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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.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Models, Methods, and Morality in the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Economies.- Part I Methods and Historiography.- 2. For Those Who Curse the Candle: A Culturally and Historically Relativistic Proposal for Rethinking the Approach to the Ancient Economy (via Archaic Rome).- 3. Can Ancient History still Engage the Social Sciences?.- 4. The Creation of Wealth and Inequality in the Graeco-Roman World: Tactics from Law and Racial Capitalism.- Part II Measurement and Morality.- 5. The Economics of Immorality: The U.S. Antebellum South, Stalinist Russia and the Roman Empire.- 6. Before the economy? Growth, institutions, and the Late Bronze Age.- 7. Standardization as Economic Institution.- 8. Towards An Ethics of Quantification : Relationality, "Common Sense", and Incommensurability.- Part III Paths Forward.- 9. Science, Morality, and the Roman Economy.- 10. The Other Side of the Ledger: Calculating the Costs and Benefits of Energy Capture.- 11. These Old Bones: An Osteobiography of an Archaic Cemetery at Agia Paraskevi, Thessaloniki.- 12. The 'Health Problem' in Roman Economic History: A Prolegomenon.- 13. Why a Human Ancient Economy Should Be Posthuman.- Part IV Responses.- 14. The Perils - and Rewards - of Constantly Re-inventing the Wheel.- 15. Cursing the Candle: Models, Methods, and Morality.- 16. Towards an Historically Informed Understanding of Institutions and Economies.- 17. Epilogue: The Potentials of a New Ancient Economic History.
