ABSTRACT
The establishment and organization of the Roman Empire united the ancient world, chiefly collected round the Mediterranean, for some hundreds of years. That political and administrative unity created new conditions for economic life, giving it a character and an amplitude which it had not had before. The peculiarity and importance of the period which covers the first centuries of the Christian era lie not so much in regional or local vicissitudes of economic life as in the coming together, interpenetration, and synthesis into one great organism of countries which had formerly been independent of one another. Their independence had, no doubt, not resulted in or been attended by complete isolation, but their power of production and capacity for consumption had not been exactly co-ordinated with those of the other parts of the world then known. Before we consider what the economic life of the ancient world was under the Roman Empire, therefore, we should determine what were the new conditions which it owed to the foundation of that Empire.
