the early Roman Empire to show that there were markets, and there were enough markets at the time that there was a market economy. I use three examples to make these points, one from my research, one from the...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...