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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANCIENT ECONOMIES
Complexity
Economics
Building a New Approach to
Ancient Economic History
Edited by
Koenraad Verboven
Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies
Series Editors
Paul Erdkamp
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Brussels, Belgium
Ken Hirth
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA, USA
Claire Holleran
University of Exeter
Exeter, Devon, UK
Michael Jursa
University of Vienna
Vienna, Austria
J. G. Manning
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Osmund Bopearachchi
Institute of East Asian Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, USA
This series provides a unique dedicated forum for ancient economic histo-
rians to publish studies that make use of current theories, models, con-
cepts, and approaches drawn from the social sciences and the discipline of
economics, as well as studies that use an explicitly comparative methodol-
ogy. Such theoretical and comparative approaches to the ancient economy
promotes the incorporation of the ancient world into studies of economic
history more broadly, ending the tradition of viewing antiquity as some-
thing separate or ‘other’.
The series not only focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, but
also includes studies of ancient China, India, and the Americas pre-1500.
This encourages scholars working in different regions and cultures to
explore connections and comparisons between economic systems and pro-
cesses, opening up dialogue and encouraging new approaches to ancient
economies.
Complexity
Economics
Building a New Approach to Ancient
Economic History
Editor
Koenraad Verboven
Department of History
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi Contents
Part III Epidemics 295
Index357
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ix
x List of Figures
Graph 7.1 Diagram of shares public and private architecture at Potentia 221
Graph 7.2 Diagram of shares public and private architecture at Trea 226
xvii
List of Tables
xix
CHAPTER 1
Koenraad Verboven
1
For example, Verboven, “The Knights Who Say NIE”.
2
See for instance Harper, The Fate of Rome.
K. Verboven (*)
Department of History, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
e-mail: koen.verboven@ugent.be
3
See for instance Verboven and Erdkamp, Structure and Performance in the Roman
Economy; Manning and Morris, The Ancient Economy; Scheidel and Von Reden, The Ancient
Economy; Remesal Rodríguez, Revilla Calvo, and Bermúdez Lorenzo, Cuantificar las
economías antiguas; for an earlier example see Finley, Ancient History.
4 K. VERBOVEN
store these data in (big) digital data collections suitable for rapid informa-
tion retrieval or for feeding into visualisation or modelling software.
Integrating the results in economic history research has profoundly
changed the way we look at and think about ancient economies.
But the process of collecting, classifying, processing, and visualising
data is not in itself revealing the dynamics underneath that caused the pat-
terns we find in the data. It is not telling us how economic processes and
outcomes are connected to broader societal structures and dynamics—
social, political, or cultural. Millions of sherds recorded in a database, pro-
cessed through graphs, plotted on maps, will not tell what was in the
minds of their makers, the obstacles they faced, and how they overcame
them. What does it mean if a dataset shows a diachronic shift from wheat
to barley? Does the increased mining activity documented in the ice-core
samples signal high economic performance, or does it merely show that
the Roman state devoted massive resources to exploit silver and gold
deposits in much the same predatory way as the Spanish crown did in
South America more than a millennium later?4 Are the disease burdened
bones from Pompeii showing us how unhealthy urban populations were,
or are they indicating efficient coping strategies for diseases that would
otherwise have killed their victims? What is the outcome of all this in terms
of living standards and well-being? And whose living standards and well-
being are we talking of? It is hard to establish how patterns in disparate
and discontinuous datasets are related to each other. What is the connec-
tion, for instance, between patterns in amphorae finds and output of wine
in production areas, given that barrels and wineskins have left little or no
traces in the archaeological record? It is even harder to establish how they
relate to patterns in non-material historical reality. Can we link urbanisa-
tion patterns to institutional changes? How many micro-level studies do
we need to make statements about trends at meso- and macro-levels?
Uncertainty increases every time we posit connections between datasets
or we generalise from sample sets. Nevertheless, these questions need to
be addressed. Economic history is not just about documenting change. It
is about understanding and explaining it. Why was the Roman Empire so
good at producing and distributing not just the basic necessities of life,
but so much more that constitutes “a good life” or “civilisation”: high-
quality tools, materials, and know-how to build comfortable houses, high-
calorie, protein-rich food, good shoes, basic health-care, art, and
4
Scheidel, “In Search of Roman Economic Growth”, 50.
1 INTRODUCTION: FINDING A NEW APPROACH TO ANCIENT PROXY DATA 5
5
Verboven, “Ancient Cliometrics”.
6
Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, 19–20; Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade”, 43; see the discus-
sion in Verboven, “Ancient Cliometrics”, 347–50.
6 K. VERBOVEN
7
Hopkins, “Models, Ships and Staples”, 85; see also Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade”;
Hopkins, “Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade”; Hopkins, “Rents, Taxes, Trade and the City
of Rome”.
8
Wilson, “Approaches to Quantifying Roman Trade”.
1 INTRODUCTION: FINDING A NEW APPROACH TO ANCIENT PROXY DATA 7
that may have emerged?9 The paradigm has achieved a lot and proved use-
ful to explain short-term economic developments in stable situations,
when exogenous shocks are absent or mild enough to be absorbed. The
evident downside of the approach, however, is that it starts from the ques-
tion “why doesn’t reality conform to the model?” There is a clear tension
between the equilibrium-drive inherent in the logic of walrassian markets,
and the imperfections, contingencies, and uncertainties of life; the acci-
dents, misunderstandings, ignorance, lack of information, miscalculations,
and change of minds and hearts of real people.10 As Douglass North put
it: “The rationality assumption of neoclassical economics assumes that the
players know what is in their self-interest and act accordingly. Ten millen-
nia of human economic history says that is a wildly erroneous assumption.”11
Not surprisingly, using Walrasian logic to explain economic history—to
retrodict rather than to predict—has rarely been successful. Comparative
advantage, to give only one example, may be a useful concept to explain
why it made sense that Egypt exported grain and Italy wine. It is not very
useful to explain why this eventuality materialised only from the first cen-
tury BCE onwards and remained heavily state-regulated throughout the
rest of Roman history.
