Luuk De Ligt is Professor of Ancient History at Universiteit Leiden. His book Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire (1993) continues to be cited as a standard work on the rural economy of the Roman world. He has also published widely on the interplay between legal and economic developments with edited volumes including People, Land and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC-AD 14 (2008), which has been greeted as a compulsory starting point for all those aspiring to understand the demographic, economic, social and political structures of Roman Republican Italy.
