Ostensibly, this is a rather ambitious attempt to grasp the fundamental structure of ancient economies on a global basis, in a few hundred pages, by a single author; and the context of his project is extremely clear: for Hirth,

This implies a clear historical and conceptual approach: respect for contemporary economic thought, yet avoiding contentions that history is irrelevant to economic theory and endorsing the New Archaeology's concepts of utilitarian, convergent, social evolution. His emphasis is on households (passim), with social developments potentially more important than technology. This seems serious, scholarly, eclectic, original and promising. Unfortunately, Hirth does not really deliver the relevant ancient economies promised—generally because he concentrates on the New World rather than the Old, but his orientation was the right one.

Hirth offers chapters devoted to economic structure and domestic, community and household aspects, allowing a pivot to institutional finance, fiscal and rentier behaviour, merchants and trade, crafts, and markets and marketplaces, culminating in “First Principles” (p. 317). These are followed by endnotes, a glossary, bibliography and index. The volume's structure is systematic and comprehensive, without chronological or geographic bias.

It is impossible to summarise Hirth's vast panorama briefly. The basic argument grasps long-term human economic history in terms of household autarky whereby examples from the Aztecs and Incas dominate and ancient China, Egypt, Greece, the Maya, Rome and Sumer are peripheral. Hirth does not consider pre-modern Spanish sovereign debt and Italian bankers relevant, but various Modern Africans, Dutch, English, German emigrants, and other Italian businessmen apparently are.

At the outset, Hirth hints that he is venturing into new terrain, contrasting a seeming absence of synthetic studies of ancient economies to “the voluminous work of countless economic anthropologists” (p. 9). And at the end of the book Hirth again remarks that “the ancient economy is rarely studied for its own merit” (p. 318). This is surprising as—even though he missed a lot, and did not use what he found—the bibliography of the volume lists a fair number of specialist studies on ancient economies. Yet this very work is denied when—in his conclusions—he once again suggests a dearth of studies.

One of Hirth's contentions regarding the Mesopotamian economy is that the “broad economic strategy” of the institutions “was one of self-sufficiency” (p. 323). Mesopotamian records and behaviour, however, both confirm that Bronze Age Near Eastern institutional, industrial-scale, labour-intensive, textile production was export-oriented in order to acquire silver. We read that linen was replaced by wool “because of its lower labor requirements” (p.121), but no evidence is cited and Bronze Age Egypt neglected. Hirth contends that those who confuse compulsory labour with taxation in goods miss a “fundamental and important point” (p. 116), but this claim is not fully supported or explored. This approach allows Hirth to neglect the ancient prebends and textile production, aside from the entire services sector—all of which determined the behaviour of the households to whom he assigns a central role.

Hirth's approach to ancient economies views trade as an activity necessary to acquire essential materials, rather than one dedicated to monetary profits (although literature that demonstrates the emphasis on profit in antiquity is cited). The author's view is perhaps skewed by his focus on goods, which results in a rather unbalanced representation of commercial trade and economic activity in antiquity. This leads him to critique the work of others such as David Graeber for creating “a type of marketplace that never existed” (p. 330). Although Hirth's criticism of Graeber might conceivably be justified in some way, he avoids criticising the scholars of antiquity on which Graeber's work is based. Despite acknowledging these scholars, there is an unfortunate reliance on work dealing with relatively recent (rather than truly ancient) economies in Hirth's work that obscures some of the commercial and financial development that occurred in ancient economies—of which there is relatively little discussion.

In ancient China, the state collected taxes in silk produced by households whose members could not afford silk because the households in the ancient urban civilisations were always the pawns of the markets and the elite. The undervalued silks were then used by the Chinese state in its trade with other states. As a result, more than 2000 years ago (before the state-sponsored Silk Road), Chinese diplomats venturing abroad were amazed to find their own household-produced silks being traded for silver on markets far beyond their own borders. This evidently commercial nature of ancient economies—which held households in check—is missing from the volume under review.

There are some frustrating inaccuracies in the illustrated maps, which show only a limited number of places. Among the few place-names shown, ancient Sippar, Babylon and Kish are all located on the wrong side of the Tigris (p. xix); another map situates the contemporary !Kung people at a lonely spot seemingly in the Kalahari (p. xxiii), but in the text they are reported as “northwest” (p. 54) of that; Zhengzhou is consistently misspelled (pp. xx & 131). The map of the Americas is better.

It is a pity that more emphasis was not given to the long-term historical development of economies over 10 000 years. Concentrating on the ancient and pre-modern economies of the Old World that contributed to the continuous development of what we know as the existing world economy would, indeed, have allowed Hirth to reach the goal anticipated at the start of the book, and this would, perhaps, have offered the reader a fuller understanding of the ancient economies—and their relationship to the contemporary world.