A complete analysis of the fragmentary evidence for the Attalid fiscal system is presented, which aims to reveal those strategies of revenue seeking that were available to the kings after the territorial grant of the Settlement of Apameia. Generally, Pergamon’s direct taxes fell on communities, not landholders. The direct taxation of persons – poll taxes – seems to have been limited. The various forms of indirect taxation on movement, usage, and sale are analyzed, including the agoranomia of Toriaion. The personnel of tax collection in the Attalid kingdom are identified at two levels: the royal bureaucracy and the local tax farmers, who purchased tax contracts from polis authorities. Royal tax farmers as such did not exist. An assessment of taxation levels is offered. What becomes clear are the practical limits and enduring ideological framework within which the post-188 BCE Attalids attempted to expand revenues by deepening the incidence rather than the scope of taxation.

The budgetary earmark was a key feature of public finance in the expanded Attalid kingdom and contributed to the success of the Pergamene imperial project. The dynamics and meaning of this administrative technique are thus explored in depth. Earmarking not only increased the quantity of money available to royal bureaucrats; it also made money into a medium for messaging. In a pointedly transparent manner, specific royal taxes and other revenues were earmarked for specific public goods. A series of inscriptions record the neat and final arrangements, but it is possible and even illuminating to reconstruct the entanglements of the process of negotiation by which these earmarks came into existence. The creation of an earmark required an interlocking of royal and civic fiscal institutions that further entrenched Attalid rule. The earmarking process posed ideological risks, as kings delved into the domain of private property and devolved agency to local actors, while also providing an arena for the display of providential care (pronoia) for royal subjects.

More than any other Hellenistic dynasty, the Attalids patronized city gymnasia. A much needed explanation for that curious philanthropic habit is provided, and it is argued that the Pergamenes helped transform the gymnasium into the “second agora” of the post-Classical polis. While the financial instability of the gymnasium and its agglomerative architectural ensemble made it an attractive target for royal donors, the ideological appeal was paramount. In the mid-second century BCE, the gymnasium may have represented itself as “the city writ small,” but this was a fiction, concocted by its elite membership and reinforced by the Attalids, ever anxious to present themselves as champions of the polis without ceding real power to the populace. The social distance of the gymnasium from other polis institutions was the critical factor for the entry of the Attalids, who partnered with towering civic benefactors to remake the space just as the royal capital reformed itself with a gymnasium as the anchor of the new urban plan.

In the time of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (“Rabbi”), there was a revolution in the relationships between the authorities and the Jews in Palestine. This revolution was linked with the special personality of Rabbi and his way of leadership, as well as the succession of the Severan dynasty to the imperial throne, and Roman policy in the provinces in general in the time of the Severans. After the Severans came the imperial crisis, which left its mark especially on the eastern provinces, which were subjected to such a heavy economic burden that many Jews emigrated to Babylonia, the home of the largest Jewish diaspora community outside the borders of the Roman empire.

This chapter integrates findings from micro-level patterns of marronnage with macro-level conditions and examines how the rates and nature of marronnage changed according to broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors. I consider the evolution of marronnage and slave rebellion from the early 18th century within the context of exploding sugar and coffee industries, the expansion of the slave trade and rapidly increasing African population, structural cleavages created by war and famine, as well as other environmental factors. I also give particular attention to the presence of the maréchaussée fugitive slave police and the ways in which they did or did not successfully repress the presence and threat of maroons in the colony.

The chapter argues against an influential thesis according to which Jews and Judaea were treated with extraordinary harshness in the wake of the Great Rebellion, due to the new Flavian dynasty’s political needs. It is argued that Vespasian enjoyed considerable legitimacy at the beginning of his reign; he did not need to base his legitimacy on a continuous ‘war against the Jews’; nothing he did needs to be explained by attributing this motivation to him. The harshness of the treatment endured by the defeated Jews was, fundamentally, “normal’ imperial harshness.

Another indicator of oppositional consciousness and racial solidarity were the connections between enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color during revolts and ritual gatherings that helped the beginnings of the Revolution. The Bwa Kayman ceremony spiritually solidified alliances between West Central Africans and Bight of Benin Africans; and the struggle of the formerly enslaved rebels and maroons propelled racial solidarity between Africans, creoles, and free people of color. I recount mobilizations that occurred in Saint Domingue’s northern, western, and southern departments, and attempt to identify patterns of racial, gender, and labor politics that would inform post-independence social, economic, religious, and political formations. The first post-independence Constitution declared “the Haitians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks,” making Haiti the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas.