Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies最新文献

{"title":"List of Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131017101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"10 Tools of Economic Connectivity in Early Historic South Asia","authors":"M. Dwivedi","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-015","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses various institutions, both physical and ideological, that linked actors vertically and horizontally and facilitated the movement of people, goods, and ideas in early historic South Asia. Between 300  and 300 , the region saw the emergence of various standardized institutions despite the lack of political cohesion. The development of the śāstric literary tradition is a clear evidence for this. It is true that a majority of these institutions presuppose a state structure, but their adoption was not limited to one dynasty or a particular type of polity. The organizing factor of these institutions, rather, is a network of ideas and ideals within which various actors negotiated with each other at different levels. This chapter, therefore, is organzed to emphasize the cohesiveness of the tools that transcended political boundaries. The first section describes the fiscal structures mentioned in different sources. The dominant fiscal systems presuppose the presence of a state structure in which the processes of resource appropriation were shaped by negotiations between various participants. The next section outlines the monetary systems in India, which were shaped by the involvement of multiple actors. These actors were able to issue coins that often cocirculated and served as media of communication. The third section concerns legal systems. These were fundamentally predicated on the presence of a monarchical polity, but they were not limited to it. Rather, the normative texts recognize a variety of semiautonomous legal spheres. The fourth section discusses the process of standardization itself, which affected the three previous domains. The geographical spread of scripts and languages, particularly Sanskrit, highlights the need to consider the normative texts as products of and participants in the process of standardization, while archaeological evidence attests to the spread of normative ideals about expenditure on luxury items and euergetic practices. At the same time, local diversity persisted. The fifth and final topic, infrastructure, focuses on the variety of ways that people responded to their environment as they practiced agriculture, built cities, and transported goods.","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123245088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"11 Tools of Economic Activity in Early Imperial China","authors":"Kathrin Leese-Messing","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-016","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers major sets of tools in the form of structural and physical institutions that shaped the economic activities of various actor groups that have been discussed in chapter six. Many of these tools are intertwined with the power of state institutions, even though they also relied on other supporting factors to varying degrees. In any case, their socioeconomic effects typically went far beyond the functions primarily associated with them. The fiscal regime of the early imperial state is one obvious example. With its thorough organizational capacity, it strongly affected people’s economic behavior and broader socioeconomic structures through the ways in which revenues were collected and redistributed. Among others, changes in fiscal policies were also strongly tied to monetization processes, in the sense that they both reacted to and furthered the latter by increasing the share of monetary extraction. The effects of increased monetization, however, went far beyond the interests of state actors by substantially facilitating economic transactions in which a wide range of social groups participated. Law is another tool that is deeply connected to state authority. Under a relatively standardized judicial system, early imperial law bore a strong potential for reducing uncertainties and negotiation costs, especially with regard to property claims. Reduction of negotiation costs across larger spaces can further be associated with certain spheres of standardization, e.g., of weights and measures. Additionally, the relatively standard use of the Chinese language and particularly the script, as well as the wide spread of sumptuary patterns, both of which were supported by administrative structures and state-promoted mobility of officials and common people, created further conditions for increased connectivity and for the use of mass production techniques. Increased connectivity and the mobility of goods in particular further depended heavily on the network of physical infrastructure. In the form of both natural and artificial waterways as well as both preexisting and newly established overland routes, the early imperial network may have been more efficient than had previously been assumed with regard to travel speeds and its suitability for long-distance transport. Finally, this chapter will consider certain examples of technological devel-","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124743361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"1 Globalization beyond the Silk Road: Writing Global History of Ancient Economies","authors":"M. Hoo","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-002","url":null,"abstract":"Ideas about premodern globalization are easily conjured when thinking about connectivity and economic development across the territories of ancient empires. Indeed, globalization has immense rhetorical power. According to evocative usage of the term, this three-volume handbook speaks to the imagination of ‘the global’ in various ways. It can be considered global in its geographical scope, spanning the vast masses of land and water of Afro-Eurasia. It can also be termed global in its temporal scope, examining 600 years of economic development across several conventional periods. In scholarship, too, these volumes have a global character, with its execution by scholars from different parts of the globe, some with global biographies, who not only work with a plethora of evidence from widely distributed regions, but also with the legacy of various historiographical traditions that developed across the globe. In all of the above, ‘global’ seems to be a convenient word that creates a powerful impression – surely, a global one – of the breadth, expansion, and immense scale of the topic and undertaking of this handbook, to the level of common wisdom. Indeed, globalization and related lexical constructions such as ‘globalism,’ ‘global connections,’ ‘global processes,’ and ‘global-local interactions,’ have become rhetorical tropes in recent practices of ancient history, in particular with regards to ‘Silk Road history.’ But some reflection on this common wisdom of the global is necessary. How global is global? What does it mean to write global history of ancient economies? How does this relate to globalization and in what way can globalization help to advance modern sense-making of ancient economies? In assessing these questions, this chapter has two related aims. The first is to provide the theoretical context of globalization, engaging with the historiography of global writing and globalization research. Despite the increasing ubiquity of globalization rhetoric in historical studies, there is a persistent “collective unwillingness to think”1 about what exactly constitutes globalization. Different usage abounds, with different meanings and different interpretive implications, but often without adequate engagement with the vast swathes of globalization literature.2 The","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114315285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"5 Territorial and Transterritorial Economic Actors in Early Historic South Asia","authors":"M. Dwivedi","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-008","url":null,"abstract":"The period between 300  to 300  is one of change and, in general terms, growth, which was the result of cooperation of different sociopolitical participants in the economy.1 This chapter discusses the major actors that participated in and influenced various economic functions in early historic South Asia. The purpose here is to briefly introduce those engaged in different economic behaviors of production, consumption, acquisition, and redistribution of goods, services, and knowledge. As these behaviors are not strictly exclusive, this chapter is organized to highlight the capacities (individual or collective) in which the actors direct their wealth and pursue their economic goals. Here, the emphasis is on who are the actors and what are their functions in the economy. The questions about the structures within which these actors operated, and the various institutions they developed are discussed in my chapter below.2 Structurally, this chapter organizes the actors based on their geographical scope of operation and radius of interaction, moving from smaller to greater spheres of influence. Within this trajectory, I alternate between actors with a clear territorial base and those with a transterritorial presence, which do not necessarily have a physically identifiable core tied to a territory or locality. I begin with the domestic households at the core of the economy, which were the most basic production and consumption units in addition to being the primary provider of human resources to all other socioeconomic organizations. I then go on to discuss the providers of manual labor, who were the first point of contact for fulfilling the labor demands of a household that cannot be fulfilled by the members of the household themselves. Therefore, while the household was an institution with a core, its transterritorial counterparts were the manual laborers. Local elites could be both territorial, when their wealth was based on agriculture; and transterritorial, when their wealth was based on trade. Mercantile and professional corporate bodies, and their territorial counterparts, settlements and cities, were more complex organizationally and operated over larger distances. Finally, the Buddhist monastic system and the monarchical state had the largest spheres of economic influence. The institution of state was bound to a dynasty and its territorial boundaries, while in contrast the monasteries had a pan-Indic presence, and a network of transmission and connection without capitals or administrative centers, surviving through political changes and the rise and fall of dynasties.","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127678694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"14 Political, Corporate, and Ritual Economic Processes of Early Historic South Asia","authors":"M. Dwivedi","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-022","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explains the economic profile of early South Asia by framing production, consumption, and distribution within their sociopolitical contexts. Here, I emphasize the importance of the plurality of social-political and religious agencies, discuss the interaction between various actors, and explore various strategies of interaction as the stimulants of both economic changes and the development of networks. Interaction through the coordination and counterbalancing of the economic impacts of various actors led to economic change and development in the period between 300  and 300 . Broadly, economic development is visible in the processes of production and connectivity. An increase in production (and possibly productivity) is indicated by reliance on specialized methods of irrigation that increased production, especially of commercial agricultural goods; the presence of a greater variety of specialized crafting associations; the volume of ceramics found in excavation; and intensive monetization of various regions. Indices for increased connectivity of early historic South Asia are the increased number and greater size of urban settlements; development of ports alongside their regional hinterland and satellite settlements; and more intense use of particular corridors and highways due to the intensive commercial and social travel by both inland and sea routes. Owing to regional diversity in terms of physical geography, the nature of polities, and social norms, the changes just outlined were neither uniform nor occurred at the same pace throughout the subcontinent. Similarly, the indices of economic changes differ in intensity as well as extent. For example, the history and development of cities and their satellite settlements in the northern alluvial plain differed from that in parts of the Deccan plateau and the Western Ghats. Similarly, the monetary practices of the northern and western regions were different from those in the economies of the south in terms of the intensity of circulation of locally produced coins. While great regional difference was undeniable, we must also be mindful of the diversity of source material available to us. At times, the sources allow deep insights into specific economic processes and developments, while they remain silent on many issues. It is, therefore, impossible to work out a general narrative of the economy of early historic India as a whole. This is not a problem of the quantity of source material, which is rich and abundant. We have both indigenous and for-","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131444362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"8.A Tools of Economic Activity in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds: Empires and Coordination","authors":"Eli J. S. Weaverdyck, Lara Fabian","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-012","url":null,"abstract":"The tools we consider here reshaped patterns of economic behavior both individually and in combination. In the case of the ancient Mediterranean and southwestern Asia, the broad shift was toward expanded patterns of coordination that promoted economic activities across larger physical distances and between disparate social groups. However, the tools could also limit access or concentrate economic power within narrow sectors of a society or market. The classic consideration of coordination is rooted in the discussion of market exchange, considering coordination as a way of reducing impediments to markets’ optimal functioning.1 Here, we consider the impact of tools not just on market integration but on other spheres of social coordination, for example hierarchies and formal networks.2 The state looms large in these discussions, as it had the most far-reaching organizational authority and some power to regulate economic behavior among its subjects. We therefore begin with a discussion of the fundamental toolset of the state – fiscal regimes, including taxation, spending, and monetary policy. Such regimes