**Primitivists / Modernist debate** At its core this argument is about how one should compare ancient economics to modern ones. The Primitivists (e.g. Sir Moses Finley) argued that ancient economies were largely a byproduct of status and civic pressures. As a consequence, primitivists claimed that one should not analyze ancient economics with the same tools and assumptions we use for modern economies - e.g. markets ruled by law of supply and demand. Modernists, on the contrary, believed that ancient economies resembled in many ways present day economies, governed by many of the same pressures and subject to the same laws. Some key points presented by Finley in the Primitivist / Modernist debate: - Ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a sophisticated accounting system, necessary to regulate and operate a large free market economy. - The relationship of the ancients with labour was vastly different than our modern understanding due to the magnitude of the institution of slavery. - Finley argues that ancients largely didn’t view the ownership of land as an investment from which you can extract an income. Finley claims that in the ancient world, land ownership was mainly a way of enhancing one’s status. It is estimated that it would have taken 2,000 to 4,000 ship voyages each year to feed Rome at its peak - a city of roughly 500,000 to 1 million people. Given that this wasn’t organized by one centralized authority, it is entirely plausible that businessmen involved in this trade would want to insure their ventures in what was a relatively risky endeavor, vulnerable to pirates, storms, mutinies, theft, fraud and other perils. **Roman financial crisis of A.D. 33** This financial crisis occurred when a law requiring creditors to invest a portion of their capital in Italian lands was revived. One of the main purposes of this law was to mark the Italian peninsula as a unique area within the empire, by appealing to the notion—widespread among Rome’s elite—that Italian agriculture had been foundational to the Roman state and was still integral to Roman mores. The rush by creditors to buy land sparked a credit crunch. The author is referring to the monthly market reports in the summaries of Late Babylonian astronomical diaries. These diaries are a unique source of economic data. They are homogeneous; span 500 years; come from one site; and all but a few can be securely dated. These diaries contained notes about celestial phenomena, births, wind direction, weather, the level of the Euphrates but also about mundane things like the level of the prices of six main commodities: barley, dates, mustard, cardamon, sesame and wool.  ** Hadrian’s Wall ** Hadrian’s Wall is a Roman defensive barrier that guarded the northwestern frontier of the province of Britain from barbarian invaders. Emperor Hadrian went to Britain in AD 122 and, in the words of his biographer, “was the first to build a wall, 80 miles long, to separate the Romans from the barbarians.”.The initial construction of the wall took approximately six years.  *Table of monetary equivalences in Roman Empire*  **Diocletian’s Price Edict** Issued in AD 301, the price edict, which attempted to curb rampant inflation, stipulated maximum prices for more than 1200 products, raw materials, services, transport, animals and slaves. The prices ranged from 1 denarius for animal fodder to 150,000 denarii for a male lion. The edict was inscribed in stone slabs in a number of cities of the empire.  *Piece of the edict in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin* ** Roman Roads ** At the peak of Rome's development, the Roman road network consisted of over 400,000 kilometers of roads. Roads were often planned and undertaken by the Roman military engineers. Records from around 450BC show that the minimum width for a public road (a *via*) was 8 Roman feet (~2.37m).  *Network of Roman Roads* Polanyi's birth year was 1886. **Bronislaw Malinowski** (1884-1942) was one of the most celebrated and influential of early twentieth-century anthropologists. Malinowski spent almost two years in the Trobriand Islands studying a system of exchange based on shell jewellery. In his best-known work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski showed how the exchange of objects without any apparent use was a way of facilitating trade, negotiating status and extending relationships. The exchange functioned, Malinowski suggested, as a surrogate for warfare.  *Malinowski with Trobriand Islanders* **Size of Roman Empire**  At its greatest extent the Roman empire covered $5,000,000$ ${km}^2$. It would take over 47 days to cross it from Bracara Augusta (in modern day Portugal) to Jerusalem. [Here is an interactive map](http://orbis.stanford.edu/) that allows you to explore different routes in the Roman empire along with their cost and trip duration. Sir Moses Finley (1912-1986) was an American-born British classical scholar. Finley immigrated to Britain in 1955 and eventually became a professor of ancient history at University of Cambridge. His move to England was largely motivated by prosecution after having been accused of being a communist. Finley’s work had a tremendous impact in how scholars understood ancient economics.  *Sir Moses Finley* **Karl Polanyi** (1986 - 1964) was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist. In 1940 he moved to the United States and later became a professor of economics at Columbia University. Polanyi was not a conventional economist but was instead mostly concerned with the development of an overarching view of the functioning of economic relationships within different social frameworks. He produced three main works based on the theme of market economy as a special form of social organization: - *The Great Transformation (1944)* - where he presented the belief the type of market economy developed in the 19th century was so socially divisive that it wasn’t sustainable in the long term. - *Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957)* - in this book Polanyi inspects Ancient empires as nonmarket forms of society. - *Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966)* - where Polanyi analyzes the economic structure of a slave exporting state.  *Karl Polanyi*