Reviews of Books

ANCIENT
Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece: An Introduction. By M. M. Austin and
P. Vidal-Naquet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. xv, 397. $27.50
cloth, $8.95 paper.

The book is in two parts: a lengthy introductory essay by the editors is followed by an
anthology of translated documents and passages from Greek literature. Each item in the
anthology is footnoted and preceded by an introductory note, sometimes longer than the
item. Although this is formally a source book, interpretation here dominates the
material, and the reader finds himself reading the translated passages in order to find
what the editors have told him is there.
It is a textbook in various senses. It brings together a collection of texts, it is a book
designed for students and suitable for classroom use, and it presents not a new
interpretation but an accessible classroom summary of current opinion and controversy
in the field, with bibliographical references to the original discussion. Such summaries
of course are never neutral. The chief influence here is the school of Karl Polanyi,
particularly M. I. Finley; some 20 different works by Finley are cited, but even these
citations underrepresent his impact on the views expressed and the selection of
passages. The Paris school around J-P. Vernant appears often in the notes but has had
less effect on the text.
As a textbook the volume deserves wide adoption, if only because there is nothing
else like it. It will certainly, provoke thought about aspects of Greek history too often
neglected. Nevertheless I am disappointed and uncertain where my dissatisfaction lies:
with the book, the intellectual school it represents, or the general state of the question at
present. Finley is not (nor does he pretend to be) the last word on these topics, but he is
the most interesting of current writers in English. It might be better to send the student
directly to his essays, since the charm of his style and brilliance of his polemics are
blunted in these pages, where his analyses are presented more or less as received
doctrine. In all fairness it would be hard to know where else to send the students. The
Paris school has produced much excellent work but treats social and economic history
in a manner peculiarly French—as a kind of intellectual history, the adventures of a
mentality. Much original work has been done recently in Italian archaeological circles,
but no major synthesizing theorist has yet appeared. Perhaps, indeed, a textbook in the
field is premature.
Two weaknesses are obvious in the book and in the literature which it summarizes.
The first is the lack of a clear definition of the term "economic." The word has in this
field been poisoned by polemic; the Polanyi school defines itself against the "modern-
ists" and begins with the assertion that "economic" cannot mean in relation to Greek
materials what it means to us. They seldom specify what it does mean. If, as they say,
the premodern economy is "embedded" in pervasive norms and institutions, does this
mean that premodern man knows no distinction between economic and other motives?
How is one to choose passages relevant to the study of Greek economic life if every
aspect of Greek life was equally relevant to economics? A detailed semantic analysis of
"economic" in the book would reveal considerable ambiguity. Sometimes the term
refers to the sphere of material life as against such ideal values as honor and shame;
sometimes to personal interest as against public justice and security; sometimes to
social interaction organized through exchange and the division of labor as opposed to
collective deliberation. The intellectual tradition is vaguely Marxist, but without
Marxist rigor. Thus the editors can say: "The conflicts between Greeks and Persians

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probably did not have 'economic causes.' On the Persian side there was the will for
power and domination, on the Greek side the will to preserve political liberty." There is
no notion that power and liberty may also be pursued in the service of specific economic
interests.
The other obvious weakness is the lack of any detailed sense of sequential develop-
ment. Three periods are discussed: Homeric, Archaic, and Classical—with references
to a fourth, the Hellenistic. "Homeric," however, is not a period but a type of poetry,
produced in approximately the form in which we have it at the beginning of the period
we call Archaic. The Archaic period lasted 250 years, and was a period of rapid
development under constantly changing conditions. Development can be studied
effectively only against a background of a refined chronology which specifies these
changes; otherwise we are left with a vauge impression of bewildering variety. Thus
Greek colonization, here treated as more or less a single phenomenon (although
different in different places) can be (still very roughly) divided into a period of pre-
colonization from c. 800 to c. 750 BC, focused on a search for metals, then a period of
proto-colonization from c. 750 to 700 BC, when a few Greek communities formed a
bridge between Etruria and the Near East. The period overlapped with early agricultural
colonization, c. 735 to c. 675 BC, when the Greeks in the west began to take control of
land and indigenous labor on the frontier, and this in turn was followed by a period of
secondary colonization, when the success of the early colonies made possible expansion
of Greek holdings on the frontier, and at the same time a few Greek communities began
importing agricultural staples from some non-Greek producers. Each of these phases
reflects changing conditions in the mainland cities; early Corinth, for example, had a
different social structure from that of the Euboean communities whose trade routes
Corinth took over late in the eighth century. The differences were reflected in shifting
interests in districts and aspects of the frontier. Greek social and economic history, in
other words, remains unsatisfyingly vague as long as it is about something called
"Greek society"; like other forms of history it needs to be seen as a series of particular
acts and events, each with its own motives and consequences. The archaeological
record is now sufficiently detailed to enable us to see the outline of such a sequence.
A subtler weakness of the book and the literature is the lack of any inclusive sense of
systemic relations. Greek economic and social history has been largely concerned with a
few problems to which investigators return again and again repeatedly declaring them
insoluble for lack of evidence. Sally Humphreys (who has done much to remedy the
situation she deplores) has remarked that it is possible to follow an article on Greek
economic history in, say, Finnish by reading the footnotes, observing the order in which
the familiar items are cited. These same familiar items appear in this volume, but at least
in English. The notion, however, that Greek economic and social history is based on
slender evidence is really a misunderstanding; "economic" and "social" do not label
particular problems but points of view from which to look at Greek history as a whole.
Although men make their own history, they do not make it just as they please.
"Economic" and "social" name the spheres of statistical facts and diffused structures,
of habits, norms, and unreflectively maintained institutions which men rely on and
complain about at the same time. At any time any society is a functioning system, even
though its inhabitants perceive aspects of it as dysfunctional. The system, further, is
constantly changing, presenting new constraints and offering new opportunities, and
local cultural norms and understandings lag behind these changes. The sum of a myriad
of individual acts, these changes further appear to those who live through them as
beyond the control of individuals and only marginally alterable by governments. The
Greeks themselves experienced such a dialectic of system and change, and wrote about
it; the choices made by individuals and states were responses to the perplexities they
experienced. We can understand the particular choices and complaints only within the
framework of the total system which they take for granted, and our understanding of the
912 Reviews of Books

