ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL Banking and Business in the Roman World. By Jean Andreau. Translated by Janey Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xix, 176. $59.95, cloth; $22.95, paper

This book is a study of all aspects of private finance from ca. 300 BC to 300 AD. It is intended for students and more advanced readers; among the latter, economic historians of medieval and early modern Europe are included. In other words: Jean Andreau is an adept of the comparative study of the various phases of preindustrial European history, beginning with that of the Roman Empire. The focus of the book is on the late Republic and the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. Andreau discerns a three-tier structure in the Roman financial world. The top tier consisted of the imperial elite of senators and knights, who made loans either directly or through intermediaries. These loans financed a variety of operations: conspicuous consumption, tax obligations of provincial cities, and, to a lesser extent, also “some production and trade” (pp. 28, 148). These elite financiers did not call themselves bankers. They were basically wealthy landowners, not entrepreneurs, who cherished a “strategy of security, not of profit” (p. 24). This mentality “imposed limits on the Roman economy” (p. 28). This elite thought in terms of networks, not of commercial companies; and this complex is supposed to explain the absence of a bill of exchange (p. 26). One may wonder whether the behavior and mentality of a small group of Roman senators were representative of the economic strategies of all urban elites in the Empire.