The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World

by Walter Scheidel (Editor), Ian Morris (Editor), Richard P. Saller (Editor)

In this, the first comprehensive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. The approach taken is both thematic, with chapters on the underlying determinants of economic performance, and chronological, with coverage of the whole of the Greek and Roman worlds extending from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The contributors move beyond the substantivist-formalist debates that dominated twentieth-century scholarship and display a new interest in economic growth in antiquity. New methods for measuring economic development are explored, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately. Fully accessible to non-specialist, the volume represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilisation of the classical Mediterranean world possible.

Genres: History, Economics, Ancient History, Nonfiction, Classics

960 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 2007

About the author

Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.

Reviews

[Bryan Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is comprehensive, but very academic. The book relies upon the New Institutional Economics, a la Douglas North, as the foundation for its approach, and is more geared toward laying down what is currently at the forefront of research, what research needs to be done from here, and theoretical considerations of theoretical considerations. The first few chapters are discussions of general factors affecting the Greco-Roman world while most of the book discusses the production, consumption and distribution of goods in Greco-Roman times. The book is full of information, but more for the academic than the general reader.

[Leon McNair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cambridge Economic History Of The Greco-Roman World

A good book to pair with this reading might be – The Oxford Handbook Of Roman Studies, Alessandro Barchiesi & Walter Scheidel


The foremost scholarship presented with the greatest abundance of critical essays provided in this one-volume tome reflects both the strength and influence of the Greco-Roman sphere on the historio-economist community earnestly seeking to understand these core fundamental factors that encased and organised the social, economic, military, political, and religious lifestyles. Admiringly thorough, expertly crafted and extremely recommended, this book’s superbly selected scholars tackle the definitions and workings of ancient economics over and against our own modern understanding of world economics. The geographical location of their focus understandably is centred around the Mediterranean coastal regions, but later chapters prudently include and consider the impact of economic-links of trades, taxes, nutritional diets, agriculture, and artisan crafts from the eastern and African regions – inside and outside Roman hegemony – namely Roman Egypt, Carthage, Asia Minor & China, with a thesis on the effectiveness of the frontier provinces on whether the constant struggle for a standing-military presence negatively affected the economic growth of the Roman empire as a whole.

An excellent source of scholarly masterminds, the book includes statistical information and diagrams supplemented by the archaeological and textual data available, and explores the question of what was involved and what was culpable in the economic growth and decline within the Greco-Roman world taking a chronological approach: through three main factors, economic performance; expansion; and distribution, this question features prominently and is answered in the format of “Production”, “Distribution”, and “Consumption”. Included in the equation is a discussion on the ecological, topographical and geological diversity within the Mediterranean landscape, leading on to the different and varied capabilities within fields of shepherding, agriculture, husbandry, and agronomy.

The field of economics is multifaceted, and so the apologetic themes, lifestyles and contexts forwarded necessarily encompass many of the disciplines such as Behavioural, Ecological, Labour, Monetary, and Urban Economics. Human-pressure in view of population control – demography, mortality-rate, mobilisation, immigration, growth and decline - directly affects the demand-and-supply trade, or investments in human capital; a surplus of money in circulation with moderate prices of grain – a common feature in the Roman economy – shows inflation reflected as gross-domestic-product, but how exactly payments were made and what currencies were used, at a time when there was not a unified monetary system; the creation of larger markets and the use of labour in the cultivating crops, mining, and manufacturing industries in the form of producing items for distribution or consumption either locally or long-distance; are a few examples in which this book tackles.

While it may seem natural that the Roman period of development – through Monarchy, Republic, and Empire eras - is the main focus of the text, great attention is also paid to Archaic and Classical Greece’s contribution in law and economic institutions, particularly in view of the juxtapositions between Athens and Sparta, particularly with the innovation of standardised minted coinage that allowed negotiations to occur and portability with long-distance travel of hired craftsmen and artisans, commencing the easing of patterns of behaviour and helping reduce transaction costs.

All things considered, this is a fantastic, scrupulous and instructive book to embrace and hold. The written style of the text, it is said in the introduction, was done with the inclusion of a broad readership in mind, although obviously by nature an academic reference text. With that said, the content did indeed feel to be at a level beyond my comprehension at times, and the length at which it took me to complete it is a symptom of that; however, anyone with a thirst and desire for gaining an in-depth knowledge of Greco-Roman economics, and a generally inquisitive mind to engage with the text, shall come to discover this book is productive in yielding such positive results.

“...”the task of economic history (is) to explain the structure and performance of economies through time”, by performance meaning, “total output, output per capita, and the distribution of income of the society”, and by structure, “those characteristics of a society which we believe to be the basic determinants of performance… political and economic institutions, technology, demography, and ideology.”” p.211