previous century.^1 Although his name is less frequently evoked today in
the context of classical antiquity than it is in connection with medieval
history and the‘Protestant ethic’, Weber’s endorsement of key concepts
developed by some of his predecessors continued to have a profound
impact on twentieth-century economic historians—the notion of the
‘consumer city’; the‘rationalism’of certain industrial processes; and,
above all, in the notion of a limited form of‘capitalism’, limited, that
is, by certain institutional and social phenomena, specifically the exist-
ence of slavery, and the breaks put on exports by the ideology of the
propertied élite. Moses Finley approvingly underscored these aspects of
Weber’s analysis, although he was disinclined to use the term‘capitalism’
in any form, however limited. According to Finley,‘the strong drive to
acquire wealth was not translated [in classical antiquity] into a drive to
create capital; stated differently, the prevailing mentality was acquisitive
but not productive.’^2 He therefore argued forcefully that analogies with
other, more recent historical periods of European history were mis-
guided and wrong-headed. Yet that is precisely what Finley was doing
himself, by emphasizing the supposedly profound differences between
ancient subsistence patterns and ‘modern’ capitalism, to the virtual
exclusion of any other theoretical approaches to historical economies.
During the course of the last century, there has been a great tempta-
tion, when thinking about exchange in the remote past, to imagine a
world blighted by ignorance, primitivism, and lack of change. This is to
apply criteria and expectations of progress appropriate mainly for the
last two hundred years to all earlier periods, as if the process of industri-
alization explained ancient and medieval forms of subsistence as well as
more recent ones. The historians of the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century, who were most influential in formulating concepts about the
economies of antiquity—Werner Sombart, Johannes Hasebroek, and
subsequently Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, and Moses Finley—were mainly
concerned with differentiating those characteristics that were considered
to have formed the origins of modern capitalist economies from what
came before them.^3 The context of these discussions was rooted in more
(^1) Morley 2009, 31–9 for discussion of the historical context of Weber’s approach; Nafissi
2005, 17–20 and 91–130, for a more detailed analysis of Weber’s ideas about ancient
economies; Hodgson 2001, esp. 178–231 for the‘ahistorical’turn from Talcott Parsons to
John Maynard Keynes.
(^2) Finley 1985 [1999] 144; Finley citing Weber approvingly: 26, 117, 122, 125, 138–9, 182,
192.
(^3) Morris in Finley 1985[1999], ix–xxxii; cf. also I. Morris and J. G. Manning,‘Introduc-
tion’, in Manning and Morris 2005, 1–44; W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. Saller,‘Introduc-
tion’,CEHGRW 1 – 12; Bresson 2007, 8–26 with further analysis.
86 Societies and economies