## History’s Earliest Hustlers

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [History’s Earliest Hustlers](https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/09/book-review-historys-earliest-hustlers-nicholas-owen)

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## Bibliographic details
- Authors: NICHOLAS OWEN
- Published: September 3, 2025

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### Summary
- Review of Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2025, 512 pp., $39.95).
- Bowes reconstructs the lives of ordinary Romans—what she calls the Ninety Percent—using archaeological discoveries, bookkeeping records, and human skeletons.
- Emphasizes a complex, “global” ancient economy marked by high consumption and low incomes, where credit, pawning, and borrowing against future income were central coping mechanisms.

### Key findings and insights
- The classical historical record focused on elites; Bowes remedies this by centering ordinary working Romans.
- The economy featured:
  - rapidly expanding demand for cheap consumer goods (greater varieties of food and drink; highly standardized pots, jugs, and jewelry);
  - low income and limited opportunities to earn a wage.
- Coping strategies for scarcity included credit, pawning possessions, and borrowing against the next harvest or other future income.
- Social mobility depended on accumulating small amounts of capital that could generate income, e.g.:
  - a plot of farmland;
  - a yoke of oxen;
  - a pottery kiln;
  - a loom for weaving.
- Occupational categories (farmer, artisan, wage laborer) often break down in practice; ordinary Romans relied on multiple income sources.
- Boundaries between adult and child, rural and urban, creditor and debtor, free and enslaved were blurred in everyday economic life.
- Bowes draws explicit comparisons between the precarious economic existence of many working Romans and the experiences of a wide swath of 21st century American society.
- Discussions of modern economic thinkers—Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Thomas Piketty—are used to add contemporary resonance.

### Evidence and methods
- Uses recent sources that have come to light or received rigorous scientific analysis only in the past 20 years.
- Draws on a combination of:
  - archaeological discoveries;
  - bookkeeping records;
  - human skeletal evidence.
- Provides dozens of illustrations and photographs to support storytelling and empirical claims.

### Notable case examples cited
- Ancient Egypt’s Soterichos family: turned to cash crops to pay off debt—illuminates smallholder agriculture.
- Pompeian pawnbroker and moneylender Faustilla: illustrates access to credit in times of want.
- Army supplier Philokles at Krokodilo in Egypt’s Eastern Desert: example of income earned by working for the Roman state, including exploiting prostitution services.

### Audience, style, and accessibility
- Lively storytelling aimed at specialist and general readers alike.
- Bowes argues: “It’s amazing how much we can know about the 90 percent just by listening to them.”

*Overview based on Finance & Development, September 2025, Nicholas Owen.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/09/book-review-historys-earliest-hustlers-nicholas-owen_