Description: In this, the first comprehensive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. The approach taken is both thematic, with chapters on the underlying determinants of economic performance, and chronological, with coverage of the whole of the Greek and Roman worlds extending from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The contributors move beyond the substantivist-formalist debates that dominated twentieth-century scholarship and display a new interest in economic growth in antiquity. New methods for measuring economic development are explored, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately. Fully accessible to non-specialist, the volume represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilisation of the classical Mediterranean world possible.
Brief description: Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His publications include Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire (1996), Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001) and, as editor, Debating Roman Demography (2001) and The Ancient Economy (2002, with Sitta von Reden).
Review Quotes: "By presenting current scholarship and its prospective future course, the editors have produced a very important work. Prodigious bibliography (148 pages). Summing up: Highly recommended."
--Choice