This talk draws on my current book project Storage and Empire, which examines the moral, social, and economic reverberations of storage in the agrarian Roman empire. Anthropologically, storage has been approached from two angles: as the state marshalling surplus, or as the farmer’s risk buffer. This study seeks to bridge these scales, by replacing an abstract and immaterial notion of ‘surplus’ with a contextual and dynamic inquiry into storage practices. It particularly emphasizes how storage and its material transformations (e.g. grain degrading; assemblages (un)forming) redefine both people and things and are a sensitive indicator of changing mentalities. In this talk, the central question is scale: how does an empire scale up?