The Open Sea

The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome

J. G. Manning

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A major new economic history of the ancient Mediterranean world In The Open Sea, J. G. Manning offers a major new history of economic life in the Mediterranean world in the Iron Age, from Phoenician trading down to the Hellenistic era and the beginning of Rome's imperial supremacy. Drawing on a wide range of ancient sources and the latest social theory, Manning suggests that a search for an illusory single "ancient economy" has obscured the diversity of lived experience in the Mediterranean world, including both changes in political economies over time and differences in cultural conceptions of property and money. At the same time, he shows how the region's economies became increasingly interconnected during this period. The Open Sea argues that the keys to understanding the region's rapid social and economic change during the Iron Age are the variety of economic and political solutions its different cultures devised, the patterns of cross-cultural exchange, and the sharp environmental contrasts between Egypt, the Near East, and Greece and Rome. The book examines long-run drivers of change, such as climate, together with the most important economic institutions of the premodern Mediterranean--coinage, money, agriculture, and private property. It also explores the role of economic growth, states, and legal institutions in the region's various economies.A groundbreaking economic history of the ancient Mediterranean world, The Open Sea shows that the origins of the modern economy extend far beyond Greece and Rome.

PART I

History & Theory

INTRODUCTION

History, Theory, and Institutions

APPROACHING THE ANCIENT ECONOMY

I said at the beginning that I would not be giving economic history a narrow interpretation. I hope that I have carried out that promise. I have tried to exhibit economic history, in the way that the great eighteenth-century writers did, as part of a social evolution much more widely considered.

—HICKS (1969:167)

OFF THE COAST OF the small Mediterranean island of Antikythera in the spring of 1900, the year in which Arthur Evans was beginning to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete and the Boxer Rebellion raged in China, sponge divers came across an ancient shipwreck at about fifty-meter depth. The ship was apparently a ship of booty, perhaps bound for Rome. Among the items pulled from the wreck, dated ca. 60 BCE, were bronze statues, hundreds of other ancient objects, including storage jars, lamps, jewelry, and a small, mysterious lump of metal. The booty is now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Excavations continue. Recently, human skeletal remains were found on the wreck, a very promising discovery since DNA analysis might reveal much.¹

At first not much was made of the mysterious clump of metal. But over the years, and now with modern photographic, x-ray, and computed tomography techniques, this mysterious object has gradually begun to reveal its secrets. This “clump” turns out to be an astonishing mechanical calendar. It shows us the brilliance of both scientific knowledge and manufacturing capability of the ancient Mediterranean world. Probably dating to the 2d century BCE, it also demonstrates a keen knowledge of differential gears and incorporates many centuries of astronomical observation. The device was probably used to synchronize lunar and solar cycles in a nineteen-year cycle known as the metonic cycle. The accumulated knowledge of astronomical cycles culled from centuries of observations shows the influence of Babylonian astronomy. As we now know, it is a sophisticated timepiece, capturing the motion of the moon, sun, and five of the planets in “epicyclic motion through the zodiac, perhaps used on astrological calculations, extremely popular in the Hellenistic period.”² The device continues to catch people unaware of the sophistication of the ancient world. There is nothing comparable in Europe until the 15th century.³

I begin with the Antikythera mechanism because it is a good proxy to think about the “ancient economy.” It is also a good case study of the nature of ancient evidence. The machine is a single item and without context. Was it common or unique? Who owned it? Who invented it? The last question, I think it is safe to say, can be answered. This machine was not “invented.” Rather, it was very likely the product of centuries of knowledge creation born of deep cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean. The machine itself appears modern, but its social context tells us that it belongs to a different world. And that is the key problem in trying to understand economic behavior and describing ancient economic phenomena.

The Antikythera mechanism (figure 1), as it is usually called, is a highly sophisticated, well-engineered machine. Of course Swiss watchmakers would now be able to produce a better and smaller version of this (in fact Hublot, who also sponsors current work on the underwater archaeological site where the machine was discovered, has done so, with a price tag of a cool $272,000), but this is a case of imitation being a sincere form of flattery.⁴ It stands among the best evidence we have that the Mediterranean world of the late first millennium BCE was more advanced than once thought. The mechanism solved a particular problem in a spectacular way. But it was unproductive, that is, it was not used to increase labor productivity, or to improve overall economic conditions. It was deployed, perhaps, to calculate the timing of religious festivals, or as a teaching device, and as a prestige item to display knowledge and wealth.⁵ We can hardly call this machine, or the stunning dog mosaic recently discovered at Alexandria (frontispiece), or for that matter the Great Pyramid at Giza, built more than two millennia before the mosaic, or the civilizations that produced these, “primitive.” This presented a paradox to scholars such as Marx, who was aware of the cultural achievements of Greece but yet thought of its economy as underdeveloped.⁶ Of course all these things were made for the elite, in the latter two cases two of the most powerful rulers in antiquity. A good deal of work on the ancient world, of course, concerns elite behavior, consumption, and tastes, and that is not insignificant given elites’ role in driving change (as well as keeping inefficient institutions in place). What about nonelites? Studying farmers, the vast majority of all premodern populations, nomadic peoples, and merchants, has always been much more challenging. But they have left their mark, and we have gotten much better at seeing them.

