Ook dit is Wassenaar. Ik had mij dat helegaar niet gerealiseerd, maar die bollenstreek begint dus een kleine 500m van mijn huis. Loop je niets vermoedend opeens tegen een akker in alle kleuren van de regenboog aan. Als keiharde provinciaal had ik zulks ook helemaal nog nooit in het echtes gezien. Sta je dan.

Miko Flohr, 16/05/2013

Papadag. Sinds een paar weken is het elke woensdag vaste prik. De workaholic in mij zag er stiekem een beetje tegenop (hoe krijg ik al dat werk dan ooit allemaal gedaan?!?). In de praktijk is het vooral heerlijk. Een dag in de week doe ik niets, behalve mijn zoon door de dag helpen. Wandelen. Babbelen. Gekke bekken trekken. Ja nou ja, eerlijk is eerlijk, ik zie af en toe hoe email binnendruppelt, en op een onbewaakt ogenblik antwoord ik weleens iemand, als het dringend is. Maar dat is het eigenlijk bij nader inzien vrijwel nooit.

Soms staat twitter aan, maar dan verzandt het gesprek ergens halverwege. Midden in een hoog oplopende discussie over de waan van de minuut vind ik mijzelf opeens terug voor een box in een rare pose met een rammelaar en een piepbeest in mijn hand, subverbale kreten uitstotend in de hoop dat er een subverbaal antwoord komt (de gène hebben we de deur uit gedaan – gène en baby’s is een slechte combinatie.). En als ie dan lacht, dan is alles vergeten. Ook welke twittermastodont of anonymicus nou weer precies waarom ongelijk had en waarom dat er überhaupt toe deed.

Vandaag moesten we naar het dorp. Er moest een pasfoto komen, want we zijn tegenwoordig zo bang voor terroristen dat bij buitenlandse reizen zelfs baby’s een ID-kaart met pasfoto nodig hebben. Onderschat ze niet, die jeugd van tegenwoordig. Dus we moesten naar het dorp. Naar het dorp betekent, bij gebrek aan auto of bakfiets: lopen. Op een mooie lentedag. Door Wassenaar. Dan terug naar huis. Voeding. Boodschappen doen. Dan koken. Beetje vegen. Wasje draaien. Een intermezzo van kleine, aardse huiselijkheid. Morgen kruipen we weer langs de randen van het ons bekende. Vandaag wandelen we in het park.

Miko Flohr, 08/05/2013

Marburg, een van de meest ‘bruine’ steden van het Duitsland van de jaren ’30. De laatste jaren zijn er overal in de stad dit soort gedenkplaatjes verschenen. Vorige maand was ik er. Bijzonder om te zien hoe men ook in Duitsland de dialoog met dat nu zo ondenkbaar pijnlijke oorlogsverleden aangaat.

Miko Flohr, 04/05/2013

Building Tabernae is an NWO Veni Project based at the University of Leiden (2013-2017). The project focuses on urban commercial space in Roman Italy and deals with the impact of economic growth on urban communities in the late Republic and the Imperial period (200 BCE – 300 CE). It will investigate how favourable economic circumstances under the Roman Empire fostered the emergence of new and more ambitious forms of investment in commercial space, and it aims to understand how this transformed the physical and social fabric of the cities of the Italian peninsula.

The project will use archaeological and textual evidence and belongs to the field of ancient history as much as it belongs to that of classical archaeology. Thematically, it operates on the interface of social and economic history and explores to which degree economic developments fostered social change. It specifically attempts to connect two highly vibrant debates: the debate about Roman urbanism and that about Roman economic life.

Both debates have seen significant development over the last decades. Discourse on Roman urbanism has moved away from the traditional emphasis on (monumental) architecture and urban planning towards studying urban landscapes in a more integrated manner (seminal is Laurence 1994). Discourse on Roman economic life has developed beyond the consumer city debate that dominated the field in the 1990s (e.g. Mattingly 1997; Erdkamp 2001), now focusing more and more on the social and spatial contexts of economic processes (Mouritsen 2001; Robinson 2005; Flohr 2007).

