The Ancient Economy

Walter Scheidel, Sitta von Reden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136069468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

The Ancient Economy introduces readers to the nature of economic life in the ancient world, and provides a valuable guide to scholarly debates on the subject. The book describes and examines the economic processes and fluctuations of the ancient world, and shows how these relate to political and social change and conditions. Leading experts address the central issues, from agricultural production to the uses of money and the creation of markets. Taken as a whole the book exemplifies the range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the ancient economy, and illustrates the methodological approaches scholars have deployed to understand it. In doing so it draws on literary, ecological and archaeological evidence.

PART I

After Finley

I The Economy (Economies) of Ancient Greece

PAUL CARTLEDGE^†

This bibliographical survey provides a thematic overview of post-Finleyan research on economies of the ancient Greek world. One strand of scholarship is concerned with the material conditions of rural production and exchange as well as with their social and geographical environment. Intensive field survey, ethnoarchaeology and palaeobotany open up new methodological approaches to the material culture of the ancient world, especially in their attempt to interpret ancient remains in the light of comparative data. Others are less preoccupied with new types of evidence than with new questions, concentrating above all on ideological aspects of the ancient economy. These scholars emphasise that a very different discourse surrounded the economy in the ancient world and explore the difference between ancient and modern understandings of economic problems. Both strands of research have moved the debate considerably away from the controversies that spun around Finley’s Ancient Economy, but they have also triggered a new controversy over what might be regarded as the proper task of economic history. Unfortunately, these two scholarly perspectives share little common ground. While culturally oriented historians tend to question the status of archaeologists’ ‘data’, ‘new archaeologists’ point out that cultural arguments ignore the harsh facts of life.‡

Cartledge’s survey reminds us that research on the ancient economy has not taken place in an intellectual vacuum. Over the past few decades, the discipline of history has undergone a general transition from the belief that the past can be, however incompletely, reconstructed to the idea that historical research can only tentatively bridge the distance between past and present. Thus, as the reality of past economies may be irretrievably lost, historians might at best be able to engage in a dialogue between past representations and modern perceptions. It is for this reason that Cartledge takes modern economic theory to be of little help to the economic historians in their task to translate an alien culture into the modern world of thought. §

OLD AND NEW HISTORY¹

[…] Theodore K. Rabb observed in 1982, with a note of palpable surprise, or shock, ‘it is almost as if there were a shrinking from the physical world’.² Historians, that is, or at any rate ‘new’ historians, seemed to Rabb to be in headlong ‘flight from materialism’, driven by an ‘uneasiness with the material conditions of life that until recently seemed so compelling’, an uneasiness itself inspired by ‘doubts … about the explanatory power of economic developments, and … the defensiveness of the economic historians themselves’. Since 1982, that tendency has if anything accelerated, with the widespread, if premature, discrediting of materialist historiography of any kind and an avoidance of pure (or mere) economic history.

We ancient historians of course tend to be congenitally suspicious, or positively contemptuous, of novelty, on the quasi-Aristotelian principle that what is new is not true, and what is true is not new. But by a coincidental paradox, during the past couple of decades we have found ourselves walking or running in parallel with our more progressive colleagues in other historical fields regarding the economic in history. It is not that the flight from economics in ancient Greek history has been by any means total. But here too there has long been discernible a distinct turn from ‘how it might actually have been’ empiricist historiography to ‘how it seems to have been thought or represented’ intellectual-cultural studies.

ECONOMY (ECONOMIES):
WHAT’S IN A NAME?

All the main words of my title require prior definition, delimitation and specification. Spatio-temporally, ‘ancient Greece’ will be taken to mean pretty much Plato’s metaphorical ‘pond’,³ that is the Mediterranean and Black Sea Hellenic world, between about 500 and 300 BCE. ‘Economy’ or ‘economies’, let alone ‘the ancient Greek economy’, are more complex issues. Perhaps one might approach them first by asking whose ‘economy’ or ‘economies’?

Objectively, students of ancient Greek economic life are faced with the problem of generalizing usefully about a world of more than a thousand separate political units, which were on the whole radically self-differentiated. Perhaps there is a useful sense in which we might say that by 500 BCE the Greek world was unified by intersecting lines of economic exchange via the long-distance trade in staple goods (human as well as vegetable and mineral). But there is surely no useful sense in which we might speak of the Greek world of 500 as one economic system. When Herodotus attempted to define Hellenism (to Hellênikon), in terms of what all Greeks uniquely and distinctively had in common, economic life was conspicuously not among his chosen ingredients, let alone economic ‘system’.⁴ Indeed, what strikes us perhaps most forcefully about ancient Greece is rather its heterogeneous pluralism, in economic life as in other fundamental aspects of both individual and communal activity.⁵ The economy of Sparta, for instance, however precisely it is to be classified and analysed, is surely a different animal from the economy of Athens – not to mention such further complications as whether Athens and Sparta themselves can be said to have had a single economy or, rather, to have comprehended a plurality of micro-economies.⁶

