¹ In writing and researching this review I have received the generous assistance of others whom I should like specifically to credit here: Hilary O'Shea and Peter S. Foden (Archivists) of the Oxford University Press; Professor John F. Oates and Maria Salomon Arel, both of Duke University, for information on the Rostovtzeff Archives at Duke University; Professor G. Edward Orchard (University of Lethbridge) for assistance in the translation of Russian texts; the staff of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (Manuscripts Collections) of the University of Toronto; the staff of the Archives, The University Library, The University of Saskatchewan; Professor William G. Rosenberg (University of Michigan) for assistance with problems of Kadet politics; and Professor J. A. S. Evans (University of British Columbia) for miscellaneous information.

² Kuzishchin, V. I., ‘Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff’, in Prakhorov, A. M. (ed.), Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (1975)Google Scholar = Great Soviet Encyclopedia, trans, of 3rd edn, 22 (1979), 292Google Scholar, and idem, ‘Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtsev’, in Joseph L. Wieczynski (ed.), The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History (= MERSH) 31 (1983), 179–80. Patterson, J. J. and Saunders, D., ‘Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff’, in Cannon, J. et al. (eds), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (1988), 356–8Google Scholar; Rousselle, A., ‘Mikhail Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff’, in Burguière, A. (ed.), Dictionnaire des sciences historiques (1986), 608–9Google Scholar; none of the above, oddly enough, are cited by Wes, despite the fact that, for example, the notices by academician Viktor (V.I.) Kuzishchin, an expert on the rural economy of late republican Italy, contain interesting bibliographic information.

³ Vernadskii, G., ‘[M. I. Rostovtzeff. On his sixtieth birthday]’, Seminarium Kondakovianum 4 (1931), 239–52Google Scholar (in Russian); Heinen, H., ‘G. Vernadsky's Notiz zum 60. Geburtstag von M. I. Rostovtzeff (10.11.1930)’, in Kalcyk, H., Gullath, B. and Graeber, A. (eds), Studien zur alten Geschichte. Siegfried Lauffer zum 70. Geburtstag (1986), II, 379–95Google Scholar, provides commentary and a German translation. No surprise, then, that Vernadsky adjudged Rostovtzeff's, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922)Google Scholar to be ‘an important turning point in Russian historiography’, and that Rostovtzeff is the single most cited author (other, perhaps, than Y. V. Gotie) in the first volume of the general history of Russia planned by Vernadsky and Michael Karpovich (the latter never undertook his part in the project): Ancient Russia (1943), xiii–xivGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Momigliano, A., ‘M. I. Rostovtzeff’, The Cambridge Journal 7 (1954), 334Google Scholar = Contribute alla storia degli studi classici (1955), 341–54Google Scholar = Studies in Historiography (1966), 91–104, at p. 103Google Scholar.

⁵ In all of them Rostovtzeff appears unsmiling, reflecting dourness and depression; but, from the same photographic session that produced W.'s pl. 6 (from his study at Wisconsin-Madison for the American Historical Association) we get a glimpse of a somewhat happier man: E. Pocock, ‘Presidents of the American Historical Association: a statistical analysis’, AHR 89 (1984), 1016–36, pl. on p. 1031 (collection of the AHA, Washington, DC).

⁶ Borozdin, I. N., Uchenye zaslugi M. I. Rostovtseva (1915)Google Scholar [‘The public career services of M. I. Rostovtzeff’].

