Roman Roads and the Economy of Empire

Abstract

My thesis explores Roman Republican roadbuilding and how road networks produce the space of empire. The roads in question are the viae publicae, the cross-country public highways that Rome built from the fourth century onwards as it expanded across the Italian peninsula. These roads were large scale and engineered for vehicular transport. The function of the roads has attracted debate, with scholars asserting that they were built for military, strategic, economic, electoral, or elite networking purposes, among other things. All of these are valid purposes for the Roman roads, but they had an even more important function in the bigger picture of imperialism. I argue that though the Romans deployed unique technologies in their roadbuilding, the purpose is comparable to similar networks in the premodern and modern world and in each case territorial empires were concerned with using roads to hold together annexed land. In each case, the scaling up of engineering technology was important for ease of travel, which in turn facilitated control. Especially in the middle Republic, we can observe that roads and imperial projects at large, including colonisation, engaged a broad swathe of the Roman population in reproducing the economy of empire. All the while, military operations were intensifying across Italy. Expansionism was not driven solely by the political class but rather the whole society sought to profit from it. Ultimately, the Roman roads of the middle Republic fuelled the economy of empire: funding expansionist war, providing land to sustain the infantry classes, erasing or obscuring indigenous knowledge, and tying that land back to Rome.