Subjectively, the issue turns in part on what one wishes to understand by economy or economics: is it need-satisfying production, distribution and exchange of the goods required for the purpose of securing life? or is it want-satisfying behaviour of those kinds with a view to achieving the good life? or something of each, or something in between? Failure to make the explananda [what is to be explained] clear from the outset is one reason for the long-running and now rather exhausted debate between the so-called ‘primitivists’ and ‘modernizers’: those who argue that the Greeks’ economy (or economies) differed wholesale from any modern (Western, capitalist) economy, and those who discern in ancient Greece smaller-scale or inchoate versions of modern economic life and thought. Another reason for its persistence is that the primitivists tend to be trying to explain how the 98% of Greeks ‘economized’, that is, secured a bare livelihood within the framework of the ideally (yet rarely) self- sufficient oikos or household; whereas the modernizers focus instead on the 2% of exceptions for whom macro-economic activity at a regional or international level was the sole or prime source of their wealth. (My percentages are of course purely notional and rhetorical.)⁷

The other pivotal subjective factor in understanding ‘economy’ or ‘economies’ is the modern interpreter’s choice of models or theory. One of the targets of Moses Finley’s attack on the importation of anachronistic theory and assumptions into ancient Greek economic history was John Hicks’s ‘model for the “First Phase of the Mercantile Economy”, in the city-state, which presupposes that “the trade (oil for corn) is unlikely to get started unless, to begin with, it is a handsome profit”’.⁸ Hicks at least was using an explicit model, but it was Finley’s persuasive view that he (like many other, if usually less distinguished, scholars) had got hold of the wrong one. For Finley’s reading of Weber and his follower Johannes Hasebroek had honed his appreciation of cross-cultural comparison by way of economic and cultural anthropology (especially that of Karl Polanyi out of Richard Thurnwald) and had led him to embrace what came to be known as the ‘substantivist’ position as opposed to that of the ‘formalists’ on the location, mental as well as material, of the economic in ancient Greece.⁹

For the formalists, the ancient economy was a functionally segregated and independently instituted sphere of activity with its own profit-maximizing, want-satisfying logic and rationality, less ‘developed’ no doubt than any modern economy but nevertheless recognizably similar in kind. Substantivists, on the other hand, hold that the ancient economy was not merely less developed but socially embedded and politically overdetermined and so – by the standards of neoclassical economics – conspicuously conventional, irrational and status-ridden. It is crucially important that this much more interesting and important substantivist-formalist debate should not be confused, as it often is, with the primitivist-modernizer debate. Not even the most ardent primitivist would deny that quite a bit of extra-household economy was practised in ancient Greece. Not even the most fervent modernizer would deny that some quite basic aspects of ancient Greek economy were really rather primitive. The most serious misunderstandings can arise when the debate about the level and quantity of Greek economic life becomes confused with the argument over its politico-social location.¹⁰

Finley, however, made things too easy for himself. From his almost tautological demonstration that the categories of neoclassical economic analysis had no useful application to ‘the ancient economy’ he proceeded to the illegitimate inference that the ancients did not employ economic analysis because there was no economy for them to analyse.¹¹ Granted that there is no question of ‘economics’ having been conceptualized by ancient Greeks in the terms of an Adam Smith or an Alfred Marshall, yet one might still prefer to use the nonapplicability of neoclassical theory as merely a preliminary heuristic. It might then be allowed that the ancient Greeks both had an economy and practised economic analysis, perhaps of an incommensur-ably different nature from anything familiar to or recognizable by us as such.¹² It is in these broader terms that both Plato and Aristotle have been claimed on independent grounds as ‘discoverers’ of ‘the economy’.¹³ However, it should go without saying that neither would have dreamed of – nor could reasonably be imagined as – writing either An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations or The Principles of Economics.

SOURCES: EVIDENCE AND/OR MODELS?

How then should we set about formulating usable and useful models? According to Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, we should ‘formulate the necessary categories, from the ground up’ on the basis of ‘a very large body of evidence about the economic life of the Greek city … the great bulk [of which] comes from the late fifth and (more especially) the fourth century’.¹⁴ This is right in principle, but right for the wrong reasons. Actually, there did not exist a single, homogeneous, normative ‘Greek city’, nor can we, as Ste. Croix claims, ‘steadfastly clear our minds of all preconceptions derived from other periods of history’; and, finally, his phrase ‘a very large body of data’ may be seriously misle...