> I particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards without the technological advancement which created the modern world.
Note that this was not at all unique to the Romans. People in the Bronze Age were able to use bronze because they had a well-functioning system of international trade. The Late Bronze Age Collapse disrupted that system and essentially eliminated the bronze industry, requiring iron to be used instead. (Iron is hard but otherwise not especially desirable. It's also more difficult to work. But it has the significant advantage over bronze of being available everywhere in the world, where copper and tin both require long-distance international trade.)
And a similar thing happened again in the late Middle Ages when Genghis Khan more or less unified the Asian land mass. This was not great for China, but Europe benefited immensely from his suppression of highwaymen in overland trade. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica )
The more trade is possible within a region (or across a region's borders), the richer everyone in that region is.
I agree. The thing defining modern nation-states is the use of accounting methodology(quantities of ships, bars of iron, population demographics etc.) to define power in terms of assets on hand and gains from trade, which gradually recast military forces into the previously unrecognized role of "defending property" and therefore enforcing rules of trade. Likewise, early-modern chattel slaves were different from Roman-era slaves precisely because of the heavy influence of market coordination forces: they had fewer rights, were freed less frequently, and were conveniently redefined from "human" to "product" through the development of racism. These things made the early-modern version of the institution easier to coordinate and therefore (speculatively - not that I've seen a formal advancement of this theory) more productive. But it would take the Industrial Revolution for labor efficiency to become recognized in earnest.
The pre-modern states, including Rome, had much more haphazard accounts and focused on tributary economics(how to extract more from the population or continue adding to conquests). Defense of property was strictly a thing for nobles or local militia, thus invaders looting cities was a normal occurrence through the medieval period. The Roman state was above the rest in applying a bureaucracy to the task of being the best at managing conquests - and it shows in the quality of Roman engineering, city planning and record keeping. Ghengis Khan achieved a similar, if short-lived, degree of coordination during the conquests, but lacked follow-up institutions that would have turned it into a longer-lived empire like Rome.
Note that this was not at all unique to the Romans. People in the Bronze Age were able to use bronze because they had a well-functioning system of international trade. The Late Bronze Age Collapse disrupted that system and essentially eliminated the bronze industry, requiring iron to be used instead. (Iron is hard but otherwise not especially desirable. It's also more difficult to work. But it has the significant advantage over bronze of being available everywhere in the world, where copper and tin both require long-distance international trade.)
And a similar thing happened again in the late Middle Ages when Genghis Khan more or less unified the Asian land mass. This was not great for China, but Europe benefited immensely from his suppression of highwaymen in overland trade. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica )
The more trade is possible within a region (or across a region's borders), the richer everyone in that region is.