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- W4312777617 abstract "Reviewed by: Fisco, annona, mercato. Studi sul Tardo Impero Romano by Domenico Vera Paolo Tedesco Fisco, annona, mercato. Studi sul Tardo Impero Romano Domenico Vera Bari: Edipuglia, 2020. Pp. 433. ISBN 978-88-7228-901-3 This volume contains a selection of nineteen articles that Domenico Vera published over a span of twenty years, from 1998 to 2018. Although many first appeared in prominent journals, others come from less easily available publications, which makes them all the more welcome in their new form. Except for the opening chapter, which provides the general framework for the discussion that follows, the articles gathered in this volume are organized chronologically and reflect the ambition, interests, and pathways of Vera's outstanding scholarship. It may be useful to start by considering the issues that this book explicitly claims to address through an analysis of the ideas that structure the book. The latter sets out three broad themes and one basic proposition. The themes are: first, the structures of the imperial tax system and their functioning on the ground; second, the nature, scale, and purpose of the interregional exchanges collectively called the annona; and third, the commerce (and private wealth more broadly) identified as the actual engine of the late Roman economy. These themes are, in turn, linked to the central tenet of Vera's thesis. In brief, no matter how sophisticated and pervasive the role of the late Roman state might have been, the system of exchange and the overall economy in Late Antiquity depends not on its fiscal infrastructures but on the size and scale of private trade. The natural conclusion is then that the decline of the Mediterranean exchange networks in the West in the fifth century and in the East in the seventh century cannot be linked to the end of the imperial tax system and that the causes of these imperial crises must be found elsewhere. Vera's essays cover and examine every aspect of the late Roman tax and economic systems. He scrutinizes the imperial fiscal units called millena and iugum, which were fundamental classifications that the fiscal apparatus deployed to assess and collect taxes from diverse regional landscapes (chs. 17 and 18). Next, he moves on to explore the various types of tax linked to specific functions, such as those directed to benefit a selected class of beneficiaries (chs. 3, 5, 6, 7, and 12). A group of articles describes the routes and timing of the annona's exchanges (chs. 2, 4, 9, 14, and 15), the system of stockage in the warehouses (chs. 9 and 19), and the personnel involved in the operations carried out between the stages of tax collection and distribution to the recipients (ch. 8). What emerges from these collected essays is a world of stunning economic complexity, where public and private actors carried out administrative and commercial operations side-by-side as complementary economic procedures. The strength of Vera's scholarship, however, lies at a deeper level of specificity: his minute examination of the documents, ability to combine different and at times contrasting types of sources into a consistent narrative, and his detailed description of the tax infrastructures and their organizational techniques. His detailed analyses are innovative readings of these difficult-to-understand sources. But Vera's analyses break down when he moves from the description of single fiscal mechanisms to the construction of [End Page 549] an overarching interpretative model to understand the economy of Late Antiquity. I would draw attention to two of his ideas and a historical example. First, Vera's research demonstrates convincingly that the volume of commercial exchanges was greater than state fiscal transfers. This is not in dispute, since no serious historian claims otherwise. Leading fiscal historians, such as Chris Wickham or John Haldon, take this commercial exchange model into account, but they highlight the role of a tributary machine as a modifying factor. Taxation is an integral part of the commercial market system at every level where its operations were conducted, whether by actors such as bureaucrats, or military personnel, or landowners, at the expense of other actors (primarily peasant taxpayers). Nevertheless, tax arrangements inevitably transformed the structures (though not the culture) of the..." @default.
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- W4312777617 date "2022-09-01" @default.
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- W4312777617 title "Fisco, annona, mercato. Studi sul Tardo Impero Romano by Domenico Vera" @default.
- W4312777617 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2022.0030" @default.
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