Status Updates From Peasant-Citizen and Slave: ...

I think among my favorite things about Wood's histories is her scope of historical vision: haunted by capitalism's pollution of history with its own analytic categories, Wood always strove to provincialize it on the historical continuum. In turn, she brought to life the specificity of all that came before - Rome, the Middle Ages, golden-age Athens. Side-by-side she would place them, and with them, the arc of history.

EMW’s introducing a lot of evidence here that slaves couldn’t have made up the majority Attica’s rural workforce but - not to immediately introduce World System-y objections to a work of hers that’s nominally on another subject - wasn’t Athens a major food importer? Maybe she’ll address this later but it seems pretty fatal to an analysis of the class system of Athens/Attica as such.