Scheidel's volume introduces the workings of the Roman imperial economy for readers at any level, pairing its chapters with further material online. The organising questions are what drove Roman economic development, what shape it took, and what followed from it.

Five sections carry the argument: economic theory applied to antiquity, the organisation of labour, the making of goods and of power, the channels through which things moved, from markets at one end to plunder at the other, and finally the economy's successes and its eventual failure.

Familiar subjects such as slavery, the food supply and coinage get their due, but the collection presses hardest on matters earlier surveys passed over: human capital, the generation of energy, the extraction of rent, the logistics of moving goods, and how well people actually lived. On the contested question of Roman trade, five specialists are convened to argue it out.