Why does any of this matter? Because understanding the structure of premodern economic behavior is an important window into ancient life more broadly. But it is also one of the main sources of debate about what we can and cannot know about the ancient world. Indeed scholars looking at precisely the same evidence can conclude radically different things about what the evidence means for economic behavior or performance. To say that understanding the “ancient economy” has been a “battleground” for a century is an understatement.⁷ The battle lines have been drawn in binary opposition: either/or, primitivism/modernism, substantivism/formalism, pessimists/optimists, use-value/exchange-value, status/contract, rational/irrational, oikos/polis (household/city), private/public, market/non-market, classical/Near Eastern, West/East, ancient/modern, sort of like us/not like us at all.

FIGURE 1. The Antikythera mechanism. Courtesy of the German Archaeological Institute, Athens. DAI-Neg.-No. Photographer 1 D-DAI-ATH-Emile 827. Photo by Émile Seraf.

This kind of manichean framing, as I will argue below, is too simplistic, and to reduce historical investigation to opposed pairs in order to make arguments, usually directed to the other camp, and almost always to score points, makes little sense. In the end, classifying premodern economies as one type or another leads to “debates about nothing.”⁸ This conceptual poverty in both thought and language belies the ancient Mediterranean world’s richness, complexity, diversity, and development over four thousand years. Neither third-millennium BCE Sumeria nor the Roman Empire of Hadrian can be characterized as a world of hunter-gatherers or of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The very real problem is how best to describe ancient economies and their institutions. Sensitivity to language was something that Max Weber (1864–1920) already suggested was a problem in analyzing economic institutions of the premodern world, and we would do well to pay better attention to the language we use to describe the social realities of this world.⁹ Modern categories like “market” and “private property,” even seemingly obvious ones like “democracy” and “authoritarian rule,” must be thought through very carefully in their ancient contexts because there was considerable change over time and important regional and cultural differences in what “market” or “private property” entailed.¹⁰ The real challenge, in my view, is to find the right “analytic narrative,” combining deep knowledge of the society with the explanatory power of theory at different scales of analysis. It is a field I call analytical humanities, and I believe that there are rich opportunities to further develop this approach.¹¹

Cultural differences, as Joel Mokyr has elegantly shown in his study of the Industrial Revolution, as well as structural ones, must always be in the front of one’s mind when comparing premodern to modern economies.¹² Nevertheless, the shifts in scale, the pulses in populations, and the technological changes of the ancient world show human creativity and ingenuity at every turn. But these differences, on the other hand, and the vocabulary used to describe them, have driven the fierce debates about the overall nature of “the ancient economy” as well as the nature of specific institutions. Being aware that the premodern Mediterranean was substantially different from our own world, we must also fight against the risk, to quote Barry Kemp, of “unnecessarily isolating the past and impoverishing the discussion.” Ancient economic institutions were not “static entities devoid of mechanisms of adjustment to changing circumstances.”¹³

My aim in this book is to set premodern Mediterranean economies in their social and environmental context. The first millennium BCE was a transformational period in the premodern history of the Mediterranean. Karl Jaspers developed a theory that some societies developed entire new ways of thinking about the relationships between politics, religion, and philosophy in this period. Throughout Eurasia after the Bronze Age collapse, between roughly 1000 and 200 BCE, large complex empires emerged at the same time as the “microstate” world of the Greek city-states came into being. Whether one follows Jaspers’s “Axial Age” theory as he laid it out or not, the first millennium BCE was certainly a period of major global transformation of both political structures and economies.¹⁴ Not all first-millennium Mediterranean societies appeared to show the Axial Age move toward more egalitarianism, but all major state-based societies underwent economic transformation.¹⁵

The literature on every subject that I touch on here is enormous, and getting larger every day. As I write this sentence, I am certain that another book, and several articles, have appeared on a subject relating to some aspect of economic life in the ancient Mediterranean world.¹⁶ While this book lacks comprehensive coverage, I hope what it does is to give the reader a sense of how large, how dynamic, how rich and varied, and how deeply interesting the study of ancient economies has become since the appearance of an important review of Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy.¹⁷ Unlike most recent studies, I also hope that there is value ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Part I: History & Theory
• Part II: Environment & Institutions
• Appendix: Climate Data
• Notes
• Key Readings
• Bibliography
• Index