The ancient economy
by M. I. Finley · first published 1973
5mentions
1recommended by
5HN commenters
2017–2022first – last mentioned
20% recommend80% neutral
To study the economies of the ancient world, one must begin by discarding many premises that seemed self-evident before Sir Moses Finley showed that they were useless or misleading. Available again, with a new foreword by Ian Morris, these sagacious, fertile, and occasionally combative essays are just as electrifying today as when Finley first wrote them.
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…https://www.amazon.com/Perspective-World-Civilization-Capita... I strongly recommend these books. If you're interest is more about the classical Western period, I recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Economy-Sather-Classical-Lect...
on “Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months” ↗Describing Rome as "capitalist" in the modern sense is a gross misrepresentation of what is known about the ancient economy, ignoring the work of Finley and Polanyi. (Also, you spotted that Rome was a slave society, but failed to make the obvious conclusion that slavery precludes free exchange of labour!)
on “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich” ↗>Describing Rome as "capitalist" in the modern sense is a gross misrepresentation of what is known about the ancient economy, ignoring the work of Finley and Polanyi. Government took only 5%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy#GDP_and_income_d... In the Scheidel–Friesen economic model, the total annual income generated…
on “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich” ↗…communism". The trend in economic history has been the opposite of what you say. In the 70s it was fashionable to emphasize how different ancient economies were from modern. See for example Moses Finley's Ancient Economy. The trend of recent scholarship has been to show that things in the old days are more like today than we thought. It's made the Industrial Revolution harder to explain, because all of the institutional…
on “Ancient weights helped create Europe’s first market more than 3k years ago” ↗> Finley sought to demonstrate that the ancient economy was not ‘proto-capitalist’ in its orientation but rather a decidedly alien economy where economic relations were structured by status, legally enforced class and slavery more than money or profit. This…
on “Why no Roman industrial revolution?” ↗