The Organization of Rome's Wine Trade.

Abstract

The ancient city of Rome was a remarkable consumer of wine: its annual consumption totaled hundred of millions of liters per year. Commerce of wine had a Mediterranean-wide scope. In addition to locally produced wine, Romans drank wine from modern day France, Spain, North Africa, the Greek Islands, and the Levant. Yet, for most of its history, Rome's government did not actively participate in supplying the city with wine, as it did for grain and olive oil. This dissertation attempts to explain how Romans achieved the remarkable feat of furnishing Rome with wine from the 1st century BCE until the late 3rd century CE. This thesis relies heavily on the tools of transaction cost economics and economics of law to show how Romans applied considerable creativity in solving the problems associated with the commerce of this important, free-market commodity. This study advances three main points. First, it argues that Roman wine-production never became an autonomous sector of agricultural industry and argues that the changing provenance of wine imports at Rome largely derived from unrelated changes in capital distribution. Unlike the wine industry in the Early-Modern period, Rome's wine production never became an independent magnet for investment. Second, this study shows that Roman organization law significantly constrained the possibility of creating multiply-owned, vertically integrated firms capable of significant capital pooling. But it also demonstrates that Roman jurists paid considerable attention to the specificities of wine commerce and actively attempted to promote efficiency in the wine trade by lowering the transactions costs of trading in wine. Third, Roman wine traders were not rigidly hidebound but took advantage of changes in Rome's institutional strucure: by examining methods of commercial wine storage at Rome, this dissertation shows that law, technology, and commercial practice could reciprocally influence one another. This dissertation concludes that Rome's wine trade successfulyl functioned without state intervention bcause of its participants' creativity at lowering transaction costs arrising from long-distance trade and their ability to take advantage of Rome's unique institutional environment.