Roads and population centers are located for geographic reasons. Many of those reasons are the same today as in Roman times, so these correlations are not surprising.
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Also, because opus caementicium is almost magical in its durability.
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Yeah, somewhat difficult to analyze the counterfactual here.
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That alternate history seems unlikely even just for the cost of wider tunnels and bridges.
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Some public goods which turned out to reflect and enhance, over thousands of years, certain long-term economic realities are REALLY good.
Other public goods, which are shaped by vicious, awful people with short political horizons like Robert Moses are REALLY bad.
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Hrm… Correlation? or Causation? Mayhap being situated around the largest “inland” sea is just really good place to be situated?
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Both Arles and Nîmes, in southern France, have Roman ampitheaters in the center of town, which they are still using for events.
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I oft used the same line at University, it went over well with the students, but those pesky Professors weren’t so amused.
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I’m all in favor of roads. But one has to wonder whether they haven’t confused cause and effect. The more reasonable explanation is that nice places to live cause population concentrations. And population concentrations follow previous population concentrations for the most part, because that’s where the cities have always been, and because they’re still nice places to live. And Roman roads just threaded between the nice places to live because that’s where the people were.
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So does the alternate history where a railway was built underneath London using Brunel gauge.
Oh, wait…
Reality is stranger than fiction. The London Underground does use standard gauge now though.
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Having lived on one of the borders of the Roman Empire (Hadrian’s Wall), I can tell you that some of the Roman roads there are still in use.
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Carlisle seems to be an exception, It was a minor settlement before Hadrian’s Wall. The major population centre before the Romans was about 30 miles further south at Clifton Dykes, which is barely a village now.
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Commercial vehicles such as buses are not allowed on New York state parkways because the bridges are so low in certain areas.
And the bridges were built so low because the parkways were never intended to be used for commercial traffic, and thus one could save money…
see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235663509_Do_Politics_Have_Artefacts for a rebuttal of Caro’s story.
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For that matter, 4 ft. 8 in. gauge didn’t become standard in England until 1845, and the Great Western Railway there still used 7 ft. gauge through 1892.
ETA: Shoulda read more of the thread before posting.
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Wait till Biggus Dickus hears of this!
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As a side note, because people sometimes lament how quickly modern roads crumble, it’s worth noting that Roman roads look like this:
It you’re driving a car, you’d really prefer asphalt even if it does have a much shorter lifespan.
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Don’t forget the A46 as well.
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The UK also used 5 ft. 3. in. gauge in Ireland (standardized in the same 1846 act that made standard gauge standard in England), and the wider Empire used all sorts of gauges. Canada originally used 5 ft. 6. in. gauge, but went to standard gauge in 1870 so as to be compatible with the US.
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I appreciate that everyone’s available time for reading stuff is limited but it does often help to read the linked article rather than just the BB summary - the authors (amazingly for a bunch of academics in the field of the reflected sound of underground spirits) did manage to think of that point:
A key challenge in identifying the effects of ancient infrastructure is filtering out the effect of underlying (geographic) factors that may have influenced both Roman road density and modern-day outcomes. Another concern is how to separate the effect of ancient infrastructure on economic development from the potential broader influence of the Empire (e.g. via institutional or cultural channels).
We address these issues in several ways. First, we focus exclusively on observations (i) within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, and (ii) that were ‘treated’ by at least one road. By focusing on areas connected to the network, we reduce the risk of omitted variables bias, and the risk that our results convolute the impact from the legacy of Roman rule more broadly (e.g. Landes 1998). To further partial out a potential Roman legacy on contemporary outcomes, we control for country fixed effects as well as language fixed effects, which help us to deal with institutional and within-country cultural variation (e.g. Andersen et al. 2016). Second, based on the literature on Roman road construction and our own formal tests thereof, we control extensively for potential geographic confounders throughout the entire analysis. Third, we exploit a natural experiment to which we return below.
There is then also a whole long section on how they compared the results in Europe with results from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) where use of wheeled transport was apparently largely abandoned “during the second half of the first millennium CE”.
They posit that:
Consequently, in the MENA region, Roman roads should be a weak predictor of contemporary roads density and, by extension, Roman roads should also be a weak predictor of contemporary comparative development. In contrast, within the European region where wheeled carriages were in use throughout the period, one would expect more maintenance and therefore more persistence in road density and, by extension, Roman roads should be a stronger predictor of contemporaneous comparative development.
And come to the conclusion:
When we split the data and estimate our baseline model on the MENA and the European samples separately, this differentiated influence from Roman roads indeed emerges. Roman road density is not a statistically strong predictor of current road density nor economic activity within MENA, despite the fact that Roman roads do predict comparative economic activity prior to the abandonment of the wheel. Within the European region, Roman roads not only predict current infrastructure, but also ancient and current economic activity.
Whether one agrees with their conclusion, one can’t simply say they didn’t think about this obvious point.
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