There is a tendency in some modern discourse to romanticise the Roman Empire, imagining it as a world of marble cities, prosperous provinces, and a sophisticated legal and cultural system. Certainly, Rome was impressive in its scope and endurance. Yet the economic reality behind this grandeur was anything but enviable. Compared to any period of English history since the reign of Elizabeth I, the Roman world was marked by poverty on a staggering scale and inequality of a kind we might struggle to comprehend. It was not a flourishing middle-class society but an empire in which wealth was concentrated to an extreme degree.

This article draws on the work of Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen, whose 2009 study in the Journal of Roman Studies represents the most comprehensive attempt to estimate the size and structure of the Roman economy. Their findings, supplemented with comparative data and modern monetary conversions, allow us to examine whether the Roman Empire was simply a world of a few super-rich and a mass of undifferentiated poor, or whether a more finely layered economic spectrum existed. The conclusion is bleak: Rome was rich, but only in the way a plantation is rich. A few thrived. The rest survived, barely.

Methodological Challenges: Conjecture under Constraint

Estimating GDP in a pre-modern society is an inherently speculative exercise. The Roman Empire left behind no national accounts, and even local economic data are fragmentary. Thus, all reconstructions are a form of “controlled conjecture,” as Scheidel and Friesen put it. But that control matters. Their approach uses triangulation from three main sources: consumption-based estimates, income-based estimates, and comparative ratios of subsistence to GDP drawn from better-documented pre-modern economies.

For instance, comparisons with eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century India allow us to infer likely wage-to-GDP ratios. The authors also draw on real wages in Roman Egypt, grain prices, and known elite incomes. The result is a range of plausible GDP per capita estimates, expressed both in sesterces and in modern equivalents, such as wheat-equivalent kilograms and Geary-Khamis dollars (a standard unit used to compare historical economies).

Of course, these methods assume that the Roman economy was broadly similar in structure to other organic economies. This is a necessary simplification. No model will be perfect. Yet the convergence of independent estimates suggests that we are not simply guessing. We are approximating within reasonable boundaries.

How Rich Was Rome?

Let us start with headline figures. But first, a note on terminology: “HS” stands for sestertius (plural sestertii), the Roman Empire’s standard unit of currency. Thus, when we speak of “HS 20 billion,” we mean twenty billion Roman sesterces—a vast figure for antiquity. To make this comprehensible, the article uses a rough modern conversion rate of HS1 ≈ £30, which allows us to express Roman monetary values in 2025 British pounds. The Roman Empire at its demographic peak (c.150 AD) likely had a GDP equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat per year, or around HS 20 billion. That converts—very roughly—to about £60 billion in 2025 British pounds, using a baseline of 1 kg wheat ≈ £1.20, and assuming HS1 ≈ £30.

Per capita GDP was somewhere between 600 and 700 kg of wheat equivalent per year—less than half the 1688 British figure of 1,550 kg. In modern money, this implies a per capita GDP of around £720 to £800 per year. For comparison, even India in 1950 had per capita GDP of £800 in today’s money.

In short, Rome was not a poor society by the standards of ancient agrarian empires. But by modern or even early-modern standards, it was both poor and stagnant. And the structure of that poverty was brutally hierarchical.

Income Concentration and Elite Capture

The Roman state, like most early states, captured very little of total GDP. About 5–7% of GDP went to imperial and municipal taxation—similar to France in 1700 under Louis XIV. At first glance, this figure may suggest a limited or laissez-faire state. But this would be a mistake. Five per cent of a meagre GDP can be more oppressive than forty per cent of a modern one. The Roman state was not small by design, but by constraint.

It lacked the capacity, not the will, to extract more. Taxation fell heavily on producers, especially in the provinces, and compliance was patchy. Corruption, tax-farming, and the costs of collection often meant the real burden on those who did pay was crushing. Moreover, the absence of a social safety net or redistributive mechanism meant that even this limited extraction could be devastating. What looks like a light touch from above was, in reality, a grinding pressure from below.

Scheidel and Friesen estimate that the top 1.5% of Roman households captured around 20% of total income. If we take a GDP of £60 billion, this means that perhaps 1.5 million people (in a total population of 70 million) controlled £12 billion. A further 10% of the population might have accounted for another £12 billion. The remaining 88.5% of the population shared the rest—about £36 billion.

Translated to household income, this implies a mean income of around £100 per person per year for the lower orders. Not starvation, perhaps, but subsistence at best.

Were There Roman “Middling Sorts”?

This is the key question for those who hope to find something recognisably humane or socially mobile in the ancient economy. Were there artisans, shopkeepers, traders, or farmers who lived above the peasant level but below the élites? In other words, could there have been a ‘middle class’ of sorts—not in the modern sense of self-owning professionals, but in the looser sense of a buffer group that enjoyed modest but secure prosperity?

Scheidel and Friesen are cautious on this point. Their modelling suggests that, at most, 10 per cent of the non-élite population earned more than twice the subsistence level—perhaps the minimum threshold at which people could afford something approaching discretionary spending or minor investment. In a more pessimistic scenario, that figure drops to 5 per cent or lower. Whichever way one cuts it, this suggests that perhaps only 4 to 7 million people in an empire of 70 million had access to even modest financial security.

