The Roman empire was one of the largest political systems ever created, and one of the longest lasting. Only the Chinese empire lasted longer. At its height, in the second century CE, the Roman empire stretched from the Atlantic coast of north Africa to the Black Sea, and from Hadrian's wall in the north of England to the Red Sea. Its land mass was equal to more than half of continental USA. The territory once occupied by the Roman empire is now split among more than thirty nation states. Its population totalled perhaps sixty million people, or about one fifth or one sixth of the whole world's then population.
It was an important source and index of the power which Rome exercised. In a preindustrial economy, land and labour are the two primary ingredients of wealth. The larger the Roman empire became, the more people it subjected, the more taxes it exacted. The more wealth the Roman state controlled, the more territory it was able to acquire and defend. For example, between 225 and 25 BCE, the period of Rome's striking imperial expansion, the population subject to Roman rule increased perhaps fifteenfold, from about four to sixty million people. But the government's tax revenues rose by at least a hundredfold (from about 4 - 8 million HS in 250 BCE to over 800 million HS in 25 BCE, at roughly constant prices)Rome had conquered and absorbed several mini-empires (Macedon, Syria, Egypt) and numerous tribes. She had become the mistress of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.

The huge size of the Roman empire was a symptom of fanatical dedication at all levels of Roman society to fighting wars, to military discipline, and of the desire both for immediate victory and long-term conquest. 'No human force could resist Roman might". Some Romans even imagined that they could, if they wished, rule or even had already 'subjugated the whole world' (Res Gestae, preamble).2 As it was they absorbed all that (or more than what) was then worth conquering, with the giant exception of the Parthian empire on its eastern borders. Further expansion, as the first emperor Augustus was reported to have said, would have been like fishing with a golden hook (Suetonius, Augustus 25). The prize was not worth the risk. A Roman historian in the second century, looking back over more than a century of 'long and stable peace and the empire's secure prosperity'

Appian commented that he had himelf seen some of these barbarian ambassadors at court in Rome, offering themselves up as subjects. But their petitions had been refused, as they would have been 'of no use'.
The empire's persistence was a symptom of the thoroughness with which Romans destroyed previous political systems, and overrode or obliterated the separate cultural identities of the kingdoms and tribes which they had conquered. Or rather, the Romans, particuarly in areas of already established polities and high culture, left their victims with a semi-transparent veil of self-respect, which allowed them an illusion of local autonomy. This partial autonomy was limited to individual towns (not groups of towns). And it was restricted by Roman provincial governors' expectation of subservience, and reciprocally by the local elites' own desire for assimilation - whether to Roman culture and Roman-style rank, or to the borrowing of Roman power in order to resolve local power-struggles.Either way, whether elite and sub-elite provincials became more like Romans, or filled Roman administrative posts, local independence was systematically undermined. And provincial cultures all over the empire, at least in outward veneer, became ostensibly Romanised.

For example, by the end of the second century, half of the central Roman senate was of provincial origin. The elite of the conquerors had merged into the elite of the conquered. In Western Europe, the language of the conquerors percolated to all levels and effectively displaced native local languages as the lingua franca. Latin became the common root of modern Romance languages. But in the eastern half of the empire, Greek remained the accepted language of Roman government. Even there, it was an instrument of change; for example, in the ancient culture of Egypt, writing in Greek letters (Coptic) displaced native Egyptian demotic script. And many Romans, to establish their credentials as people of high culture, learnt Greek. Assimilation was a two-way process, by which the ideal of what it meant to be Roman itself gradually changed. That said, the impact of Roman rule is still visible in the ruins of Roman towns from all over the empire: temples to Roman Jupiter and to the Capitoline Gods, statues of emperors (in some towns by the dozen), triumphal arches, colonnaded town-squares, and steam baths. To be Roman was to be sweaty and clean. The Roman empire was an en empire of conquest, but also a unitary symbolic system.

A modern map gives only a slight indication of Roman achievements. Its huge empire was created, when the fastest means of land transport was the horse-drawn chariot, the pack-donkey and the ox-cart. So the Roman empire was in effect several months wide, - and larger in winter than in summer. But the modern map shows up the empire's single salient feature: the centrality of the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean Sea was at the centre of Roman power, if only because transport by land, in Roman conditions, cost fifty or sixty times as much (per tonne/km) as transport by sea, and about ten times as much as transport by river.

So the Roman empire was at heart a fusion of coastal cultures, bound together by cheap sea transport, except in winter when ships usually did not sail. The suppression of piracy during the last century BCE made the Mediterranean into the empire's internal sea. Cheap transport gave the Roman empire a geopolitical advantage, which in its economic impact compared with the highly productive irrigation agriculture at the core of other pre-industrial empires. The city of Rome, with a population of about one million people (it was as large as London in 1800, when London was the largest city in the world) could profit from and enjoy the surplus produce imported from all its coastal provinces. Rome stood at the centre of a network of major cities (Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Cadiz, Ephesus, Aquileia), all of which were on the sea coast or rivers.
Rome was by far the richest market in the whole empire, by volume and value. Prices there were highest. It was there that merchants could make (or lose) their fortunes. It was there that the emperor and high aristocrats had their palaces. Rome was where emperors and aristocrats spent a large part of their taxes and rents. Rome was the prime engine of long-distance trade. The principle behind this assertion is simple. Whatever was imported into Rome from the provinces as money taxes and money rents, provincial towns had to earn back (taking one year with another) by the manufacture and sale of goods. In order to be able to pay money taxes again in subsequent years, provincial towns (villages, peasants) had to earn back the money which they had paid and sent overseas in taxes and rents. This simple equation, taxes plus rents exported roughly equalled in value exported and traded goods, however oversimplified it is, highlights the lines of trade and the volume of traffic, which criss¬crossed the Mediterranean, through a network of coastal or riverine towns, which centred on, and was fuelled primarily by, consumption in the city of Rome.

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