Joseph G. Manning. The Open Sea. The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32028/jga.v4i.511Abstract
In M.I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy, the Hellenistic period is studiously and deliberately avoided. Finley’s avowed reason for doing so was that this period saw the coexistence of two distinct economic sectors, an ‘ancient’ (viz. Graeco-Roman) and an ‘Oriental’ sector (Finley 1999 [orig. 1973]: 183). The former could be understood (so Finley argued) as a unified whole stretching from the time of Homer to that of Justinian; what bound it together was an elite mentality that remained, in his view, remarkably stable over time. Forty-five years on, the picture looks strikingly different. Manning’s thesis, which synthesises much recent work on ancient economic history, entails both blowing apart Finley’s unified ancient economy into many regional economies, and joining them together into a broader, interconnected Eurasian world focused on the Mediterranean Sea and encompassing far more than just Greece and Rome (however broadly defined), by plotting a dense web of connections that sped ideas, people, and objects across this expanse.
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