Yet, while these debates play a central role in Roman scholarship and thematically increasingly overlap, they interact only to a limited degree. Consequently, the relation between economic developments and developments in urbanism is not well-understood. This significantly impedes our understanding of Roman history. This project will contribute to filling this gap.

Key scientific objectives are to reconstruct and understand, for the first time, changing strategies of investment in urban commercial space, to investigate how newly emerging investment strategies changed the physical landscapes of Roman cities, and to explore how economic growth transformed the dynamics of urban life in the Roman world.

[IMG]32[/IMG]

Research Strategy

The main focus of the proposed research will be on tabernae, small-scale commercial units flanking urban thoroughfares. Tabernae were characterized by wide entrances fostering interaction between the people working inside and those passing by on the street (cf. Laurence 2007: 113). They were used for a variety of commercial purposes, mostly retail, but also manufacturing. The choice for tabernae is based on three observations:

1. Tabernae are a predominantly Roman phenomenon: comparable Greek and Hellenistic facilities tend to be less open to the street, and fewer in number. There seems to be a considerably stronger commercial articulation of urban space in Roman cities. This raises questions about Roman urban economies.
2. In the better known cities of Roman Italy, such as Pompeii and Ostia, the amount of tabernae seems to increase throughout the late republic and early imperial period, and commercial landscapes seem to become ever denser, suggesting that urban economies changed considerably in this period.
3. In the same period, investors began to build tabernae in larger quantities and in new contexts. At Pompeii, already in the second century BCE, independent complexes of tabernae emerged alongside the traditional model in which tabernae were related to atrium houses (Flohr 2012). In Rome and Ostia, a spectacular increase in scale eventually led to enormous complexes like Trajan’s Market (Rome).

Two strategic decisions have shaped the approach of the project. In the first place, the project limits its geographical focus to Roman Italy. The Italian peninsula provides a large quantity of material and textual evidence from a relatively coherent historical context, which is methodologically essential. The presence of the Roman metropolis and the variety of urban scenarios in Italy make that the widest possible range of investment patterns can be included in the analysis. In this way, ‘Building tabernae’ will lay a solid foundation for future research, in which Italy can be compared with other parts of the Roman world.

Secondly, the project combines two levels of analysis: on a micro-scale level, it studies the development of commercial landscapes of individual cities and the impact of this development on the urban social fabric; on a macro-scale level, it compares individual site histories and integrates them into a broad narrative about commerce and the urban history of Roman Italy. This guarantees that the analysis will take into account specific local circumstances and developments, while also fostering the development of a synthetical perspective.

[IMG]31[/IMG]

Originality

The proposed project breaks new ground in three ways. In the first place, it addresses the relation between economy and society in the Roman world, an issue that is vital to our understanding of Roman history, but plays little or no role in current debates. Most scholars have not moved much beyond the substantivist idea that economic life in the Roman world was socially ‘embedded’ and shaped by cultural values (see, originally, Finley 1985). While it is undeniable that social and cultural processes influenced economic practice in the Roman world, this project will explore to which degree the reverse is also true: society shaped economy, but to what degree did economy also shape society?

Secondly, in this context, investment in urban commercial space is a promising perspective that scholars have left untouched: approaches to commercial space have thus far mainly focused on its daily use in retail and manufacturing and neglected the investment involved in its construction. Thirdly, the tabernae constitute a large and easily accessible dataset that provides ample possibilities to discuss these issues, but they have received little scholarly attention: there are no monographs on the subject, and only a few articles (e.g. Ellis 2004; DeLaine 2005).

[IMG]2[/IMG]

Results

The project is expected to develop and test, amongst others, the following hypotheses:

1. Increasing investment in tabernae between 150 BCE and 200 CE was related to a spectacular growth of urban consumer markets throughout Roman Italy in this period.
2. The increasing dimensions of building projects and resulting properties led, especially in Rome, to decreasing social control for proprietors and increasing independence for shop holders.
3. Roman urban landscapes were shaped by economic rather than socio-political priorities.

