This volume is part of Princeton's Economic History of the Western World series. The study was funded by a Loeb Classical Library Fellowship, the Northwestern Alice Kaplan Institute and the Balzan Foundation. It is a quality hardback with clear, well-produced text and a small number of black-and-white figures, including maps.
T. investigates the economic relationship between selected state and private business institutions over a broad span of ancient history (700 bce–617 ce). The work is divided into four main chapters; each considers sources from a different era in Mediterranean state development: Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman and late Antiquity.
T. is a socioeconomic historian, whose previous publications include Trading Communities in the Roman World (2013). The guiding framework for his study is Neo-Institutionalism, an ideology devised by Douglass North, ‘the father of New Institutional Economics’ (NIE). According to T., this theoretical framework ‘has now established itself as the default paradigm in both Greek and Roman scholarship’ (p. 13). Applied to ancient history this system emphasises the actions of institutions and organisations alongside markets and networks. T. asserts that state action was indispensable for commercial exchange with one of its defining roles being enforcement. T. considers how to define and categorise ancient states with the precaution that there are numerous definitions of ‘state’.
T. accepts that economic growth occurred in the ancient world on the basis of a relationship between the formation of ‘states’ and the emergence of mercantile communities. He considers select examples from each era to illustrate how private business practices and merchant networks benefited from state infrastructure and public institutions, including courts and legal systems. This ancient world view is positioned between the efficient system of P. Temin's The Roman Market Economy (2012) and the chaotic structure imagined in P. Bang's The Roman Bazaar (2011).
T.’s introduction and first chapter consider well-established themes in current debate relying on recent publications by the Oxford Roman Economy Project (OXREP) (particularly A. Wilson and A. Bowman [edd.], Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems [2009]). For example, the remodelled shipwreck evidence and enhanced Greenland Ice pollution data are frequently cited proxies that suggest a modest growth in ancient economic activity during antiquity. T. briefly reviews other contributory physical factors including the state construction of harbours, but the main interests of T. concern social-economic factors.
T. cites K. Hopkins's theoretical ‘Taxes, Rents and Trade’ model for the Roman economy as a starting point whereby the state collected substantial taxes in multiple revenue-productive regions and spent income in militarised, deficit regions (p. 12). A counterbalancing process of ‘high-value trade’ existed to replenish fiscal dues the following year (K. Hopkins, ‘Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade’, in W. Scheidel and S. von Reden [edd.], The Ancient Economy [2002], pp. 190–230). However, revenue production as evidenced by ancient sources suggests relatively small provincial revenues. Nearly a quarter of early imperial income came from bullion, and a further third was generated by taxing international commerce conducted with India, Arabia and China (see ‘Eastern Commercial Revenue Model’, in R. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East [2010], pp. 141–78). Customs taxes (tetarte) in frontier cities such as Alexandria, Palmyra and Petra were set at ten times the rate of interprovincial trade (portoria). This has implications for socio-economic studies as certain ancient communities had greater economic impact than Hopkins suggests.
T. offers ‘a brief survey of some selected examples’ of state and private networks in operation during different periods (p. 20). His first tenet is that ‘state formation and consolidation had an aggregate positive effect on the economy of the ancient Mediterranean’. He stresses this was not due to ancient states acting as third-party enforcers of private property rights, but ‘ancient states were beneficial to growth because they created institutions conducive to economic development, even if that was not necessarily the intention’ (pp. 23–4). Consequently, he emphasises ideologies to explain economic developments (p. 25). NIE offers T. the themes, and he locates and discusses examples that broadly fit that profile. As T. explains, his interest is ‘not on what “the state” did but on what people did’, with a focus on ancient texts ‘to avoid speaking in abstractions where possible and to keep the discussion grounded in the sources’ (p. 29).
In Chapter 2 T. considers trade diasporas and Phoenician commercial activities in Greek cities. ‘Social-order theory’ (D.C. North, J.J. Wallis and B.R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders [2009], discussed by T. on pp. 29; 33–5) is adapted to explain how overseas communities developed, managing long-range trade in the absence of third-party enforcement to regulate behaviour. Emphasis is placed on ‘public friendship’ (proxenia), but few details are provided to contextualise the scale and value of these economic activities.
T. then reveals Hellenic practices in mid-third century bce Syria/Palestine through the surviving papyri letters of Zenon, an agent of the Ptolemaic finance minister, who arranged private affairs alongside state duties. T. considers whether activities involving public goods, a banking system and public order enforcement (state guards and soldiers) constitute the socio-economic definition of the ‘stationary bandit’, due to its use of coercive force. The discussion is detailed and coherent and suggests that modern studies of the ancient economy should place greater emphasis on Hellenistic era institutions.
Chapter 4 returns to the central tenets of NIE by considering transaction and enforcement costs during the Roman Imperial era. T. argues that Roman legal contracts involving lists of witnesses, cited according to status, publicly embedded social standing. These agreements had enhanced enforceability and therefore reduced costs due to greater social incentives to meet obligations and reduce, or create, more effective litigation. He asserts that this enforcement-enhancing effect was an ‘emergent property’ enabling more successful economic interactions. Sample objects of study are wax tablets from Pompeii and Transylvania indicating practices at the core and periphery of the empire. Unfortunately, the beneficial effects of these social systems are difficult to quantify, and T. does not consider the high revenue generating eastern commercial centres.
T. argues that the adoption of Christianity as a state religion in the fourth century ce produced an environment of intolerance and violence against paganism that ‘upset the equilibrium’ of Mediterranean diaspora trade, producing an ‘institutional shock’. To verify this, he emphasises the role of pagan religious rites in fostering ‘trust’ and promoting collaborative behaviour in mercantile communities with ‘honest signalling’ (pp. 31; 168–210).
The epilogue is a brief outline of the major incidents in the decline of the Roman state, where themes of globalisation, environmental change and religious violence resonate with modern socio-political concerns. T. endorses the view of K. Harper (The Fate of Rome [2017]) that ‘waves of deadly pathogens and a deteriorating climate joined forces, ultimately to overwhelm the Roman Empire’ (p. 211), but introduces the possibility of a change in religious policy, ‘aggravating an already adverse situation’ (p. 169). Accordingly, the state's forced promotion of cultic uniformity had a negative impact on the economy by damaging mercantile social cohesion and harming long-distance commerce by upsetting ‘the private-order equilibrium’ (pp. 173; 209). These are promoted as ‘a major case’ and ‘in line with standard Neo-Institutional thinking’ (p. 227). T. cites well-documented instances of religious violence against pagan sanctuaries in Gaza, Alexandria and Rome.
Overall, T.’s socio-economic approach to history is inhibited by a lack of quantitative evidence regarding scale, commercial value or tax revenues that might qualify or conceptualise his selected studies. There are also issues with the concluding study of Roman decline. A multiplicity of factors affected Roman economics beyond religious violence, for example Sassanid, Palmyrene, Gothic and Hunnic conflicts. This book has value by encouraging a wider approach to the study of how trade was organised in antiquity. In future, similar studies combining socio-historic approaches and quantifiable evidence could provide important new insights.