Part of the difficulty is that from the viewpoint of general equilibrium
theory history is always a succession of exogenous shocks. This makes it
hard for any economy to “discover” its equilibrium in the real world.12
Equilibrium economics deals with this by identifying the shocks and
changing externalities, and establishing how these prevent or change the
equilibrium predicted by economic theory. For instance, text-book
wisdom predicts that pandemics increase the price of labour (now scarce)
and decrease the price of land (now abundant). We assume that long-term
strong and stable polities (such as the Roman Empire) support and are
supported by resilient economic systems, capable of absorbing minor local
9
Cf. Arthur, Complexity and the Economy, 3: “[E]conomics early in its history took a sim-
pler approach, one more amenable to mathematical analysis. It asked not how agents’ behav-
iors would react to the aggregate patterns these created, but what behaviors (actions,
strategies, expectations) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate pat-
terns these caused. It asked in other words what patterns would call for no changes in micro-
behavior, and would therefore be in stasis, or equilibrium” (emphasis by the author).
10
On the advantages of equilibrium economics and its limits see Arthur, 3–4.
11
North, “Some Fundamental Puzzles in Economic History/Development”, 237.
12
The terminology is revealing. It suggests that equilibrium is really “out there”. It is
merely hard to find because life keeps getting in the way.
8 K. VERBOVEN
13
Freeman and Carchedi, Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, viii.
14
Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth.
1 INTRODUCTION: FINDING A NEW APPROACH TO ANCIENT PROXY DATA 9
interact with each other and adjust their actions and strategies to the per-
ceived outcome of previous actions. Economic systems are themselves
subsystems of larger social and ecological complex adaptive systems.
Complex societies can be defined as complex adaptive social systems char-
acterised by the interaction of many diverse interacting components (indi-
viduals, groups, organisations, etc.) and by elaborate diversified rule sets,
some of which support societal subsystems, such as the economic system.15
A variety of techniques can be used to study the emergent patterns of
complex adaptive systems. One of these, familiar to historians, is Network
Analysis to visualise both the structure and behaviour of systems. Another,
more familiar to archaeologists, is using the framework of thermodynam-
ics to identify the controlling variables and thresholds of a society’s Socio-
ecological system (SES). Yet another familiar to archaeologists, is
agent-based modelling, whereby the results derived from computer simu-
lations are compared to observed real-world patterns to verify or falsify
assumptions regarding the cause of these patterns.
Contrary to neoclassical economics, complexity economics analyses
data as the outcome of network dynamics and the logic of change, rather
than as deviations or confirmations of theoretical supply and demand
curves. The questions then relate to the structure of these networks, the
regularities in their behaviour and their degree of inter-connectedness.
The advantage for ancient economic historians (and more generally eco-
nomic historians working on preindustrial economies with poorly quanti-
fiable data) is that it opens up for analyses source-data that are relevant to
study economic development but are poorly suited for neoclassical analy-
ses. Thus, for economic historians, complexity economics complements
the more established (or familiar) neoclassical approaches.
15
For a more elaborate discussion see the chapters by Verboven.
10 K. VERBOVEN
16
The chapter is useful also to links this book to a previous book in the same research
programme: Verboven and Erdkamp, Structure and Performance in the Roman Economy.
1 INTRODUCTION: FINDING A NEW APPROACH TO ANCIENT PROXY DATA 11
KANSAN POIKA.
»Entä Rosenstein»?
»Hyvän nimenikö»?
»Miksi sitten istutte siinä ja raautte kuin joku pahanilman lintu? Jos
teillä on hyviä uutisia, niin miksi kujeilette kanssani pilkkaamalla
onnettomuuttani?»
»Vaan?»
»Herra kreivi!»
Miten András kulutti lopun päivästä, ei hän olisi voinut sanoa. Tiet
olivat niin ravalla, että Csillag voi vain vaikeasti löytää tien mudasta.
Kumminkin ymmärsi se isäntänsä surun, sillä se harhaili hänen
kanssaan pustalla kauan vielä senkin jälkeen kuin illan varjot olivat
kietoneet tasangon vaippaansa. Kaukaa kuuluva Tarnan kohina
lisäsi seudun luonteenomaista surullisuutta ja autiutta. Oli jo
myöhäinen, kun András vihdoin saapui rauhalliseen kotiinsa, missä
Etelka kehruuksiensa ääressä odotti levottomasti poikaansa. Kun
hän kuuli Csillagin kavioiden kapseen kartanolta, meni hän ovelle ja
katsoi pimeässä, miten András hoiti lemmikkiään ja vei sen sitten
mukavaan pilttuuseen yöksi. András ei nähtävästi ollut huomannut
äitiään, sillä silloin olisi hän ensimmäiseksi tervehtinyt häntä. Kun
Etelka huomasi, miten raskaasti ja hitaasti András lähestyi
rakennusta, tunsi hän kuvaamatonta surua. András pysähtyi
puutarhaan tuon ihanan ruusupuun juurelle, jossa oli paljon pieniä,
ihanaa kesäkuuta ennustavia nuppuja, ja Etelka ihmetteli, miksi
hänen poikansa ensin koski kädellään jokaiseen nuppuun ja
kumartui sitten suutelemaan niitä.
XX
VASTAUS.