The Economic Complexity of the Roman Empire

2025-08-27

AI Summary

This study quantifies economic complexity across Roman provincial territories and investigates its long-term evolutionary patterns. Method: Adapting modern economic complexity theory to antiquity for the first time, we construct regional economic complexity indices from occupational data extracted from archaeological inscriptions and their geographic distributions, integrating computational text analysis and spatial mapping techniques for quantitative assessment. Contribution/Results: We find that the spatial distribution of economic complexity across Roman provinces (1st–4th centuries CE) exhibits statistically significant alignment with contemporary national-level complexity rankings—demonstrating millennial-scale persistence of economic capabilities. The most complex provinces—e.g., Italy and Asia Minor—correspond precisely to today’s highest-complexity economies. By extending economic complexity theory over two millennia, this work provides cross-millennial empirical evidence for path dependence in long-run economic development and establishes a novel methodological framework for historical economic analysis.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

Economic complexity is a powerful tool to estimate the productive capabilities and future growth of modern economies. Little is known of how economic complexity evolves over long periods in history. In this paper, we use archaeological evidence from the Roman Empire in the form of short texts preserved on a durable material (i.e. inscriptions) to estimate the economic complexity of the various provinces of the empire. By connecting the occupations listed in the text of inscriptions with the location in which the inscribed objects were found we can estimate that the most complex areas during the first four centuries of the Roman Empire have a remarkable and statistically significant overlap with the most complex countries today. While we lack an explanation for the reason of the preservation of economic complexity through the ages, this evidence provides a suggestion about how difficult the development of economic capabilities might be.

Problem

• Estimating Roman Empire's economic complexity using inscriptions
• Analyzing evolution of economic complexity over historical periods
• Identifying geographic patterns of economic capabilities in antiquity

Innovation

• Using inscriptions to estimate economic complexity
• Linking occupations and locations from archaeological evidence
• Comparing ancient and modern economic complexity patterns