This is an important, well-written book, by a historian specialised in Ancient Egypt. M.’s aim is to interweave several different economic narratives leading up to the unification of the Mediterranean under Rome as well as to set pre-modern Mediterranean economies in their social and environmental contexts.
The preface and first chapter deal with the history of studies and theories on ancient economies. The theories of distinguished scholars like F. Braudel, K.A. Wittfogel, M. Rostovtzeff, M.I. Finley and K. Polanyi are carefully reconsidered as the basis of a new debate on ancient production and consumption in the Mediterranean Basin. Special attention is paid to New Institutional Economics and to palaeoclimatological data as a source of evidence of economic transitions.
The second chapter focuses on the economic changes that characterised the passage from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the Mediterranean Basin. The importance of an interdisciplinary and critical approach to these complex phases of transformation is stressed by the significance attributed to archaeological evidence and to the increasing role of open databases and quantification of ancient economies in scholarship.
Chapter 3 introduces the debate concerning the Mediterranean space and its periodisation. M. clearly states that, to understand better cultural and trade interaction across the Mediterranean Basin, we should also consider the main historical and environmental changes in the surrounding regions, i.e. the Indian Ocean, Western Asia and the Nile Valley. Local environmental and climatic changes are identified as causes of local institutions or political collapse.
One example is provided by the landscape of Ancient Egypt, where the Nile flood regime strongly influenced political organisation. The average gradient of the river is almost flat (about 1 m in 10 km), which made navigation and water transport easy but did not allow extensive radial canalisation (with the exception of the Fayum area), which is why the Nile water system had always been managed at a local level. This influenced the entire Bronze Age history of Egypt, producing bottom-heavy social organisation: it was easy for the Pharaoh and his court to maintain military control of the whole Nile Valley, but it was the local elites, settled in villages, who in reality managed the irrigation of fields around the flood basin and controlled the payment of rent and taxes through local temples. Southern Mesopotamia, on the other hand, offered the possibility of radial canalisation thanks to the higher average gradients of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This soon necessitated a stronger centralisation of power, according to the well-known theory of Wittfogel, which was at least counterbalanced by the presence of many city-states.
The fourth chapter focuses on the organisation of labour for agricultural production. M. introduces many historiographical issues concerning slavery and wage labour, land productivity, land ownership and land reclamation in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, with some references to ancient Greece.
Chapter 5 deals with the use of natural archives for historical reconstruction. M. is well aware of the difficulties of such an approach, and he hopes for an increase in regional studies and in more detailed climate proxy records. Among many examples there is the problematic interpretation of two dramatic changes in the climate of the eastern Mediterranean area and their possible historical implications: a three centuries-long cooling and megadrought event, which took place around 2200 bc, and a similar phenomenon around 1200 bc, which could have played substantial roles as exogenous forces in the Bronze Age ‘collapse’.
The sixth chapter deals with the evidence for rational behaviour in economic affairs. After an interesting summary of the historiographical debate on the household as the basis of pre-modern societies, M. draws our attention to the exceptional source of knowledge for the history of ancient economies represented by the Hekanakht letters. These three ancient Egyptian papyri, dating back to 1950 bc, describe the management of rural estates in an area of Middle Egypt and are an important example of the sophistication of the household economy in the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. They were dictated by Hekanakht, an intermediate rural notable, and addressed to his household. In the texts we find evidence of the temporary employment of wage labour, the cultivation of barley and emmer, land leasing strategies, ownership of cattle and the taxation of grain. Calculations are expressed in monetary terms: textiles, copper and barley are commodities used as interconvertible media of exchange.
The complexity of pre-modern economies leads to a discussion of the possible role of the state in economic activities. M. rightly rejects the primitivist idea that states and markets were of no importance. In fact, he clearly emphasises the importance of ancient states in ruling economies in terms of improved security, the administration of revenues and, last but not least, warfare, which was perhaps the main expression of the state and which is rightly considered to be a structural part of pre-modern economies. This lesson from antiquity also obliges the reader to consider the extent to which war is still a mode of acquisition of local resources and a structural part of politics.
The seventh chapter deals with the economic impact of money, law and legal institutions. From a New Institutional Economics perspective, the development of private contractual agreements and private property rights are the pillars of real economic growth. M. focuses on the diffusion of coins from the sixth century onwards, in parallel with the development of trade institutions and laws concerning the sale of private property in the Near East, Greece and Egypt. The common thread is the role played by states in ruling the markets and the economies of their communities.
Chapter 8 focuses on growth, innovations, markets and trade. M. stresses the importance of the sixth century bc for the growth of trade and markets in the Near East, Greece and Egypt, and the rise of a kind of middle class in many states in the Mediterranean area.
The book is mainly based on evidence from Egypt and the Near East, due to the large availability of ancient administrative documents and thanks to M.’s expertise in ancient Egyptian texts. The central and western Mediterranean and Black Sea areas and their economic interactions with continental and Atlantic Europe are only mentioned cursorily, although the relevant literary, archaeological and epigraphic evidence from these areas could have corroborated or nuanced many of the book's theses (for instance, among recent works, B. Cunliffe, Facing the Oceans [2001]; K. Kristiansen, P. Suchowska-Ducke, ‘Connected Histories’, in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 81 [2015], 361–92; A. Naso [ed.], Etruscology [2017]; L. Donnellan et al. [edd.], Conceptualizing Early Colonization [2017]; V. Kozvsklaya [ed.], The Northern Black Sea in Antiquity [2017], with previous bibliography).
However, the importance of this book lies in its synthesis of theories on ancient economies and in the application of an interdisciplinary approach to ancient societies, in which environmental data are discussed together with literary and archaeological sources. Furthermore, the book contains an important summary of the theoretical debate concerning Near Eastern Mediterranean trade, production and consumption before the second century bc, within the framework of New Institutional Economics. For these reasons the work can be considered an important achievement in the history of Mediterranean studies.
