Dedicated to the French economic historian Jean Andreau, who is well known for his publications on Roman banking practices, this volume offers 22 comprehensively referenced chapters on ancient economic history. The scope is broad, spanning roughly a millennium from the fifth century b.c. to the fifth century a.d., and with subject matter covering everything from the ancient ideological reception of the shoe-making profession to the economic impact and nature of ancient slavery. The book is somewhat awkwardly divided into six main sub-topics: (1) historiography and economic structure, (2) the agrarian economy, (3) money, price and taxation, (4) commerce and markets, (5) social status and the status of work, (6) writing and demography. Aside from a two-page note outlining the honorand's career achievements, along with a comprehensive bibliography of his published work to date, little is offered in terms of a general introduction. An understanding of the current theoretical state of Continental scholarship on ancient economics is left to H. Bruhns in the opening chapter.

Taking a critical but reflective stance Bruhns discusses the dangers of an economic ‘science’ that claims to be universally applicable (recently advocated by a group of scholars originating at the University of Bordeaux and headed by A. Bresson, who faces the brunt of the critique). Bruhns countenances against forgetting the important theoretical heritage of figures such as Sir Moses Finley and in particular Max Weber, whom he argues Bresson and others have either misread or deliberately caricatured. Following a brief interpretative essay on the economy of the Late Empire by P. Garnsey, the central issue of what constitutes a market economy, returned to by Finley in his ‘Further Thoughts’ chapter added to the second edition of The Ancient Economy (1985), is deftly sidestepped by J.-Y. Grenier in an interesting comparison of the market behaviour of ancient Rome, illustrated with examples from seventeenth/eighteenth-century England and China.

One of the strengths of the volume is its broad range of contributors and subject matter, defying reduction to any single theme or methodological approach. Having said this, it is also clear that the editors have opted chiefly for inclusiveness rather than elegance of composition, with a small number of the papers sitting rather awkwardly among their neighbours. A good number do, however, complement each other well, and while it is not possible to mention all the ways in which the volume functions successfully in this regard, it will be sufficient to give a number of examples.

The strongest complementarity exists between two excellent papers in Section 4, examining the literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence for the functioning of the Gallic ports of Narbonne and Arles during the High Empire. The connections between economy, trade and power are particularly well documented in these papers. M.-L. Bonsague, for example, mentions a member of the elite owning both amphora workshops in Baetica, where olive oil was produced and bottled, as well as estates in the hinterland of Narbonne, where a proportion of Baetican produce was distributed along the rivers Aude and Garonne. Later, a descendant of the same man became duumvir of Narbonne. The archaeological evidence of shipwreck cargoes is also brought in to demonstrate that ships originating in Baetica stopped at Narbonne, some taking on Gallic wine, before travelling on to Italy. N. Tran can replicate similar sorts of argument in connection with port activity at Arles. The point of departure is an extract from the Digest of Justinian referring to a slave involved in the oil trade at Arles during the second century a.d., and Tran's attempts to extrapolate from the financial goings on in Italy to the situation at the Gallic port connect his paper nicely with the theme of financial loans touched upon in Section 3.

In that section G. Bransbourg also examines the financial loans given by the Sulpicii during the mid-first century a.d. known to us thanks to a box of wax tablets discovered at the Italian port town of Puteoli in the mid-twentieth century. Bransbourg explores the possible rates of interest offered by such bankers in the records of the loans that enabled the purchase of several thousand modii of Alexandrian grain and vegetables. The other papers in this section are something of a mixed bag. J.-J. Aubert surveys the exiguous but interesting evidence for the ancient legal distinction between barter and sale. The decision to tackle the difficult legal terminology in English seems rather an odd one, but lucid statements do arrive in his conclusion (pp. 119–20). The same section includes discussion of the nature of a Late-Roman tax, the Chrysargyre, by J.-M. Carrié (much of which involves a thorough and rather laborious examination of the evidence for whether the tax was collected at five- or four-yearly intervals). Finally, a speculative but entertaining attempt to reconstruct the value of land in fifth-century b.c. Rome is undertaken by C. Viglietti.

Of the papers in the section on the agrarian economy those by L. Capogrossi and G.C. Mac Gaw, while very different in approach, draw similar conclusions about the state of research on Late Republican agriculture. Capogrossi acknowledges the continuing trend in research begun by M. Frederiksen. Models of the early and mid-twentieth century allowed for less continuity in the fortunes of the Italian smallholder, and a higher level of heterogeneity in the organisation of Italian agriculture is now accepted. For the reader wondering where this leaves the position of the great slave estate, so clearly testified in the agricultural treatises of the period, the chapter by Mac Gaw contains a reasonably thorough historiographical analysis which, although apparently overlooking entirely the recent Cambridge World History of Slavery (2011), draws similar conclusions to some of the papers contained in that volume. In the next chapter J. France focuses on the famous inscriptions of the Bagradas valley in modern day Tunisia, which were important for changing ideas about the prevalence of agricultural slavery in the provinces during the High Empire more than a century ago. France restricts himself to examining only those inscriptions relevant to the lex Hadriana de rudibus agris, ignoring those relating to the complaints of economic exploitation by the coloni under Commodus, which archaeologists now realise significantly coincided with the increased importation of African ceramics to Rome–Ostia.

The classic ‘economic’ passages of Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics do surface, although not necessarily for the usual reasons. In Section 4, R. Descat uses Aristotle's discussion of the comparability of weights and measures in the Nicomachean Ethics as the point of departure for an examination of the evidence for the complicated issue of weighing and measuring. He draws on the fourth-century b.c. Athenian law governing the collection of grain tax and various papyri from Egypt. In Section 5, M.-C. d'Ercole touches on Aristotle's discussion of the origin of money in the context of a thorough study of the literary and pictographic references to the profession of shoemaking.

There is much of value in the volume; despite some structural oddities it will be an important reference point for scholars in the field of the ancient economy in the coming years, providing an excellent counterpoint to the growing popularity of the various branches of post-war development economics. Indeed, for the Anglo-American scholar feeling somewhat beleaguered by the steady progress of neoliberal ideology in the study of the ancient economy this volume could well provide something of a palliative. The subject of economic growth focused on with increasing myopia in Anglo-American scholarship since the 1980s does predictably raise its head in Garnsey's chapter on the Late Empire, but one finds only the occasional use of modern economic jargon such as transaction costs, per capita income or GDP in the book. The type of scholarship concerning Bruhns in the opening chapter finds little representation here, despite an institutional approach having recently been advocated by one of the editors.