Jack Goody has spent much of the latter part of his remarkable career trying to shift European and North American perceptions of the past out of their deep-cut Eurocentric channel and, of course, it is daily more apparent that contemporary developments in the world are shifting the flow in his direction. His is now a far less lonely voice than when he started, as witness such books as Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now (2010). In The Theft of History (2006)^{Footnote 1} Goody attacked the historical basis of European exceptionalism and its appropriation of the emergence of the positively valued social institutions of democracy and capitalism, imposing “historical concepts and periods that have aggravated our understanding of Asia in a way that is significant for the future as well as for the past” (2006, 8). In his new book he takes the search for metals, from before the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution, as his framework, tracing its history and its role in creating connections between cultures in “East” and “West” that in Goody’s view belie the sharp distinctions between their social evolutionary trajectories that are conventionally made. He sees the Bronze Age as key because it can be taken as a “common origin” for developments in both the east and the west, thus avoiding the “divisive versions” of Eurasian history that he regards (rightly in my view) as so damaging. However, he is not solely concerned with metals. Other forms of production are also considered in passing, including ceramics and textile production, as well as the relation between production and exchange and the growth and spread of knowledge, especially literacy. Perhaps unsurprisingly given its very broad theme, the book is not as tightly argued as its predecessor and in detail it would have benefitted from stronger editing than it has received.

The book’s structure is basically a straightforward chronological one, though there is considerable temporal shifting within a number of the individual chapters, intended for the purpose of comparative analysis, but which can often be confusing. It starts with a review of Bronze Age metallurgy and with the needs of the growing cities and populations of Mesopotamia and their elites for metal resources that had to be obtained outside the region. The following more wide-ranging chapter on metals and society benefits greatly from being informed by Goody’s ethnographic experiences many years ago in Ghana. An examination of Late Bronze Age trade and the ideas that flowed with it leads into the Iron Age, with a particular emphasis on the importance of the new metal for warfare and on the role of the Roman Empire. Subsequent chapters cover the post-Roman period in Europe and the Near East, with a diversion into China covering the development of metallurgy and other industries from the beginning of the Bronze Age to the construction of cast-iron pagodas in the early centuries CE. Chapters on the revival of European and Mediterranean metal production and trade in the medieval period, in particular the role of Venice, then lead to a review of the growth of iron production and the Industrial Revolution. An overview chapter at the end draws the themes together. It reasserts Goody’s view that from the beginning of the Bronze Age Eurasia was linked, from east to west, by flows of materials, technologies and religious ideas, the direction of the current changing from one period to the next and with numerous eddies along the way. He criticizes Wallerstein for making a qualitative distinction between the core-periphery relations of the modern world system and everything that preceded it, but also finds the idea of core and periphery unhelpful for the “Age of Metals” that he has just reviewed because it “seems to solidify relations in a defined way by making these situations permanent or semi-permanent” (286). In other words, long-standing Western uniqueness must be rejected.

It makes sense to take metals as a framework for a large-scale, long-term interactionist history. From the very beginning they were always valuable enough to have been exchanged, like high quality stone before them, and therefore provided a basis for links between different societies.

Insights into what was already going on in the Bronze Age are given by ancient shipwrecks. Famously, the ship of probable Syrian origin that sank at Uluburun off the southern coast of Turkey around 1300 BCE was carrying around 10 tons of copper ingots from Cyprus and a ton of tin from an unknown but non-European source. Some of the copper ingots were of a distinctive 2-handled form which it has been suggested were intended for specially designed saddles for pack animals. The cargo also included 150 “Canaanite jars,” many containing terebinth pine resin, amounting to a ton altogether, as well as 175 glass ingots, logs of blackwood from Africa and elephant tusks. Equally interesting was the presence of several sets of balance weights, presumably indicating that some of those aboard the ship were merchants. Although the scale was different, such finds are not restricted to the Mediterranean. A wreck dating to c.1200-900 BCE found recently off the coast of Devon in southern England contained 259 copper and 27 tin ingots, over 80 kilos of metal altogether, shown by analysis to be from a number of different European sources. Such finds are strongly in favour of Goody’s view of the scale and significant commercial nature of Bronze Age trade. Unfortunately, evidence for the donkey caravans that must have criss-crossed the ancient Near East is much less visible.

