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Book Reviews M. I. FINLEY, The Ancient Economy. Chatto & Status among the senatorial aristocracy, in- Windus, 1973.22z pp. Map. £3.5o. deed, prevented them from engaging in com- Professor Finley is an image-breaker and his merce in the accepted sense, ready as they were writing is caustic and salutary, nor would I to acquire wealth by grant, purchase, conquest, care to quarrel with lfis surgical analysis of the or confiscation. Precisely this attitude it was, ancient economy. He points out that the tlfinks Finley, wlfich explains the absence of modern conceptions of economy did not exist any drive to increased productivity by tech- among the Greeks and Romans, not because nical innovation. But the agriculture of file they were fools, but because the economic large estates was not simple subsistence agri- structure of their societies was different, in that culture, for they produced large incomes--and it did not constitute "an enormous conglo- there's the rub. The aristocratic status attitude, meration of interdependent markets" (P.oll). nevertheless, was also one of the factors deter- The rest of the book is virtuallyan essaywritten mining the non-productive character of the to demonstrate the reasons for this: the lack of ancient city; Finley follows Max Weber in a conception of the relationslfips and trends to stating that the ancient towns were primarily be deduced from statistics, the absence of a centres of consumption, and in those which system of plamled investment involving cal- were entrep6ts of trade the merchants were culations of costs, labour output, overheads, predominantly foreigners and non-citizens. transport, and the state of the market, wlfich In treating of labour, Finley points out that did not exist on a world scale. A major factor the term "slave" covers a number of differing blocking the development of a world market categories, from the convict labourer in the was the expense and difficulty of transport mines to the rural helot and the slave carrying (Finley nfight have done well to mention on an independent business for his master. here the researches of Lefebvre des No~ttes); It was the status-revolution in the later Korean hence all the cities which attained exception- Empire, which by levelling the poorer citi- al size were near the sea or close to navig- zenry down to the same status as the tied tenant able water-ways--Athens and Rome alone and the serwts casatus, reduced the greater part subsisted on grain imported from any dis- of the rural population to dependent involun- tance. tary labour, and this development was rapid There were also psycho-social obstacles: the in proportion as the sources of slavery dwin- Graeco-rZoman attitude favoured wealth but dled. Moreover, the gruelling taxation of the saw agriculture arid land primarily as the basis late empire could not be passed on by the big of leisure; liberty was the freedom from the landlords to slaves, but it could be passed on necessity of working physically. The Greek to coloni. prohibition which prevented non-citizens Examining tenurial and rural problems, from holding land restricted credit because Finley finds that statistics on the size of hol- the non-citizens, who conducted the lion's dings are scarce and unreliable but he tlfinks share of trade and manufacture, could not lend that on the whole small holdings were un- on mortgage. Nor in Rome did the equites rentable because of the surplus of small- constitute in toto a business class; only a holders' sons who had to be employed on minority of them were publicans, contractors, them. Large landowners, on the other hand, and moneylenders; the equites no less than the seeing land as the basis of leisure and nn- senators, as Finley observes in his chapter on interested in increased production, a quick 'Order and Status', were landowners; there turnover of capital, or the exchange of goods, was little correspondence between class (in were under no impulse to improve their terms of wealth) arid economic function on estates. the one hand, and social status on the other. As to the cities, Finley's major problem is 63 64 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW to explain how they paid for those needs not which may possess major implications. In furnished by the agriculture conducted by analysing concepts differing in oriental and their landowlfing citizens and their tenants? Graeco-lkoman society, Finley states that His answer is, by agricukural produce arid by "the word 'freedom' cannot be translated invisible exports--tourism (I assume that into any ancient near-Eastern language, in- includes cult-income) and re-exports. No cluding Hebrew." Whether or not the matter single ancient city, wrote Hulme (Finley con- is relevant, it is desirable to correct this mis- curring), attained importance by virtue of its statement for the sake of numerous potential manufactures .The establishmentof the P,.oman