⁷ On Vinaver and his ‘Volksgruppe’ [Jewish People's Group] founded in 1906 as a small section of Jewish Liberals associated with the Kadets — smaller, however, than the mainline ‘Volkspartei’ [Jewish People's Party] founded by the Jewish historian Shimon Dubnov, also adopting a lot of the liberal ideology of the Kadets — see Pinkus, B., The Jews of the Soviet Union: the History of a National Minority (1988), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Another near total and dramatic change (though not peculiar to Rostovtzeff alone) is from German to English in all his private correspondence after the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939 (i.e., he continued to write in German with his German-language correspondents, like Bikerman and Heichelheim, right up to August of that year). Such attitudes to dramatic shifts in primary language were, of course, rather various amongst the community of scholarly exiles. For example, Fritz Heichelheim himself was apparently quite open to a return to using German and to re-entering a German-speaking milieu after the Second World War, whereas Elias Bikerman was not. As the latter put the matter tersely, ‘As to your suggestion about Vienna, why don't you seek the post yourself if you care so much about German universities? I don't give a damn whether the bastards have or not professors [sic]. Likewise, I am not prepared to write in German.’ (Letter to F. Heichelheim, 28 January 1947: see UTL, LF, Ms. Coll. 118, The Fritz Heichelheim Papers, Box 3.) The collection of Heichelheim letters in this archival collection is very important for Rostovtzeff's history. The archive contains a substantial collection of letters between Rostovtzeff and Heichelheim dating from 1932 to 1944. Yet, so far as I can see, I am the first ever to have used them: a pity, since the rich deposit of letters obviously deserves systematic use.

⁹ The problem is, of course, mitigated by the fact that some of his major works of the period were translated into German, and many of the results of his earlier researches have been incorporated into his later large works published, primarily, in English.

¹⁰ Novick, P., That Noble Dream: the ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1988), 120–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Boyd, B., Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian Years (1990), 430–1 and 506CrossRefGoogle Scholar: W. has recovered the 1936 letter from the Bakhmeteff Archive (Columbia University), but not the March 1939 appeal (in the Nabokov Archives, Library of Congress); Nabokov's background is itself directly relevant to an assessment of what might be interpreted by Russian liberalism — he was born in 1899 into a family, as Mr Boyd puts it, ‘of stupendous wealth’; ‘when he was 17 he inherited an 18th-century estate, Rozhdestveno, that made him one of Russia's grandest of grandees’ (so, Walter Kendrick). Yet his father was sufficiently identified with the liberal opposition to the ruling order as to provoke his assassination in Berlin in 1922 at the hands of a Tsarist loyalist.

¹² The latter, along with Westermann, are noted with emphasis by Rostovtzeff in his letter of 23 April 1933 (part of a series in the months of February and April of the same year) to Fritz Heichelheim in an attempt to find him a position in the United States (see UTL, LF, Ms. Coll. 118, The Fritz Heichelheim Papers, Box 16).

¹³ This collection, once housed in the Seminar of the Department of Classics, has now been transferred, by agreement with the American Society of Papyrologists, to the Special Collections Department of the Duke University Library. It contains an interesting correspondence relating to refugees from Nazi Germany, as well as letters with his close friends of pre-Revolutionary days, such as Th. Zielinski, A. Tyrkova-Williams, and others. It is to be hoped that, in its new quarters, proper cataloguing of the collection will enable much better access to the letters, and will encourage a systematic use of these most valuable data.

¹⁴ Of course, more is being unearthed elsewhere: Pack, E., ‘Una lettera di Johannes Hasebroek a M. I. Rostovtzeff’, Athenaeum 75 (1987), 542–7Google Scholar; Marcone, A., ‘Una poco nota recensione di M. Rostovzev’, Athenaeum 75 (1987), 541–2Google Scholar and ‘Michele Rostovtzeff e l'Istituto Archeologico Germanico di Roma: la corrispondenza con Christian Hiilsen (1894–1927)’, Critica Storica 25 (1988), 339–50Google Scholar.

¹⁵ His conceptions of ‘capitalism’, however, were not without important nuances, and it does no one any good grotesquely to caricature them; cf. SEHRE ², 2, 543 n. 1: ‘I must point out that I use the expression ‘capitalism’ in its wider meaning, of the economic form which aims at profit, not at consumption. Naturally, modern capitalism is of a wholly different kind, and in the typical forms it manifests today unknown to the ancient world’ — a response to criticisms of the first edition.

