Koenraad VerbovenGhent University | UGhent
Koenraad Verboven
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44
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (44)
This book offers critical analyses of the dynamic relation between legal regulations, institutions and economic performance in the Roman world. It studies how law and legal thought affected economic development, and vice versa. Inspired by New Institutional Economics scholars the past decades used ancient law to explain economic growth. There was,...
Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. Th...
Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpins of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth—as well as the fate—of nations. This book asks whether it always thus, and whether the Roman economy—large, complex, and sophisticated as it was...
This essay has been an exploration and a plea for a research programme to integrate economic archaeology fully into global economic history. Without archaeology economic history is condemned to stare myopically at the handful of societies which over the few recent centuries have left enough textual evidence for statistical analyses. I have argued t...
Explanation of the success and failure of the Roman economy is one of the most important problems in economic history. As an economic system capable of sustaining high production and consumption levels, it was unparalleled until the early modern period. This volume focuses on how the institutional structure of the Roman Empire affected economic per...
Together with a previously published contribution on the credit crisis during the reign of tiberius (Prora 18, 1) this littel dossier provides material to help secondary school students who take Latin to understand econmic mechanisms and to see the ethical dimensions of economic crises. The texts and commentaries also provide a more nuanced picture...
Over the past decade, the New Institutional Economics have become a popular model for analyzing ancient economic history. However, the notion of cultural beliefs, which plays a central role in Douglass North’s recent work and Avner Greif’s analysis of institutional change, has been largely ignored. This article argues that a neo-institutional appro...
Résumé
La nouvelle économie institutionnelle est devenue populaire dans la recherche de l’économie antique depuis une dizaine d’années. Pourtant la notion de « croyances culturelles », qui joue un rôle central dans l’oeuvre de Douglass North et dans les analyses du changement institutionnel par Avner Greif, a été largement ignorée. J’affirme qu’une...
On peut aujourd'hui distinguer deux courants complémentaires dans l’étude de l’économie antique qui dépassent le modèle finleyien dominant dans les années 1980. L’un veut mesurer la performance économique par le biais de proxies archéologiques (nombre d’épaves, taille d’ossatures, concentration de plomb dans les glaciers ...) . L’autre essaie d’exp...
Scholars have long downplayed the role of professional associations (collegia) in the Roman economy. Comparisons with medieval or modern guilds are mostly rejected. Contrary to the guilds, collegia would not have been intended to regulate, support or protect the occupational interests of their members. In the light of New Institutional Economics th...
Petronius' novel is an important rate source for Roman social and economic history. However, it is also a extremely difficult source to interpret. This chapter introduces the reader to some of the possibilities and difficulties involved in using the Satyrica.
PREPRINT VERSION for reference purposes please refer to: in: Verboven K. & Vandorpe K. & Chankowski V. (edd.), Pistoi dia tèn technèn. Bankers Loans and Archives in the Ancient World. Studies in honour of Raymond Bogaert, Leuven, Peeters, 2008, p. xxxvii-xlviii (Studia Hellenistica 44) Let me begin by noting a double blank in the papers collected i...
Reports the find of a Merovingian gold tremissis from the moneyer Alchemundus (c. 575-675) and lists other finds of Merovingian coins in the province of West-Flanders.
Forthcoming in: Athenaeum: studi periodici di letteratura e storia dell'antichità 95 (2007) Status differentiation in Roman business circles is mostly treated as a common fact. Some traders or financiers were rich, others poor, some were freedmen, others freeborn, some belonged to the aristocracy and operated through middlemen, others sailed the se...
Projects
Project (1)
Scholars usually concurr that transport by rivers and lakes greatly stimulated the development of trade in the Roman empire. The contribution of rivers and lakes to transport networks is mostly treated in a matter of fact way. This is not an unproblematic view, however, waterways require investment, regulation and control. They are as much man-made as roads are. Without tow-paths, canals, locks, connecting roads, ports and warehouses rivers offer only a marginal contribution to trade.
This project will study the institutional conditions governing navigation on rivers and lakes, and the resource requirements for and effects of Roman riverine and lake navigation. Our approach is inspired by complexity economics, which analyses economics systems as dynamic networks of autonomous agents. We combine a social network analysis and a spatial network analysis to study the institutions, agents and spatial structures in the Rhone/Saone river basin and in the river basins of Scheldt and Meuse. Both areas differed institutionally and ecologically, but were interconnected via the Rhine and were part of a larger transport network linking the Mediterranean to the North Sea area.