Moreover, this group was disproportionately concentrated in urban settings, particularly in port cities and administrative centres. Urban economies allowed for some specialisation—craftsmen, tavern keepers, money changers, and builders—and for the presence of freedmen whose fortunes were sometimes considerable, at least in relation to their background. In Ostia and Pompeii, archaeological evidence of shopfronts and workshops suggests modest prosperity in some quarters. But again, the scale is limited. These towns were the exceptions, not the rule.

In the countryside, which housed the vast majority of the imperial population, middling income earners were even rarer. Smallholders—sometimes described by modern writers as ‘independent peasants’—often operated under the thumb of landlords, tax collectors, and rent obligations that left them one bad harvest away from collapse. Indeed, part of the strength of Rome’s dominion lay in its ability to convert these men into soldiers or labourers with little disruption to the larger economy.

It is tempting to imagine a Roman equivalent of the English yeoman or the French artisan—social types that stabilised and enriched their societies. But these figures are largely absent in the Roman world. Where they existed, they were anomalous: islands of stability in a sea of economic fragility.

Power Law and the Richest of the Rich

One striking aspect of the study is its use of a power-law distribution to model elite wealth. If we assume that wealth doubled every time the number of households halved, we can model a plausible structure of inequality.

For example, 600 senatorial families may each have had an average income of HS 300,000 (£9 million), producing a combined income of £5.4 billion. Another 20,000 equestrian households might average HS 24,000 (£720,000), yielding another £14.4 billion. Municipal elites (the decurions) might have added a further £7 billion. This still leaves considerable room for wealthy freedmen and others outside formal ranks.

The top 1% of households could have captured between 16% and 20% of GDP—comparable to colonial India, 18th-century Naples, and late imperial China. This is a level of inequality rarely seen in developed economies today.

GDP Distribution Models

Statistical measures like the Gini coefficient—ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality)—are useful, but they must be treated with caution in the ancient context. A Roman Gini score of 0.42 to 0.44 does not necessarily indicate a moderately unequal society. Modern societies with such scores usually enjoy significant redistributive structures: progressive taxation, welfare provision, public healthcare, and education systems. Rome had none of these.

More importantly, Rome’s average income was so low that inequality had sharper consequences. In a high-GDP society, inequality means differences in consumption, housing, and savings. In a low-GDP society, inequality often determines whether one eats every day. This is why Scheidel and Friesen prefer to use the concept of the “inequality possibility frontier” (IPF)—the maximum level of inequality that a society can sustain without starving the labour force.

By this measure, Rome pushed its limits. Its estimated IPF value is among the highest known in premodern history—perhaps 80 to 85 percent of the theoretical maximum. This implies a level of extraction from the working population that left very little room for economic shocks. Famine, plague, war—all of which were common—could push large segments of the population into absolute destitution or death.

One might think of Roman inequality as not merely a feature of the system but its operating condition. There was no margin built in. Most households were not saving; they were surviving. Any increase in elite wealth came, necessarily, at the expense of those below. This makes the Roman Empire one of the clearest examples in history of a zero-sum economy operating at scale.

Conservative Reflection: Comparing Civilisations

Rome is sometimes held up as an example of imperial efficiency: a centralised state, professionalised armies, and impressive infrastructure. But we must ask what that infrastructure was for. The roads, aqueducts, and amphitheatres were not, for the most part, designed to improve peasant life. They were built to extract grain, move legions, and entertain the urban poor into political passivity. The economic logic behind them was aristocratic, not inclusive.

This is why comparisons with early modern England are revealing. From about 1550 onwards, England began to generate middling prosperity not only in London but in towns and rural areas. Yeomen, clothiers, shipbuilders, and tenant farmers could expect rising incomes, some education, and a degree of autonomy. This did not happen under a strong redistributive state. It happened because institutions—property rights, common law courts, and relative political decentralisation—allowed productive activity to flourish.

Rome did not fail because it was decadent or militarily overextended. It failed, in part, because it could not generate widespread prosperity. Its tax base weakened over time because the underlying economy remained stagnant. Productivity gains were limited. Technical innovation stalled. There was no Smithian commercial revolution, no demographic dividend, no systematic investment in human capital. Its political class saw power as a right and extraction as a duty.

This comparison should not be overdrawn. Rome and early modern England faced different constraints and arose in different technological contexts. But the contrast remains important. Rome developed administrative capacity on a vast scale, but it lacked the ideological and institutional tools to create a society in which large numbers of people could prosper. For all its order, Rome never made the breakthrough into self-sustaining growth.

Conclusion

The Roman economy was impressive in its scale, but not in its justice. It delivered comfort and splendour to a small minority, while the great mass of the population lived lives not far above biological survival. Whether we view the empire with admiration or unease, we should not mistake its might for virtue. Rome was a pyramid resting on the bent backs of its people. In this, it more closely resembled the latifundia of the Caribbean than the England of the early modern gentry.

To romanticise such a structure is to misread it. A civilised society should be judged not by what it builds for the few, but by what it delivers for the many. By that standard, Rome was a marvel of injustice.

To summarise: Rome succeeded at domination, not development.

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