Abstract
The aim of the project is to study the relation between urbanisation, labour opportunities and migration in Roman Italy in the first two centuries A.D. The central question is to what extent labour-induced migration was important for the functioning of the towns and cities of early-imperial Italy. The working hypothesis is that the dominance of slavery in some sectors of the urban economy, especially in the domestic sector, reduced labour opportunities for free women. If this basic idea is correct, most free migrants must have been men, and cities must have been characterised by a very skewed sex ratio. Since this would have made it impossible for urban populations to reproduce themselves, it would follow that large-scale migration was a vital prerequisite for the continued existence of the Roman cities, even more so than in the case of the towns and cities of later European history, where high levels of urban mortality are commonly identified as the main reason why urban populations depended for their survival on a continuous influx of free migrants.