¹⁶ Themes prefigured in his article, ‘La crise sociale et politique de l'Empire romain au IIIe siècle après J.-C.’, Le Musée Belge 27 (1923), 233–42Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Wes, M. A., ‘The Russian background of the young Rostovtzeff’, Historia 37 (1988), 218–21Google Scholar; see now Kassow, Samuel D., Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (1989), ch. IGoogle Scholar; in 1914 V. I. Verndaksii published a severe criticism of the trend towards the government's increased emphasis on technical institutes and the technical side of higher education (369).

¹⁸ On just how small and isolated the ‘middle class’ was in Russia compared to western industrialized states of the period, see Pipes, R., ‘The Missing Bourgeoisie’, Russia Under the Old Régime (1974), 191–220Google Scholar, cf. ‘The Intelligentsia’, ibid., 249–80.

¹⁹ As Reinhold, Meyer, ‘Historian of the classic world: critique of Rostovtzeff’, Science and Society 10 (1946), 361–91Google Scholar — a critique that was ill received by the scholarly establishment of the time, rather needlessly, however, since the critique of Rostovtzeff's ideology still left the magnitude o f his actual achievement largely untouched, as Reinhold himself was at pains to point out (391).

²⁰ Rostovtzeff, M. I., ‘Eduard Meyer (1855–1930)’, in Seligman, E. R. A. and Johnson, A. (eds), Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1933), 402–3, at 402Google Scholar.

²¹ Vernadsky, G., Russian Historiography: A History, trans. Lupinin, N., ed. Pushkarev, S. (1978), 335Google Scholar.

²² Momigliano, op. cit. (n. 4), 92.

²³ e.g., in his letters to Pitirim Sorokin (Archive reference n. 25 below).

²⁴ Source: M. I. Finley (from W. L. Westermann); cf. Jean Andreau, ‘Antique, moderne et temps présent: la carrière et l'oeuvre de Michel Ivanovic Rostovtseff’, in Rostovtseff, Michel I., Histoire économique et sociale de l'empire romain, trans. Demange, Odile (1988), i–lxxxiv, at xxviiGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Rostovtzeff to Pitirim Sorokin (18 Dec. 1932) = P. A. Sorokin Collection, University of Saskatchewan Library, IX Correspondence, R-25, M. Rostovtzeff.

²⁶ Rostovtzeff, SEHRE ², 2, 587 n. 19; in line with his statement to Westermann, it might be noted that he repeatedly cited original Russian-language scholarship in his notes to SEHRE and SEHHW. Mir Bozhij [‘The World of God’] was a left/liberal ‘cultural’ publication; it was superseded in 1906 by Sovremennyi Mir [‘The Contemporary World’]: Rostovtzeff made contributions to both.

²⁷ Some interesting aspects of this side of Rostovtzeff are well brought out by W., though in an article which seems, oddly enough, not to have been exploited for the book: Wes, M. A., ‘The Russian background of the young Rostovtzeff’, Historia 37 (1988), 207–21Google Scholar.

²⁸ Quoted by W., op. cit. (n. 27), 215; although W. (14) hints at a more consciously independent Sophie Kul'chitskii, an active supporter of the Constitutional Democrats for the Duma elections of 1906 (that is, according to the memories of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams), her only later accolade is to serve as a somewhat faceless amanuensis and ‘compiler of indices’ for her husband: Welles, C. Bradford, ‘Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870–1952)’, The Russian Review 12 (1953), 128–33, at p. 129Google Scholar; ‘M. I. Rostovtzeff’, Gnomon 25 (1953), 142–4, at p. 143Google Scholar; and ‘Michael I. Rostovtzeff’, in Architects and Craftsmen in History: Festschrift for Abbott Pay son Usher (1956), 57 n. 6Google Scholar.

²⁹ W., op. cit. (n. 27), 215 makes clear just how well-off that must have been.