readers. There are three words in Hebrew for Empire, states Finley, led to urban growth as freedom, the earliest of which occurs in a means of increasing services, but not of en- Leviticus, the latest on coins of A.D. 70. larging urban production, and urban revenue Finley defines Mediterranean as a unified was never invested to increase it. In medieval region of light-soil agriculture--perhaps too Europe the rural nobility were consumers of sweeping a statement, as an examination of the urban products; not so in the R.oman the ancient occupation of the red soils, the Empire. As the latter developed, crafts- rendzinas, and the alluviums of some ancient centres were withdrawn more and more to Mediterranean countries might show. The the rural estates, resulting in an atrophying of Mediterranean "on the whole is no place for the city as a productive unit. One factor in all nomadic peoples"; no doubt, but the nomads this was the absence of a productive credit of North Africa and Arabia thought other- machinery; the ancient world never dis- wise, witness the expansion of Islam, and file covered fiduciary money or the concept of a nomads should never be left out of account public debt. (Without disputing this finding, when we estimate the major problems of the it might nevertheless be interesting to men- region. In his general thesis of the non- t-ion that the Anonymus de rebus bellicis writing existence of large marketing areas inthe 1korean in the fourth century, did propose something Empire, Finley may be overstating his case. like it, as C. E. Stevens has pointed out, Against Wheeler's cautionary tale of the single drawing our attention to leather money found terra sigillata bowlin Gothland, here cited, we at some place in north-western Britain.) Few may quote sites where terra sigillata potters' loans to expand production can be traced; stamps run into hundreds; the problem is not there were no permanent business partuer- export over the frontiers but internal circula- ships aimed at combining resources, and crafts tion. Dunning showed that an industry pro- organizations never endeavoured to control ducing shale vessels in southern Britain in prices or to extend free production. Selling Korean times sold up to a radius of 9.oo miles and buying were the provhlce of non-citizens, in the earlier period, its customers including and big capital was in the hands of the landed seven villas--and to a radius of fifty miles in aristocracy. the later period. Both figures are well beyond All this produces the further conclusion that the "four to five miles" deduced by Messrs ancient imperalism was not mercantile im- Hodder and Hassall for tlle radius of Komano- perialism and did not involve capitalist ex- British market centres; in any case the dis- ploitation. Ultimately tile imperial govern- tribution of the products of several local ment, by concentrating in its hands army- Komano-British pottery industries, to say supply, withdrew from the market the econo- nothing of oysters and coal, is sui~icient to mic potential of the wealthy class, which refute their deduction. Nor can statements on thereupon entrenched itself in its autarkic the autarkic economies of later Koman es- estates, arid so a dyarchy was born which tates be accepted without qualification: presaged the feudalism of the European archaeology offers contrary evidence (see Middle Ages. Agrarian Hist. Eng. and Wales, I, ii, pp. 947-48 ), Like most worthwhile books, Finley's in- and the problem becomes one of assessing it. quiry poses as many questions as it answers. My own view is that it was precisely the non- I confine myself to some minor matters, autarkic character of the estate economy BOOK REVIEWS 65 which led to its swift delrdse in some pro- significant that despite recorded imperial vinces under barbarian conquest--more es- legislation suppress~g the crafts guilds in the pecially Britain. As to the landowner's incen- towns of Asia Minor, they nevertheless sur- tive to increase production--granted a non- vived sturdily, as inscriptions indicate, arid if capitalist mentality and the non-availability of they were not composed of citizens in Tarsus, liquid capital to apply it--how are we to guilds apparently took the place ofphylae in interpret Finley's complementary statement a number of other Asiatic cities. Did they owe that the big estates produced large incomes? this toleration to the probability that their Cheap labour and the thorough exploitation manufactures were essential to the imperial of manpower are not sufficient. Surely, this economy and more particularly to the army? also implies good maintenance and accomlting, A point may also be made concerning the sound cultivation, likewise much improve- relative absence of teclmological progress, ment in the restricted interior sense, and especially in connection with agriculture, in efficient plamfing within the accepted fi'ame- the Roman Empire.

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