If there is a common refrain that has characterized much recent scholarship on the economy of ancient Greece, it is that it is misleading to think of an autonomous economic sphere. So, for example, Moses Finley, one of the most influential ancient economic historians of the twentieth century, argued that it was only possible to study the ancient economy because of reasons that had nothing to do with the economy. Finley’s seemingly paradoxical conclusion can only truly be understood when set against two long-running theoretical debates on the subject - namely, that between modernists and primitivists and that between formalists and substantivists.
The primitivist-modernist debate is sometimes also known as the Bucher-Meyer controversy after the two German historians who first tackled the issue of the ancient economy. Karl Bucher (1847-1930), adopting an explicitly evolutionist point of view, argued that various national economies had passed through three different stages: in antiquity, there had existed only closed household economies, whereas the Middle Ages had been characterized by city economies, and the modern period by national economies. For “primitivists,” there were therefore important structural differences between the economies of the present and those of the past. By contrast, the view that the ancient economy had been primitive and focused on relatively small households whose primary concern was subsistence held little appeal for historians such as Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), whose more modernist understanding of the ancient economy was not entirely unconnected from their belief that Ancient Greece had impor-
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Tant lessons to teach the Germans concerning political unification. Meyer explicitly professed that the economy of Greece corresponded to fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Europe and, for the modernists who followed in his tracks, ancient economies differed from modern ones only in scale rather than in substance.
The Bucher-Meyer debate would probably have played itself out relatively quickly had it not become entangled in a complementary - though not identical - debate between formalists and substantivists. Formalists regard the economy as a functionally segregated, autonomous sphere of activity, characterized by the existence of a market in which actors adopt rational strategies in order to maximize their profits. By contrast, substantivists, influenced in great part by the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), examine the political, social, and cultural institutions that guarantee the provision and satisfaction of material needs and regard the economy as “embedded” within society. Polanyi and many of his followers believed that a formalist approach could only be practiced in the case of industrialized modern economies, while embedded economies were typical of pre-industrial societies, thus seemingly mapping the substantivist-formalist opposition onto the primitivist-modernist divide. In reality, however, the correlation is not entirely satisfactory. One could, for example, argue that the economy of the Archaic Greek world was indeed embedded in social and political relations while still entertaining a conception of it as involving economic transactions that extended well beyond individual households.
Finley’s The Ancient Economy, first published in 1973, has proved to be one of the most seminal contributions to the subject. An attendee of Polanyi’s seminars at Columbia University, Finley was also influenced greatly by the works of the sociologist Max Weber as well as by Johannes Hasebroek, who, in 1928, had argued that ancient Greek cities lacked economic policies because trade was in the hands of a non-citizen merchant class of outsiders. In Finley’s view, the principal aim of the ancient economy was self-sufficiency based primarily on agricultural production. Trade accounted for only a tiny proportion of the gross product because production exhibited few variations from place to place, transportation costs were high, there was not a sufficient market for the luxury goods that were in circulation, and the status of traders was low. Echoing Weber’s distinction between the “consumer” cities of antiquity and the “producer” cities of the Middle Ages, Finley characterized the ancient polis as a center of consumers who paid for what they needed to subsist by extracting rents, taxes, and tributes from the rural hinterland that the urban center controlled.
Finley’s position continues to exert considerable influence today - even to the extent that there have been many calls to lay the old primitivist-modernist and formalist-substantivist debates to rest. Yet scholarly opinion has hardly remained static in the thirty years or so since The Ancient Economy was published and, although few would now adopt an extreme modernist or formalist position, some scholars have voiced the suspicion that Finley may have underestimated the complexity of the ancient economy. So, for example, recognition of market exchange in Ancient Greece has provoked debate as to whether or not markets were interdependent and some economic historians have considered it profitable to apply analyses from modern economics even as they admit that the scale and nature of the ancient economy were very different from that of today. One such recent approach is that of New Institutional Economics, which focuses on the role institutions play in encouraging more efficient economic behavior by reducing “transaction costs” (i. e. the energy and effort required to secure accurate information about the availability and value of a commodity). Although more commonly applied to the better-documented Roman Empire, it is an approach that has been employed to explain the appearance of regional monetary currencies in the Archaic Greek world (pp. 279-80). In the remainder of this chapter, we shall seek to explore just how embedded or underdeveloped the economy of the Archaic Greek world was.
World History