³⁰ She maintained a suitably imperious disposition in exile; see the recollections of Hopkins, Clark, The Discovery of Dura-Eumpos (1979), 29 and 32Google Scholar.

³¹ Hence Momigliano, op. cit. (n. 4), 99, is surely mistaken to call him ‘the great Russian liberal [who] rapidly became a great liberal historian’ and to group him with ‘the line … from Guizot and Grote to Marc Bloch and the Hammonds’. Rostovtzeff surely had little, if nothing, in common, ideologically or historiographically, with Bloch, and, least of all, with the Hammonds.

³² See Boyd, op. cit. (n. 11), 62, with his other monitory remarks.

³³ Oldenburg, S. S., Last Tsar, 2Google Scholar: Years of Change, 1900–1907, trans. Mihalap, L. I. and Rollins, P. J. (1977), 201Google Scholar; cf. B. L. Levin-Stankevich, ‘Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev’, MERSH 23 (1981), 208–11; on 18 August 1908, as a result of official retaliation against university professors who were affiliated with the Kadet Party, professors who signed the 1906 Vyborg Manifesto had to swear, as a condition of their remaining in government service, that they were not members of any anti-government party or organization — which it is fairly certain that M. signed, given that he continued to hold an active academic appointment: see Kassow, op. cit. (n. 17). 33 n. 119.

³⁴ Timberlake, C. E., ‘The concept of Liberalism in Russia’, in Essays on Russian Liberalism (1972), 1–17Google Scholar; ‘liberal’ often tended to be a label adopted ex post facto by Russians to translate their political position to Westerners; it was rarely used internally. Paul Miliukov, for example, the leader of the Kadets, never called himself a liberal at home, but quickly adopted the label abroad (II).

³⁵ W., op. cit. (n. 27), 215.

³⁶ Rosenberg, W. G., Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (1974), 84–5 n. 62Google Scholar (where M. I. Rostovtzeff is listed as M.N., the ‘N’ obviously resulting from a mistranscription of the Cyrillic ‘i’ = H).

³⁷ Bradford Welles acquired a lot of his information from her, though it was principally directed to her husband's academic achievements and publications: see, e.g., Welles, C. Bradford, ‘Michael I. Rostovtzeff’, in Architects and Craftsmen in History: Festschrift for Abbott Payson Usher (1956), 55–73, at 57 n. 6Google Scholar.

³⁸ Again there is the comparison with fellow Russian exiles, like his friend Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd, had no problem filling the first volume of his study, entitled ‘The Russian Years’ (see above n. II) with a plethora of political acts, whereas the second, entitled ‘The American Years’ (1991), is marked by a similar near-total absence of such political involvement. So too, Boyd's study of Nabokov's ‘Russian years’ had to correct the existing account of those years by N. himself (Speak, Memory) which has correctly been characterized as a ‘vivid but factually erratic story’ (Walter Kendrick).

³⁹ Lunacharsky, A. V., Tri Kadeta (1917)Google Scholar; W. has him listed, variously, as Rostovtzeff's cousin (13) or his nephew (29); the former is correct. Rostovtzeff might not have been too happy to note the connection since Anatolii was the illegitimate son of his father's sister, Varvara Yakovlevna Rostovsteva, from her liaison with a nobleman Aleksander Ivanovich Antonov (the offspring, Anatolii, however, took the name of her legal husband, Vasilii Lunacharsky) — see W., op. cit. (n. 27), 213–14, 219.

⁴⁰ See the explanations offered in the introduction to Rosenberg, op. cit. (n. 36), for writing a large work on the subject (and some of the reactions elicited from his colleagues).

⁴¹ GSE/BSE, vol. 11, 232.

⁴² Programmatically, whatever their sordid concessions in the Realpolitik of 1917–18, the Kadets called for a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, with ministers to be responsible to the elected representatives of the people.

⁴³ Kassow, op. cit. (n. 17), 214–28; by August (220 n. 52) the Union had 550 members at St Petersburg.

⁴⁴ Kassow, op. cit. (n. 17), 272.

