contracts, loans, bank deposit accounts, and various kinds of taxes, were
widespread within the time span examined here. But that rather broad
reference frame is where any analogy with more recent times ends.
The conceptual difficulties encountered by historians are rather
deeper than what may appear to contemporary onlookers as a minor
ideological diversion amongst scholars of equally remote times, whether
students of classical antiquity, or the Eurasian Middle Ages. Asfinancial
systems in the Atlantic world have seemed to falter alarmingly since
2008, the need for historical perspective has become imperative. Histor-
ical memory has acquired a relevance that has often been lacking in
conventional analyses of contemporaryfinancial systems.^46 What is less
clear is the depth of time that may be relevant for understanding the
relationship between present and past economic phenomena. Since the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, politicians, writers, and economists,
as well as historians, have used examples from classical antiquity to draw
very different conclusions about the relationship between the modern
world and its antecedents. The observations of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, about the value or otherwise of
confronting the ancient past with their own eras, could not be more
starkly different.^47 One of the reasons why it was possible for commen-
tators to take such different positions was the fact that individual aspects
of past economies, whether the existence of slavery, or the extraordin-
arily creative character of artistic production, were features of classical
antiquity considered largely in isolation from other economic pheno-
mena. Karl Marx likened ancient slavery to the‘plantation economy’of the
antebellum United States rather than with early modern Europe.^48 This
admission shows that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians
found it difficult to locate ancient slaves into a formal theoretical frame-
work that would help contemporary readers to differentiate between
ancient and more recent forms of slavery. Ancient slaves in many cases
enjoyed a social intimacy with free men and women that was wholly
different from more recent forms of enforced servitude. If we want to
think about the significance of slavery within the wider economy, then
(^46) Cf. Ferguson 2008, 362:‘When we withdraw banknotes from automated telling
machines, or invest portions of our monthly salaries in bonds and stocks, or insure our
cars, or remortgage our homes, or renounce home bias in favour of emerging markets, we
are entering into transactions with many historical antecedents.’
(^47) Morley 2009, 31–9 (on David Ricardo and early modern economists); 50–4, 66–9, 123
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau); 39–44, 146–8, 150–6 (on Karl Marx); 82–3, 88, 92–6, 101–13,
13148 – 2, 142–5 (on Nietzsche).
Morley 2009, 42–3 with discussion, citing K. Marx,Kapital, III [1894] inMarx-Engels
Werke, 25, Berlin, 1983, 795.
26 Introduction