Miko Flohr, 01/04/2013

Indisch koken. Gewoon, omdat ik het toch eens echt moet leren. Nu helemaal. Alle (!) kant-en-klaar-pakjes zitten vol met trassie. Dat is dode garnaal. Dat eet ik niet. De Tempeh is gemarineerd met ketjap, ui, knoflook, kruiden en gula jawa. De sajoer lodeh is met kemirienoten en santen. De lontong is simpelweg gekookt.

Miko Flohr, 03/03/2013

Afgelopen maandag schreef ik – denk ik – mijn meest expliciete en stevige stuk in tijden. Ik beschuldigde iemand van het uiten van racistische ideeën, en sprak het betreffende weblog aan op hun redactiebeleid, omdat ik ten eerste oprecht vond en vind dat je als redactie niet alleen juridisch maar ook moreel verantwoordelijk bent voor wat je publiceert en ten tweede omdat ik vond en vind dat je je bij dit soort stigmatiserende en slecht onderbouwde stukken echt best kan afvragen of je ze moet willen publiceren. Wil je dergelijke denkbeelden echt een podium bieden? Wat mij betreft mag daarover best af en toe discussie zijn. De publieke ruimte is van ons allemaal, dus dan mogen we ook allemaal een mening hebben over hoe we die gebruiken. Ook als die mening niet ‘anything goes’ is.

Sinds maandag is het kermis in mijn timeline op twitter, maar over of er al dan niet sprake was racisme heeft bijna niemand het. Zonder het te weten maakte ik namelijk in het stuk een kapitale vergissing. Ik verwees naar ‘de adverteerders’. Dit is wat ik schreef:

“Je mag hopen dat er ooit een paar adverteerders opstaan die aan hoofdredacteur Joshua Livestro laten weten dat ze het fantastisch vinden dat het rechtsconservatieve geluid van Nederland via De Dagelijkse Standaard haar publiek vindt, maar dat ze de doorgeslagen neo-rassenleer van mensen als Niemöller echt kunnen missen als kiespijn.”

Sindsdien ben ik een ‘adverteerdersbeller’, en ‘roep ik op tot het boycotten van …’. Ook het woord ‘matennaaier’ is gevallen. Ik kan niet zeggen dat me dit geheel lekker zit. In mijn beleving heb ik namelijk in het geheel niet opgeroepen tot het bellen van adverteerders en heb ik dat ook helemaal niet willen impliceren. Noch heb ik willen aanzetten tot een boycot van De Dagelijkse Standaard. Ik heb er – geloof me of niet – totaal niet bij stil gestaan dat er ongelukkige zielen op het idee zouden komen om daadwerkelijk bij adverteerders te gaan klagen. Wat ik vooral wilde zeggen was: ‘als ikzelf adverteerder zou zijn, dan zou ik hier niet heel blij van worden’. That’s all.

Gezien de reacties heb ik daarmee de dynamiek van het internet totaal verkeerd ingeschat. Dat is onhandig en vervelend, en eigenlijk had ik, met mijn bijna tien virtuele dienstjaren, gewoon beter moeten weten. Een adverteerdersbeller, dat wil ik ook helemaal niet zijn, en ik wil ook die indruk niet wekken. Ik wil discussiëren, op inhoud – en wat mij betreft hoort ook redactiebeleid daar soms bij – en ik blijf erbij dat dat in dit geval voor mij zo is. Dat is geen pose, doch een oprechte mening, en het heeft voor mij niets te maken met censuur, maar alles met nadenken over wat je roept.

Maar die adverteerders, die zal ik in het vervolg buiten beschouwing laten. Die zoeken zelf maar uit waar ze hun geld aan uitgeven.