particulars will not be better than our understanding of the system as a whole. But no
one, at least since Max Weber, has attempted even a sketch of the whole system of
production, consumption, and exchange relations interacting with social structure,
culturally conditioned aspirations, and political and social power. Such a sketch might
constitute "an introduction" to the economic and social history of Greece—but it
remains to be attempted.
JAMES REDFIELD, University of Chicago

MODERN EUROPE
A Study of the Business Fortunes of William Cotesworth, c. 1668-1726. By Joyce M.
Ellis. Dissertations in European Economic History. New York: Arno Press, 1981. Pp.
233. $20.00 cloth.

The title of Joyce Ellis's reprinted Oxford University dissertation is less informative
than it could have been. Indeed, the work contains much more than a discussion of
William Cotesworth's business activities, providing also valuable information regarding
the organization of the coal and salt industries in early eighteenth-century Newcastle.
On the other hand, because of the nature of the surviving material, the book is not a
complete business history. The problem with the material is most certainly not lack of
volume. The main sources, the Cotesworth and Ellison manuscripts and the Carr-
Ellison manuscripts, comprise many thousands of documents, the most relevant of
which were business letters. The problem is that none of Cotesworth's ledgers or
account books survive, which is strange given the family's penchant for hoarding other
material. Ellis does not speculate on whether they were lost or destroyed, but
Cotesworth's involvement with extensive litigation toward the end of his life may have
had something to do with their disappearance. The result is that Ellis's study is not as
informative, in a quantitative sense, as for example J. V. Beckett's recent book, Coal
and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland,
1660-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1981). But as Ellis argues accurately, the loss
is not crippling.
William Cotesworth rose from humble beginnings, the younger son of a yeoman
family, to become a major force in the Newcastle coal industry and perhaps the largest
producer of salt in England. He did this through native intelligence and business sense,
hard work and frugality, and with a modicum of luck. Apprenticed to a prosperous
Gateshead merchant in 1683, he was an active partner by 1690 and cemented the
relationship by marrying into his partner's family. He first entered the coal industry by
leasing way leave rights in 1704. In 1706 he left the partnership and by 1708 was actively
engaged in producing coal. To provide an outlet for his inferior coal, he began leasing
salt pans in 1710, and by 1720 he was the largest salt manufacturer in the area.
Throughout his lifetime he continued to participate in salt manufacturing and joint coal
ventures (primarily with the Liddell family), purchased several estates, and owned parts
of several ships. Towards the end of his life, Cotesworth became overextended. He
purchased nonproducing collieries and became entangled in so many legal disputes that
his lawyers were earning more from his various enterprises than he was. After
Cotesworth's death, his son was forced to withdraw entirely from the salt industry and
to sell several collieries. Upon his son's death only three years later, the estate passed to
Cotesworth's daughters and eventually to the Ellison family.
In spite of his position in salt manufacturing, the truly vital activity to Cotesworth was
his interest in colliery ventures. Ellis devotes considerable attention to the organization
of the industry between 1709 and 1726, and this may be considered the major
contribution of the thesis. The picture that emerges is of an industry fiercely competi-