⁴⁵ idem, 275–9; on 7 November the Faculty Council voted 61 to 5 to keep the university closed. The council's declaration is most interesting to read, opposing any mixing of the University with politics: ‘The very nature of political activity is incompatible with the essence, purposes, and spirit of the academy…’; the University's purpose was to support social consensus, and ‘it would collapse [in that role] immediately as soon as politics were introduced into the university’. Manuilov was rector of the University of Moscow from the fall term of 1905; his involvement with the Academic Union is another case of how many parts of its membership elided into the formation of the Constitutional Democratic Party. Manuilov remained on the Central Committee of the latter organization from 1905 until the 1917 Revolution, then became Minister of Education in the Provisional Government (1 March–3 July 1917).

⁴⁶ Andreau, op. cit. (n. 24), xxi.

⁴⁷ Note, too, the tone of her remarks concerning ‘foreign’ recruits to the Bolshevik Party: ‘They especially numbered a great many Jews. They spoke Russian badly. The nation over which they had seized power was a stranger to them, and besides, they behaved as invaders in a conquered country. Throughout the Revolution generally and Bolshevism in particular the Jews occupied a very influential position… In the Soviet Republic all the committees and commissaries were filled with Jews. They often changed their Jewish name for a Russian one … But such a masquerade deceived no one.’ Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, From Liberty to Brest-Utovsk: the First Year of the Russian Revolution (1919), 298–9Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Healy, Ann E., The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1905–1907 (1976), 130Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Evident, as clearly as anywhere else, in the traveller's observations in his Caravan Cities, trans. Talbot-Rice, D. and T. (1932)Google Scholar; cf. the recollections of Hopkins, Clark, The Discovery of Dura-Europos (1979), 27 and 29Google Scholar: ‘Rostovtzeff saw the Bedouin as weak and lazy… a thorough barbarian’, and as a people ‘carried away by their innate lawlessness’, etc.

⁵⁰ Said, Edward W., Orientalism (1979)Google Scholar. I cannot subscribe to Said's interpretation without qualification, since it sometimes lapses into caricature; nevertheless, it catches a basic truth about western historical scholarship of the period.

⁵¹ SEHHW, 1081, cf. 131 o; and he can end his paean to the effects of this Greek genius on the East with one of the most amazing of statements, given his own practices as an historian: ‘There is no need for evidence in support of this statement’ (1096).

⁵² ibid., 1096; he then launches off into a general theory of climatic and cultural degeneration typical of such theories; stability in the face of almost inevitable change (i.e., decline) was assured for a certain period, however, since the Greek communities were successfully able to resist the ‘orientalizing’ forces about them.

⁵³ The twelfth and final chapter of SEHRE is entitled ‘The Oriental Despotism and the Problem of the Decay of Ancient Civilization’, 502–41; in this Rostovtzeff (as elsewhere) is careful to eschew crude biological interpretations of ‘race’ (e.g., his remarks on pp. 539–40); the theme was an old one derived from his ‘Russian period’, but to which he paid particular attention in the first years after exile, see ‘[The Decline of Ancient Civilization]’, (in Russian) in the exile journal Russkaia Mysl [‘Russian Thought’] published in Paris, Prague, and Berlin, vols 6–7 (1922), 190–214 (and reference to it in SEHRE, 251 n. 18).

⁵⁴ For example, his Mystic Italy (1927) [The Colver Lectures in Brown University, 1927] marked by the ‘orientalist’ strands in Thaddeus Zielinski's writings on religion (as well as those of his good friend Franz Cumont).

