Economic and social history can sometimes seem static, focused on the description and analysis of structures that lasted more or less unchanged for decades or centuries. Ancient peasant farming practices changed remarkably little in a thousand years, Roman merchants relied on the same form of maritime loan as the fourth-century Athenians, and changes in the system of client-patron relations in Rome took place over a century or more; in general, this is an ideal topic for those with a poor memory for exact dates.
However, although it developed in explicit opposition to traditional event-focused political and military history, economic and social history is not uninterested in change; but it focuses on what it regards as the real causes of events. One of the clearest expositions of this approach was put forward by the French historian Fernand Braudel, who characterized the different speeds of historical time through an oceanic metaphor (1980; cf. P. Burke 1990). At the surface there are many waves and much activity, but these are driven largely by the tides and deeper currents; just so, the “history of events” catches our attention - it is, after all, history at the human scale, focused on individuals - but what really determines the development of a society is change at the level of social and economic structures, shaping and constraining the freedom of action of individuals and establishing the limits of what is possible. We can narrate the establishment of the Athenian democracy or the fall of the Roman republic in terms of the actions and choices of a few aristocrats, but to understand these events properly we have to see how they were shaped and propelled by deeper changes and developments, taking place over decades or centuries, of which the actors were only vaguely aware. Below this level is the “long term,” the deep ocean currents of the almost changeless environment, which has shaped and set limits on social and economic structures - as, for example, ancient agricultural practices were influenced by the particular conditions of the Mediterranean.
Social and economic historians focus on changes in the medium and long term, in the belief that these are more significant for understanding the development of the ancient world than short-term events. They then tend to display preferences for economic explanations over social ones, or vice versa. Ultimately, however, the task is interdisciplinary and integrative; to show how different structures and processes interact, and to show how the different levels of historical time influence one another. The key question is always to understand the nature and dynamics of change, and to identify the best intellectual tools for this purpose. As ancient historians have, over the last decade or so, become frustrated with the limitations of the old primitivist-modernizer debate, so they have started to draw on ideas from a wider range of disciplines to illuminate antiquity: for example, from ecology, demography and other material sciences, which provide a deeper understanding of the physical and biological contexts of historical developments; from anthropology and sociology, offering more detailed and subtle readings of the ways that economic and social behavior is embedded in culture; and from new developments in economic theory, such as the New Institutional Economics, that offer a more sophisticated interpretation of the relationship between “the economy” and the rest of society. Each approach, of course, presents itself as the best way of making sense of the past; ancient economic and social history will continue to be a subject of fierce debate for the foreseeable future.
World History