Miko Flohr, 27/02/2013

Originally published at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2013.02.51

This is a highly relevant book that breaks important new ground in an area of Roman studies that has suffered from neglect both traditionally and in recent years: retail, though socially and economically a defining aspect of urban life in the Roman world, has not been high on the agenda of Roman scholars – neither of those studying urbanism, nor of those focusing on the Roman economy. While various scholars have focused on certain aspects of retail or certain datasets related to it (e.g.macella or bars), Holleran is the first to discuss the topic in a broad and thematic way. Thus, while the primary focus of the book is on the city of Rome, it provides a conceptual framework that will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on future debates on retail and consumer economies in the Roman world.

The argument, which is well-written and easy to read, starts, as far as the evidence is concerned, from texts. While archaeology features prominently throughout the book, it is primarily studied through publications, and does not tend to play a very decisive role in the argument. That is, the iconographic evidence is well-integrated into the narrative, but the discussion of architectural remains is, beyond Rome, limited to well-known sites, particularly Pompeii and, to a lesser extent, Ostia. However, while some archaeologists might have wished a more thorough analysis of this evidence, it is important to point out that this focus on texts does not really harm Holleran’s argument. Rather, it is a logical consequence of her choice to focus on everyday retail processes and strategies: material remains of tabernae, macellae and other commercial buildings, even at Pompeii, have simply less to say in this respect than texts have.

In making sense of the evidence, Holleran makes frequent use of parallels with other preindustrial societies for which our evidence for retail economies is more detailed. Particularly, early modern Europe and eighteenth-century London are used to sketch scenarios for aspects of the retail trade that are invisible in the evidence from Rome and Roman Italy. At the same time, the argument is well connected with current debates in the study of Roman economic history and demography, and shows an acute awareness of the structural complexity of the consumer economy of a preindustrial metropolis of one million inhabitants. This makes the book much more than a simple discussion of the evidence for buying and selling. Rather, Holleran offers a model of the Roman metropolitan consumer economy that helps us understand the often fragmentary and scattered pieces of evidence available. This model consists of five major components: wholesale trade, retail through shops, retail in markets and fairs, street trade and forms of trade directed towards elite consumption. It is around these ‘mechanisms of distribution’ that the narrative of the book is organized.

After a short introductory chapter that sets out the agenda of the book and puts it in its scholarly context, the first numbered chapter discusses, in generic terms, the relation between retail trade and the economy, discussing the nature of retail and some structural aspects of Roman society and Rome’s urban economy that had an impact on it. Here, Holleran, while acknowledging the emergence of mass-production in certain branches of the economy, positions the argument a bit on the primitivist side of the Roman economy debate by emphasizing the small scale of manufacturing in general and the important role of social structures (and particularly the presence of slaves and freedmen) for our understanding of the retail economy. In Holleran’s model, Rome’s retail economy was to a large extent dominated by ‘craftsmen-retailers’, who were more often than not of servile or freed status (and were thus socially tied to the elite). As a consequence, the entrepreneurial possibilities of the freeborn poor were limited.

The second chapter deals with the ties between retail and the wholesale trade: as Rome depended on imports, so did the city’s retailers. Holleran discusses the topography of import on the Tiber banks and the way in which the wharves and the horrea functioned as a hotspot in the commercial landscape of the metropolis, as well as the commercial fora connecting traders and retailers. She also makes a strong case for the city gates as key nodes in the commercial network, performing a similar role, but on a smaller scale, and oriented towards the rural hinterland.

Chapter three focuses on that canonical unit of retail – the taberna. Here, Holleran starts by signaling the ubiquity of tabernae in the archaeological record of almost any urban excavation in Roman Italy, but rightly emphasizes that their material remains rarely reveal anything about the way in which tabernae were used, as this use was, by nature, highly flexible. To understand the nature of commercial activities in tabernae, we need to rely, mostly, on textual evidence. This suggests thattabernae were used not only for retail but also for manufacturing and for the service industry. While tabernae were ‘fundamental to the distribution system of Rome’, their flexibility makes things a bit fuzzy. A slightly worrying implication of Holleran’s argument is that it becomes very hard to see how important tabernae were in Rome’s retail system: it is unclear what proportion actually was partially or completely devoted to selling consumer goods.

