Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Joel Mokyr, Series Editor A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book. Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean Private Order and Public Institutions Taco Terpstra Princeton University Press Princeton & Oxford Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved LCCN 2018957367 ISBN 9780691172088 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal Production Editorial: Natalie Baan Jacket Design: Carmina Alvarez Production: Jacquie Poirier Publicity: Julia Hall, Jodi Price, and Alyssa Sanford Jacket image courtesy of Shutterstock This book has been composed in Arno Pro Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Public Institutions and Phoenician Trade 33 3 King’s Men and the Stationary Bandit 83 4 Civic Order and Contract Enforcement 125 5 Economic Trust and Religious Violence 168 6 Epilogue 211 7 Concluding Remarks 226 Bibliography 233 Index 261 v Acknowledgments Several organizations have provided me with financial support, allowing me time away from teaching to dedicate myself entirely to research and writing. I extend my sincerest gratitude to the Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Hu- manities at Northwestern University and the Balzan Foundation. Without their generous support, it would have taken me many years longer to finish this book. I further thank Northwestern’s Center for Economic History for the funds to draw the maps and acquire reproduction rights for the images displayed herein. I also express my gratitude to the University of Ghent for inviting me as a visiting fellow for the spring term of 2016. The beautiful scenery of a medieval “producer city,” the excellent research facilities and, most of all, the intellectual environment of the History Department have been greatly stimulating to my work. In particular Wim Broekaert, Koen Verboven and Arjan Zuiderhoek have been wonderful colleagues and willing sounding boards. I greatly en- joyed our conversations over Trappist beer and frites about Roman economic history, medieval economic history, Belgian politics and much else besides. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from the participants of the “Sin- ews of Empire” conference at the Norwegian Institute at Athens in Decem- ber 2015, and thank the organizer, Eivind Seland, for inviting me. A special word of appreciation should go to Alain Bresson and Dennis Kehoe for discussing the manuscript with me in May 2017. Our day- long con- versation has greatly helped me in improving the book, and the end result is much the better for it. I am also profoundly grateful to Arjan Zuiderhoek for his willingness to read a large part of the manuscript and give me extensive feedback. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to Roger Bagnall, Tim Earle and Vincent Gabrielsen, all of whom have read and commented on individual chapters. A word of thanks should also go to Alain Bresson, Christelle Fischer- Bovet, Hannah Friedman, Joe Manning and Andrew Wilson for allowing me access to some of their (at the time still) unpublished work. My Northwestern Classics Department colleagues have been a constant source of support and encouragement. I am grateful to them all for offering vii viii Acknowledgments me their thoughts, and thank in particular Bob Wallace and John Wynne. Mira Balberg deserves a mention for discussing late-antique religion with me, giv- ing me advice on Biblical texts and providing me with useful reading sugges- tions. Further, I most warmly thank Joel Mokyr in the Economics Department for having been an effective and motivating editor. I also thank him for hav- ing put me in touch with Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press. It has been a pleasure working with Rob throughout the production process of this book. I also wish to express my gratitude to the three anonymous Princeton UP readers, whose comments have been extremely helpful in improving the manuscript. On a more personal note, I thank Karel, Sanne and Frits for their support when I much needed it. Finally, I am grateful to my parents for their warmth and love. Once again, this book is for them. Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean Frontispiece. The macellum (marketplace) of Puteoli, Italy, ca. 200 CE. Photo courtesy of Barbara Caffi. 1 Introduction Globalization and the Nation State When the fruits of the Industrial Revolution began to be reaped in the course of the nineteenth century, a period of rapid economic expansion followed. Steamships and trains improved transportation, machines allowed for the mass production of goods, and the telegraph and telephone sped up commu- nication. Global markets for commodities and manufactured goods alike be- came increasingly interconnected. This growing connectivity benefited from the fact that the world’s nations were cosmopolitan in a way unthinkable now, operating almost entirely without ID requirements, visas or other cross- border restrictions. In addition, this was a time of economic development largely unchecked by labor laws, unions or social safety nets. Finally, it was the height of European imperialism, with about half the planet’s populated surface governed by some form of imperial or colonial rule. The result of this potent technological, economic and political mix would be the so- called first global economy, already established by the 1870s.1 In a famous passage in The Eco- nomic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes lauded this “extraordi- nary episode in the economic progress of man”: The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his door- step. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other for- mality . and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent.2 1. Jones 2007: 143–47. 2. Keynes 1920: 9–10. 1 2 chapter 1 The outbreak of war on July 28, 1914, revealed that the first global economy had been none of those things. “The projects and politics of militarism and impe- rialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclu- sion” were to play “the serpent to this paradise,” Keynes wrote. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s finished off what was left of the first global economy. How paradisiacal it had all been much depended on whom you asked, I suppose. But in any case, an “extraordinary episode” it undeniably was. After the Great Depression, World War II prevented economic globaliza- tion from reemerging. The process only began shifting gears again in the early 1950s, speeding up significantly after the 1970s following market deregulation and liberalization. The collapse of the Soviet Union reopened Russia and Eastern Europe to foreign investment, and by the turn of the century large emerging economies had firmly joined the global capitalist mainstream, most notably China. With these developments the world had entered a new phase of ever deepening and accelerating interconnectedness, the “second global economy.”3 But now a backlash against this seemingly unstoppable process is under- way, almost exactly a century after World War I brought the first global econ- omy to a violent halt. Among electorates in many Western democracies there is a growing sense that the payoffs of globalization have been too disappoint- ing for too many, the burdens too unevenly distributed, the benefits too un- equally shared. In the political and public discourse the question is increas- ingly being asked if globalization “works for everyone,” indeed if it is even capable of working for everyone. The merits of heightened trade barriers, curbed migration and strengthened borders or, in the case of the European Union, restored borders are discussed in a way that they have not been in decades. Nation- states have always exerted a strong influence over people’s sense of collective identity and economic self- determination. But that influ- ence is growing again after a long period in which supranational organizations enjoyed broad and almost unquestioned support. The sour mood gripping many societies at the moment seems largely to be expressed in a nihilistic desire to demolish the status quo, seen by large num- bers of citizens as rigged against them. In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra has at- tempted to capture what is driving the current destructive temper. He notes that in the recent past, the shocks of modernity were “absorbed by inherited social structures of family and community, and the state’s welfare cushions,” whereas now “individuals are directly exposed to them in an age of accelerat- ing competition on uneven playing fields, where it is easy to feel that there is no such thing as either society or state, and that there is only a war of all 3. Jones 2007: 150–52. Introduction 3 against all.” The results are not pretty: “An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness . is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”4 If nativist sentiments and zero- sum thinking are on the rise, industrial- scale, interstate warfare of the kind that marred the twentieth century still seems only a remote possibility.