⁵⁵ W., op. cit. (n. 27), 65, catches some of this in the context of his discussion of the Vekhi controversy; he also notes (in a matter deserving more than a footnote?) the direct influence from Rostovtzeff's SEHRE on Ortega y Gasset (who was translating the work at the time) and on his concept of ‘revolt of the masses’; cf. Wes, M. A., ‘Geschiedenis en Late Oudheid: van Rostovtzeff tot Jones’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 82 (1969), 453–68Google Scholar, at 456–7. It would be nice, too, to see if that direct influence could be traced to the door of K. A. Wittfogel and his Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (1957), who cites Rostovtzeff's work on the colonate (1910) and his SEHHW (1941) extensively. Both, however, appear to be working on a theme much elaborated in the nineteenth century, by, amongst others, Marx (somewhat ironically, given the views of Rostovtzeff and Wittfogel).

⁵⁶ That is, from late 1939 through late 1940. Part of his frame of mind is reflected in his letter of 2 April 1940 to Heichelheim: ‘About the political conditions, I am as pessimistic as you are, but I prefer not to talk about it. We are helpless blind puppies. Logic is of no avail where emotions and elemental, often bestial, impulses are decisive. But so it was since men began to build up their civilization in order to destroy it by their hands as soon as they got a chance’ (UTL, LF, Ms. Coll. 118, The Fritz Heichelheim Papers, Box 16).

⁵⁷ R. A. Maguire and J. E. Malmstad, intro. to A. Bely, Petersburg (1983), vii.

⁵⁸ See the comments by M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), 255–70, and Callinicos, A., Against Postmodernism (1990), 50–1Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Avrekh, A. Ya. and Slavin, N. F., ‘Konstitutsionno-Demokratisheskaia Partiia’, in Soveskaia Istoricheskaia Entsiklopediia 7 (1965), 830–6, at 835Google Scholar [in Russian].

⁶⁰ In the usual notices: see Welles, op. cit. (n. 27), 143; Momigliano, op. cit. (n. 4), 98; Bowersock, G. W., ‘The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire by Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff’, Daedalus 103 (1973), 15–23Google Scholar, at 17–18, and his ‘Rostovtzeff in Madison’, The American Scholar 55 (1986), 391–400, at 391–2.

⁶¹ Bowersock, op. cit. (n. 59), 394.

⁶² For example, Norman Baynes in his review of SEHRE in JRS 19 (1929), 230Google Scholar, cf. JRS 33 (1943), 34Google Scholar, somewhat perversely suggests that Rostovtzeff's work was Marxist: ‘It is matter for regret that Rostovtzeff's account of the third-century crisis is frequently distorted by this unfortunate theory. The Romans of the third century were not indoctrinated in the teachings of Marx…’, etc.; for another case, see the great economic historian Sir John Clapham (who ought to have known better), The Study of Economic History (1929), 27Google Scholar (cf. Meyer Reinhold, op. cit. (n. 18), 388 n. 94).

⁶³ Hopkins, Clark, The Discovery of Dura-Europos (1979), 25Google Scholar; Bowersock, op. cit. (n. 59), 395.

⁶⁴ These words were written in November and December of 1990 (and revised slightly in January of 1991). Their full significance was not apparent then, and the meaning they will have by the time of the appearance of this review in publication may well be radically altered by further developments in the process of the disintegration of the Soviet empire.

⁶⁵ For example, there are the unearthed parts of his ‘Scythia and the Bosphorus’ which have now been made available: see V.I. Kuzishchin, ‘[Concerning the publication of the unpublished chapters of the monograph of Academician M. I. Rostovtzeff]’, VDI 188 (1989), 206–7 [original in Russian]; and V. Zujev, ‘[M. I. Rostovtzeff and the unpublished chapters of his book “Scythia and the Bosphorus”]’, VDI (1989), 208–10 [original in Russian].

⁶⁶ Marcone, A., ‘Pietroborgo — Roma — Berlino: l'incontro di M. I. Rostovtzeff con l'Altertumsviissenschaft tedesca’, Historia 41 (1992), 1–13Google Scholar, appeared and came to my attention, too late to be considered in this paper. It adds some valuable details concerning German influences on pre-Revolutionary Russian scholarship, and on Rostovtzeff in particular — influences, including above all that of Eduard Meyer, which I have already emphasized in the article above.