The subsequent chapter four deals with markets and fairs, starting with a discussion of the Roman macella and their location, followed by a discussion of the nature of the macellum, which Holleran sees as a market for exclusive, high-quality foodstuffs. While this certainly is an attractive idea for the macella of the city of Rome, one could argue that the evidence does not really make clear whether this was the case in smaller urban centres as well. The subsequent discussion of periodic markets (‘nundinae’) shows their importance in the retail economies of smaller cities, but Holleran rightly notices that the evidence for the city of Rome does not allow us to be completely sure as to where in the city they were held, and what role they performed. The same is true for mercatus or fairs.

Chapter five is the chapter that will probably have the largest impact on future scholarship. It introduces an aspect of the urban retail economy that is likely to have been omnipresent but thus far has received little or no attention at all from scholars: street trade. Holleran not only shows that there is a variety of evidence for street trade and hawking, but also discusses the spatial logic of street trade within the city, emphasizing how street traders, for good reasons, were to be found at crossroads, and near concentrations of people. More importantly, Holleran argues, street trade provided low-threshold income opportunities for freeborn poor, women and, particularly, immigrants, though part of the market was also occupied by institores, often slaves selling wares produced in the households to which they belonged.

The sixth and last chapter deals with elite consumption. The focus here is slightly different from that of the other chapters in the sense that it is the consumer more than the retailer who is in the center of the narrative. Holleran discusses the two main ways in which the Roman urban elite acquired its products – privately and publicly – and concludes that, despite all the ideology and rhetoric of self-sufficiency, elites were not at all independent from the market – buying luxury items in specialist stores or at auctions, which Holleran sees as fundamental to the circulation of luxury goods in Rome.

In a brief concluding chapter, Holleran emphasizes the fundamental role of the retail trade: despite the annona, retail was the most important mode of distribution in the city – both quantitatively and qualitatively – and because of the complexity of the Roman consumer market, the wide range of commodities sold and the variation in consumer strategies within the population, the retail trade was diversified, operating through a variety of channels, each satisfying another type of demand. Holleran sees this system as largely unplanned, ‘evolving in response to the needs and desires of the population’ (263). Thus, despite, being ‘embedded’ in socio-cultural structures on the level of individual agents and their strategies, the system as a whole was, essentially, a market driven phenomenon – albeit one that was subjected to certain institutional controls and regulations.

Holleran’s book is a great contribution to our understanding of Rome’s urban economy, and to debates on Roman urban economies in general. It uses a wealth of information and fits it into a credible framework that covers the Roman retail trade in all its variety – from ‘normal’ retail in ‘shops’ through markets and street trade to auctions and retailers visiting their clients at home. Of key importance is that Holleran consciously breaks with the old-fashioned (and often counter-productive) practice of organizing narratives about everyday economic processes by commodity. As Holleran herself notes (262), this allows her to shed light on the mechanisms of retail, rather than on the peculiarities of specific products. In this respect, her book sets a clear example for future scholarly work.

This book does not aim to be and must not be seen as the definitive account of Roman retail. Rather, it deserves to be a starting point for further debate. The argument makes one realize that there is a number of challenges that were beyond the scope of Holleran’s agenda for this book, but that do deserve the attention of scholars in the future. In the first place, there is a clear challenge for archaeologists to find a way to integrate the material remains of retail architecture into the debate so that the possibilities of this evidence are more fully explored than now is the case. The remains of tabernae in particular are simply too numerous and too widespread to remain forever sidelined in serious academic debate on the history of Roman retail as, essentially, they still are. Secondly, there is a set of questions related to the relative historical position of Rome that are not directly relevant to our understanding of Rome’s urban distribution system, but are essential to understand its meaning. To what extent, for example, did the retail system of the Roman metropolis differ, structurally, from that of other cities in the empire? More importantly, how did Rome, as a preindustrial metropolis, perform compared to other preindustrial metropolises? These are key questions that emerge from Holleran’s work and that deserve our attention.

