recent social and economic preoccupations, and particularly with the
distinctiveness of Western‘modernity’. Historians and sociologists who
took the long view of human history as their canvas were concerned with
ways of explaining or elucidating the relationships, and the many intel-
lectual and cultural facets, which connect‘antiquity’and‘modernity’;
terms that became the twin components in a rhetorical reflection on the
(largely unknowable) past.^4 What mattered most in such studies was the
way in which classical antiquity served as a foil to‘modernity’. The
authors were less interested in studying antiquity as a subject that
deserved to be explored on its own terms.
The early inventors of theories about ancient economies retain an aura
of authority, even though most of the ideas that they espoused no longer
inform the assumptions that contemporary scholars of classical antiquity
apply in their historical investigations. Historians today do not begin
with the individual household as the primeval nucleus of ancient soci-
eties, as one of the most eminent founding theorists, Werner Sombart,
did. The idea that all households and, by extension, whole communities,
focused their energies on being‘autarkic’, that is, not dependent on
others, has been turned inside out by studies of Mediterranean ecologies
(see further below). We no longer worry about whether ancient cities
were primarily centres of consumption rather than production, whilst
accepting that civic centres were the main loci of élite expenditure.^5
Nevertheless, there are other aspects of economic behaviour isolated by
nineteenth-century historians that continue to generate intense debate.
Members of the so-called German ‘historical’ school, such as
J. K. Rodbertus and Gustav von Schmoller, justifiably objected to key
aspects of‘classical’economic theory (as propounded by Adam Smith
and David Ricardo). They were unhappy with what they saw as mech-
anistic processes, in which abstract‘market’principles were given free
rein, without consideration of circumstances. Although some of the ideas
developed by these late nineteenth-century historians have not stood the
test of time (such as their notion of quasi-autonomous domestic econ-
omies, or about gratuitous gift exchange), their fundamental objections
to impersonal economic drivers have gathered support from a variety of
quarters and in some respects have become far more significant than the
authors themselves could ever have imagined. Other topics explored by
(^4) Morley 2009 provides a rich discussion.
(^5) Finley 1985 [1999] 192–3 and cf. Morris, ibid., xvi–xviii; see the contributions to
Parkins and Smith 1998;CEHGRW 82 – 3, 405–6, 546; 578, 669. For an extended analysis of
Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, and Moses Finley, as well as their predecessors in the German
‘historical’school, Nafissi 2005; Bresson 2007, 10–17.
Societies and economies 87