Legal Tradition

Money in Imperial Rome offers an in-depth examination of the institutional framework within which money operated as an economic agent in the Roman empire, emphasising its systemic complexity. Analyses focus on classical Roman law as reflected in the writings of Roman jurists from the second and early-third centuries AD. The legal sources are augmented with documentary materials, which give independent evidence of actual practice, and with Jewish legal sources, which give evidence of a separate contemporary legal tradition. The work promotes Keynesian claims for the endogenous nature of money and adopts approaches advanced by new institutional economics (NIE), while its innovative contribution is in suggesting a complexity-oriented approach to understanding the conceptual framework that dictated the use of money in private transactions. Money is a complex phenomenon in the sense that it allows for new patterns of activity to be created by individuals, who adjust their use of it to the continuously evolving system in which they operate.