It is impossible for me to do a comprehensive review of this book, lacking as I do Goody’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the many periods, regions and sources that he covers. He acknowledges in the introduction that he is bound to have got specific things wrong and this is certainly true for the periods and areas I know about, so presumably it is also the case for those about which I know much less. Many of the references are recent but some date back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s and do not reflect current views or the present state of factual knowledge. There are also some striking omissions, such as Spufford’s (1988)^{Footnote 2} outstanding book on medieval money, which addresses many of the same themes as Goody for its period. The question is, does this matter? I don’t think it does, or at least not very much.

As archaeological finds continue to accumulate at an ever increasing rate, the evidence increasingly supports Goody’s interactionist view of long-term Eurasian history rather than contradicting it, both in terms of material movements and cultural connections. Recently, for example, Nickel (2009)^{Footnote 3} has suggested that the life-size ceramic sculptures of the famous Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi were a result of Hellenistic influence from Central Asia as there was no prior tradition of life-size sculpture in China, while Kohl’s book, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (2007)^{Footnote 4}, documents the enormous scale of production and consumption of bronze tools and weapons across the Steppe region by the time of the Late Bronze Age, incidentally criticising Gordon Childe’s (1942)^{Footnote 5} argument, to which Goody subscribes, that iron metallurgy, because of the increased local availability of ore sources “democratised agriculture and industry and warfare.”

Childe is one of the inspirations of this book, as of “The Theft of History” (Goody 2006) before it. His synthetic books of the first half of the 20^th century brought together current knowledge of the ancient Near East and of prehistoric Europe, presenting evidence of extensive networks of exchange across Bronze Age Eurasia, arguing that the social and technological developments of “civilisations” and the “barbarian” societies around them were linked together through “the irradiation of European barbarism by European civilization” (Childe 1925^{Footnote 6}). However, it is worth noting that Childe was just as Eurocentric in many respects as any of those Goody criticizes; indeed, his final book, The Prehistory of European Society, is subtitled, “How and why the prehistoric barbarian societies of Europe behaved in a distinctively European way” and he begins it by saying: “The central object of this book is to show that even in prehistoric times barbarian societies in Europe behaved in a distinctively European way, foreshadowing, however dimly, the contrast with African or Asiatic societies that has become manifest in the last thousand years” (1958^{Footnote 7}, 9). For Childe this is why the European Bronze Age was important. Although, on his view, copper and bronze metallurgy were introduced to Europe as a result of the need for raw materials on the part of the urban societies of the Near East, the latter became stagnant and despotic while European Bronze Age communities were small and competitive and it was never possible for one to become dominant over large areas. The result was that bronze workers could not gain a living from being tied to a single chief, but nor could they be tied down by them. They had to be itinerant, and local leaders had to accept this because they needed both their expertise and the raw materials from which their products were made. Their mobility led to freedom from “the more rigid fetters of tribal custom” because they could see that things were done differently in different places. These small-scale competitive societies continued right through until the medieval and post-medieval ancestors of modern nation states in those parts of Europe not dominated by the Roman Empire, and re-emerged there too when the Empire collapsed, according to Childe. He concludes the book stating that, “The metics at Athens, the wayfaring journeymen of the Middle Ages, and the migrant craft unionist of the 19^th century are the lineal descendants of the itinerants just described” (19588^{Footnote 8}, 173). These ideas of Childe’s are overlooked by Goody in his concern to take his work as a starting point for his own arguments.

The word in Goody’s title that I have not yet touched on is “capitalism,” and here too he continues the message of The Theft of History, where he concludes the chapter on the theft of capitalism thus, “Can we not therefore dispense with this pejorative term drawn from 19^th century Britain and recognize the element of continuity in the market and in bourgeois activities from the Bronze Age until modern times” (211). The tide of recent work is with him in this respect too. The insistence of Polanyi and Finley and their many anthropological followers on a major break between pre-modern and modern forms of transaction has been increasingly rejected. However, here, I think, we see one of the shortcomings of Goody’s approach. His is not really an economic history and would be better if it had been. The main impetus for the recent reassessment of ancient economies has been the “new institutional economics” (e.g. North 1981^{Footnote 9}), which analyses the links between institutional forms, not least the rules of exchange transactions, and organisations in societies. In doing so it provides an explanatory framework to account for change in those relationships and this it seems to me is what Goody lacks; indeed, he shows no awareness of relevant major works produced within this framework such as the recent Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Scheidel et al. 2007^{Footnote 10}). He provides us with a broad history that achieves his aim of undermining assumptions of Western superiority, but it lacks a sense of dynamism, and only tracing “the element of continuity” does not do justice to the co-evolving relations between institutions and organisations in the broad history of metal production and its impact that he describes.