Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies is a collection of essays which focuses on the art of questioning; it is about ideas and analytical experiment. Ancient economic history has developed enormously since the publication of M.I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy in 1973. Much new material has been brought to bear on the debate on the character of economic life in the Greek and Roman world. But, at the same time, discussions have been going round in circles. This is because not enough attention has been given to the questions ancient historians ask and the concepts with which they approach the economy. In this collection, an attempt is made to renew the terms of the debate by presenting a wide variety of new analytical approaches to ancient economic history ranging from literary theory, cross-cultural comparison, statistical analysis of archaeological data to neo-institutional economics and model-building.

This edited volume presents a multi-perspectival inquiry into the models that have shaped the study of ancient economies in past decades. The contributions collected here respond to the prevailing tendency to measure ancient Mediterranean economies using methods and techniques designed for assessing the performance of modern economies, considering a range of approaches that might generate a more socially and morally attuned history of the ancient Mediterranean. The volume explores the challenges of quantification and critically examines the ideological assumptions implicit within the models usually applied to the study of ancient economic performance. The chapters advocate for more inclusive alternatives to traditional ideas of ‘growth’ that take factors such as social inequality, fairness, wellbeing and the relationship between humans and the natural environment into consideration. The book examines through a series of different questions the importance of querying the appropriateness of economic methods from an ethical or socially aware position. Rather than condemning older models, methods, and points of view for their inadequacies, this book focuses on leveraging the benefits from existing methods in economics and suggesting new frameworks to reach toward historical approaches that are both methodologically sophisticated and attuned to the moral, ethical, and political concerns of the twenty-first century. This book will be a valuable resource for interdisciplinary researchers in economics, economic history, ancient history and archaeology.

The cultural wealth of the classical Greek world was matched by its material wealth, and there is abundant textual and archaeological evidence for both. However, radically different theoretical and methodological approaches have been used to interpret this evidence, and conflicts continue to rage as these different starting points produce clashing views on the significance and distribution of money, labour and land. Money, Labour and Land reflects the current explosion in ideas and research by assembling case-studies from an international selection of renowned US, British and European scholars. Drawing on comparative historical and anthropological approaches, sociological, economic and cultural theory, and developments in epigraphy, legal history, numismatics and spatial archaeology, this volume will be of interest to all students and scholars of ancient economies.

Historians and archaeologists normally assume that the economies of ancient Greece and Rome between about 1000 BC and AD 500 were distinct from those of Egypt and the Near East. However, very different kinds of evidence survive from each of these areas, and specialists have, as a result, developed very different methods of analysis for each region. This book marks the first time that historians and archaeologists of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome have come together with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, to ask whether the differences between accounts of these regions reflect real economic differences in the past, or are merely a function of variations in the surviving evidence and the intellectual traditions that have grown up around it. The contributors describe the types of evidence available and demonstrate the need for clearer thought about the relationships between evidence and models in ancient economic history, laying the foundations for a new comparative account of economic structures and growth in the ancient Mediterranean world.

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.