Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDebt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East is a remarkable book. Weisweiler and his colleagues expand the very notion of what the study of the ancient economy can reveal. The more capacious view afforded by anthropology opens our eyes to the embedding of economic thought and conduct in matrices of social relations and systems of value of enormous complexity. At the same time, the chronological and geographic ambition of the work endows it great conceptual and comparative significance. One senses the enriching of an entire field. * Clifford Ando, University of Chicago *
This book is the first to draw attention to Graeber's Debt as a major text for the study of pre-modern economies, and makes a compelling case that we should be reading it alongside Finley, Polyani, Weber and now Piketty. * Kimberly Bowes, University of Pennsylvania *
This is a fascinating volume, which tests some of Graeber's main theses on the link between coins, debt and slavery in the Axial Age. Although Graeber opposed the paradigm of New Institutional Economics that stable institutions protecting private property are more favorable to growth, the volume fully acknowledges the role of markets in ancient societies. The point of the various papers of this volume is not simply to illustrate Graeber's views, but rather to show how they can fruitfully inspire new research. We should be grateful to John Weisweiler for putting together this splendid and thought-provoking volume. * Alain Bresson, University of Chicago *
Offers a compelling discussion of modern assumptions of the universality of notions of value and economic behaviour...; Above all, the book shows the value of Graeber's work as an 'explanation framework,' as framed by Weisweiler, for the study of the roles of debt and money in the shaping of human relationships and for rethinking ancient and early medieval economic thought. The book is nicely dedicated to David Graeber's memory in a posthumous recognition of the importance of his work. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
Table of ContentsPreface 1 The Currency-Slavery-Warfare Complex: David Graeber and the History of Value in Antiquity John Weisweiler 2 Beyond Debt: Markets and Morality in First-Millennium-BCE Babylonia Reinhard Pirngruber 3 Cosmic Debt in Greece and India Richard Seaford 4 Private Debts in Classical Greece: Bond of Friendship, Curse of hatred? Moritz Hinsch 5 Debt, Death, and Destruction in Ancient Rome Lisa Eberle 6 The Poetics and Politics of Exchange in Roman Agronomy Neville Morley 7 Monetization, Marketization and State Formation: The Later Roman Empire as an Axial Age Economy John Weisweiler 8 Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber's Late Axial Age Richard Payne 9 Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy Michael Bonner 10 Debt's Fourth Millennium Seen From Below: How Papyri Modify the Picture Arietta Papaconstantinou 11 After the Axial Age: Debt and Obligation in the European Early Middle Ages Alice Rio 12 Afterword Keith Hart
