TY - BOOK ID - 136015148 TI - The Economics of Urbanism in the Roman East : Panel 8.4 PY - 2020 SN - 9783947450961 9783947450978 3947450974 PB - Heidelberg Propylaeum DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136015148 AB - This volume discusses the geography of cities of the Eastern Mediterranean that existed under the Roman Empire. Roman urbanism has a long historiography, however, many previous studies saw the ancient town as an isolated historical phenomenon, or at best as an index of the spread of Hellenism or Romanitas. This volume attempts to take a step further and place the town in its socioeconomic context, while also presenting the most uptodate statistics for the urban phenomenon in the Roman East. Six contributions all deal with issues related to the spatial patterns observed in the distribution of cities in the eastern half of the Empire. One contribution, by way of comparison, deals with Roman urbanism of the Iberian Peninsula. Starting off with an overview of the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole, each contribution zooms in on a specific region in order to investigate the factors that shaped the pattern of urban settlement and the variation of city size on both (supra)regional and local scales. These factors are wideranging, from climatological variation, possibilities of connectivity through the roadnetwork and sealanes, historical path-dependency, and agricultural potential to specific policies of Roman imperialism. ER -