All roads lead to Rome, goes the popular saying, referring to the rise of the ancient Roman roads that spread throughout Europe 2,000 years ago. Actually, they not only led to the capital of the Empire, but also to Civitas Parisiorium (Paris), Londinium (London) or Tarraco (Tarragona), among many other places.
At its peak, this impressive road network included more than 80,000 kilometers of highway. At that time, however, its construction had little to do with economic reasons. It was the desire for conquest and the need to move troops to different parts of the continent that made these infrastructures develop.
Roman architects paid little attention to the oldest roads and to the main villages and communities of the time. Their main objective was to facilitate the transport of soldiers to conflict sites and that is what they did. But soon the roads began to be used for commerce and transport as well, becoming links between emerging markets. And it seems that this has not changed since then.
Two millennia later, these land connections remain a source of economic prosperity in the 21st century, according to researchers from the University of Goteborg in an article published in the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Swedish experts believe that the ancient Roman roads became important “channels for the transfer of wealth” and contributed to the concentration of cities. Places that thrived 2,000 years ago and still tend to be more economically developed even today.
“Since so much has happened since then, many sites should have adapted to modern circumstances. But it is striking that the Empire’s roads have contributed to economic activity along them, even if they are covered by new roads,” he says. Professor Ola Olsson.
Olsson and his team overlaid maps of the road network of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its geographic extent (AD 117) on modern satellite images showing light intensity at night, a way of analyzing activity. economy in a geographic area. They then divided the map into a grid, measuring in each square the presence of Roman roads and comparing them with the current infrastructure, population density and economic activity.
“We found a remarkable pattern of persistence showing that higher Roman road density is accompanied by higher modern road density, the formation of large market towns in the early medieval period (5th to 8th century) and higher economic activity in 2010. -2020”, the researchers write in their article.
After this previous work, an interesting question arose. Did the Romans build the roads in areas with strong economic activity or were those roads the ones that gave rise to prosperity? “The chaos in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire would have been an opportunity to reorient economic structures. Despite that, the urban pattern was maintained,” says Olsson.
There is another element that also helps to understand the vital importance of Roman roads in the economic boom. In the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, in North Africa and the Middle East, wheeled transport was almost totally abandoned between the 4th and 6th centuries, to be replaced by camel caravans.
The ancient Roman roads in the region were used less and less and were left in disrepair. Thus, unlike the western parts, no new roads were built over the old ones. “Those roads became irrelevant and therefore we don’t see the same continuity in the bonanza at all,” Olsson says.
“It can be said that the area was affected by what is called a ‘change of fortune’: countries that developed an early civilization – such as Iraq, Iran and Turkey – are today autocratic and have significantly worse economic development than countries that They were then in the economic periphery”, adds the researcher.
Infrastructure investments can have major economic consequences both decades and centuries after they are made, which helps to understand why some regions are more developed than others, says Ola Olsson. “And that information can also be important today to make political decisions about infrastructures”, he concludes.
