In many ways the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire arrived in Britain with the financiers, traders and merchants who are represented in the Bloomberg tablets.
Contemporary with the Bloomberg tablets were very similar financial documents of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus in Pompeii.
Cooley, Alison E., and M. G. L. Cooley. Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook. 2nd edn. Routledge Sourcebooks for the Ancient World. London: Routledge, 2014, 277–86.
I found Andreau’s introduction to banking and business in the Roman Empire an excellent way into understanding what was going on in the dealings represented by the Bloomberg tablets.
Andreau, Jean. Banking and Business in the Roman World. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
It is hard to differentiate the legal and the financial documents among the Bloomberg tablets. It is very apparent, that Roman provincial law arrived with the first traders in Britain and can be glimpsed in the Bloomberg tablets. The following are key works:
Johnston, David. Roman Law in Context. 2nd edn. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Meyer, Elizabeth A. ‘Writing in Roman Legal Contexts’. In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law, edited by David Johnston, 85–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Meyer, Elizabeth A. ‘Law and Latinization in Rome’s Western Provinces’. In Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents, edited by Alex Mullen, 182–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Paul du Plessis is a major authority on Roman Provincial Law; he has written extensively on the Bloomberg tablets and their value in understanding the practical working of Roman Law in Britain. His contribution to the Edinburgh Legal History Blog shortly after they were published identifies twelve tablets that have a bearing on an understanding of the workings of Roman law.
Plessis, Paul J. du. ‘“Provincial Law” in Britannia’. In Law in the Roman Provinces, edited by Kimberley Czajkowski, Benedikt Eckhardt, and Meret Strothmann, 436–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
du Plessis, Paul J. ‘The Roman Concept of Lex Contractus’. Roman Legal Tradition, a Journal of Ancient Medieval and Modern Civil Law 3 (2006) 79–94.
Plessis, Paul J. du. Letting and Hiring in Roman Legal Thought: 27 BCE - 284 CE. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
In the Bloomberg tablets, and later in the Vindolanda tablets we encounter slavery. I have drawn on the following works on slavery.
Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Johnston, David. Roman Law in Context. 2nd edn. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 51–54.
Harrill, James Albert. Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.
Harrill, James Albert. ‘Paul and Slavery’. In Paul in the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook Volume II, edited by Paul Sampley, 301–45. London: T&T Clark, 2016.
Woolf, Greg. Rome: An Empire’s Story. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 98–99