Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Credit, Money, and Social Obligation

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

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In his Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber put forward a new grand narrative of world history. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, all across the Near East and Mediterranean, relationships of mutual obligation were transformed into quantifiable and legally enforceable debts. Graeber suggests that this transformation made possible new economic institutions, such as IOUs, coinage, and chattel slavery. It also led to the emergence of modes of thought that have shaped Eurasian philosophical and religious traditions ever since. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East explores the implications of this theory for the history of the Mediterranean and Near East. A distinguished group of ancient historians assesses how well Graeber's interpretations fit current understandings of ancient and late antique economies. At the same time, this volume offers a history of premodern credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both quantifiable economic reality and immeasurable social obligation. By exploring the diverse ways in which social relationships were quantified in different ancient and late antique societies, the work introduces a method of writing the history of premodern systems of exchange that departs from the currently dominant paradigm of neo-institutional economics.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-12-22
Mått159 x 242 x 27 mm
Vikt572 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor290
FörlagOUP USA
MedarbetareJohn Weisweiler
ISBN9780197647172

Tillhör följande kategorier

Preface 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

Debt 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.