Moreover, they point to a methodological issue that the field will have to come to terms with: ancient historians are increasingly eager to use evidence from other historical periods as a ‘parallel’ to improve our understanding of the Roman world. Similarly, when discussing aspects of urban life in the city of Rome, there is a (more traditional) tendency to use evidence from other cities – particularly Pompeii and Ostia – as parallels in a similar way. Holleran’s book is no exception. Yet while this is often extremely helpful, and partially is indispensable, it also tends to obscure the historical peculiarities of the Roman world in general and of the city of Rome in particular. The question thus is how, in the debate on the city of Rome (and in that on Roman urbanism in general) the comparative evidence can be used in a more confronting way, so that it not only fills in gaps, but also highlights differences.

However, since Holleran’s book is the first analytical monograph in this oft-neglected field, it should be seen as a merit rather than as a problem that it evokes a couple of research questions, and it does not mean that it can be fully appreciated only once these questions are answered. Quite the contrary – it is to be expected that the model outlined in this book, in general, will provide a reliable basis on which future research can build, and it is to be hoped that ‘Holleran 2012’ will become a widely used standard reference for years to come.

Miko Flohr, 06/02/2013

KRAK. Zomaar opeens. Halverwege de Haagweg in Leiden. Gewoon, fietsend. Niet remmend, optrekkend, sturend of anderszins uitlokkend. KRAK, klonk het. Luid en duidelijk. Vrolijk begon de straat om mij heen te deinen, maar op het eerste gezicht was niets te zien. Pas na een meter of dertig lachte de breuk in het aluminium van mijn Batavus mij in volle glorie toe. Mijn fiets was zojuist overleden. Dat wil zeggen: ik zat nog op het zadel, en ik bewoog mij nog vooruit, maar het ding was klinisch dood. Niets meer aan te doen. Een hobbel, en de tweede stang zou ook doorbreken, en dan zou ik daar liggen, in het gunstigste geval zonder een metalen buis in een van mijn ledematen. Beduusd stapte ik af. En nu?

Een fiets is een gebruiksvoorwerp. Een suf object dat louter een praktisch doel dient. Niet iets om je aan te hechten. Mijn exemplaar was bovendien ook nog een slechte koop. Een rotfiets waar altijd wat mee was, en waarvan bovendien het zadel niet hoger kon dan vijf centimeter te laag. In december nog had ik in Oxford het ding uit pure frustratie op de stoep gesmeten nadat de ketting er voor de zoveelste keer de brui aan had gegeven. In het heuvelige Engeland kon je er sowieso nauwelijks mee fietsen. Het was een rotfiets. Maar het was wel mijn fiets.

En nu ik daar zo liep, het ding dan maar aan de hand meevoerend naar zijn tijdelijke laatste rustplaats, vond ik het ook wel weer sneu. Je gunt zo’n rotding ook een mooie oude dag. Een tweede eigenaar. Of een derde. Rammelend. Overgespoten, als studentenfiets. Gejat. Verwisseld, na een feestje, en uiteindelijk roestig en afgeleefd wegkwijnend in een fietsenstalling, in het meest ideale geval eindigend op de bodem van een water. Het heeft niet zo mogen zijn. Nauwelijks zes jaar oud is definitief heengegaan mijn Batavus, slechts bereden door een handvol individuen, en slechts één rechtmatige eigenaar versleten.

Maar gelukkig heeft deze Batavus wel wat van de wereld gezien. Dat dan weer wel. En vele fietsenmakers. Drie kettingen versleten. Twee nieuwe trappers. Vier paar lampen. Twee keer de zee over gevaren. Steunend en zuchtend de heuvel op, als een betonblok de heuvel af. In Engeland. In Nijmegen. In de duinen bij het strand van Wassenaar. Menig rivier overgestoken, bovendien. Nee, deze rotfiets is niet van de straat. Niet meer, althans.

Miko Flohr,

Wassenaarse Slag. Stevige zuidwester. Wat een razend geweld. Lage zandmist vliegt over het lege strand dat erbij ligt alsof er nooit iemand op liep. Alweer een nietigheidsmoment.

Miko Flohr, 01/02/2013