allowed central authorities to raise tremendous revenue and to spend it in ways intended to ensure the preservation of state power, generally benefiting the ruling coalition. In actuality, although control of fiscal regimes rested in the hands of a central authority, the processes of consolidating and redistributing the vast capital that flowed through state coffers were distributed. The configuration of responsibility to assess and collect taxes structured patterns of authority and sovereignty, creating economic ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and shaping patterns of cooperation in the process. State spending, although directed at the survival of the state, promoted monetization that was both more intense and more widespread than in previous periods. The increased monetization, in turn, supported coordination of consumption, production, and distribution not just for the state but for the wider community. Two other tools sit in close proximity to the state, physical infrastructure and law. The former covers large-scale physical projects generally undertaken by central","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131789445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"8.B Tools of Economic Activity in the Arsakid Empire","authors":"Razieh Taasob, S. Reden","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-013","url":null,"abstract":"Our knowledge of the economy of the Arsakid Empire is far more limited than that of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires in the Near East. While some cities or regions are relatively well documented, others are not at all. The rather patchy sources, moreover, cover very different aspects of the economy and administration of particular regions and places: some give us titles of administrative personnel, transactions, and accounting practices in specific tributary contexts; others preserve contracts relating to particular legal traditions; yet others offer glimpses into regional minting. The Stathmoi Parthikoi (“Parthian Stations”) describe the forts and road stations of the main imperial road in great detail, while the Palmyrene caravan inscriptions show the incentives that drove the use of another route for commercial purposes.1 Furthermore, the documentary evidence from the Arsakid period, written in several languages, is not evenly distributed chronologically, with much pertaining to just a few decades in the life of an empire that lasted over 400 years; questions of diachronic development can rarely be addressed. These limitations are all the more frustrating as the Arsakid court had authority over relatively autonomous imperial subregions. Economic and administrative diversity must have been even greater than in other ancient imperial states.2 Given that there are, in terms of administrative personnel and terminology, long-term continuities from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period, scholars tend to assume some long-term administrative continuities that were maintained throughout the Arsakid period.3 Yet we must be careful not to overlook important differences, especially in those aspects where there are strong indications of change. Such differences stand out in the coin policy of the Arsakids, which shows important innovations.4 Another area of change can be noted in the military system, which seems to have been more decentralized than under the empires before and after.5 Given that military organization is closely related to fiscal politics, this will have changed economic life in important ways.6","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117091400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"12.C Institutions and Economic Relations in the Roman Empire: Consumption, Supply, and Coordination","authors":"Eli J. S. Weaverdyck","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-020","url":null,"abstract":"The global history of inter-imperial trade and transcontinental connectivity is the story of networks and relationships, their varying geographical extent and interlinkages, the institutional structures that allowed for different types of transactions to be carried out across them, and the way these changed over time. This chapter sketches the Roman part of that history. I approach the Roman economy as a set of coordinated behaviors that resulted in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. In premodern economies, the cost of transporting goods over long distances and the difficulty of obtaining reliable information about potential partners represented significant constraints on the quantity and complexity of economic transactions that could take place, and therefore on the economy as a whole. Peter Bang characterizes the ancient economy as a peasant economy of hardsided cells that needed to be punctured in order to generate long-distance flows of goods.1 Nevertheless, a variety of archaeological proxies seem to suggest that, in the period under consideration here (300 –300 ), more goods were traveling across longer distances than before and that the Mediterranean world saw some economic growth (though there remains some debate as to how intensive versus extensive that growth was and how integrated the economy truly was).2 Rather than focusing on the abstract questions of economic growth or integration, I focus on the structures that allowed for more extensive economic coordination. By economic coordination I mean action taken in the expectation that others would take complementary action, be that production and consumption or cooperation in production and distribution. Coordination requires social relationships (weak and strong), so in line with the approaches of this volume I examine the economy as a series of interactions embedded within social networks and shaped by institutions. Although technological development and the construction of infrastructure played important roles in the Roman economy (for which, see ch. 8.A, sections VII and IV respectively), I set these aside for the present to focus on the social structures and networks that knit people together across the Roman world and allowed people, goods, and","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117281049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"3.A Economic Actors in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires: The Mediterranean and Southwest Asia","authors":"Lara Fabian, Eli J. S. Weaverdyck","doi":"10.1515/9783110607642-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607642-005","url":null,"abstract":"The economy of the ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asia was driven by a wide variety of actors whose behavior was shaped by social, cultural, and physical structures.1 This chapter examines a variety of types of actors who played important roles, both positive and negative, in this development in order to shed light on the ways in which their economic behavior impacted the behavior of others and the structures within which they operated. We start with urban systems, before moving on to consider sovereign rulers, armies, temples, local elites, households, producers, and networking agents like bankers and merchants. The structures within which these actors operated are the focus in part II, which treats economic ‘tools.’ In the ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, state power was distributed across several constituencies. For our present purposes, the most important are cities, which interacted directly with the bulk of the population; imperial and regional rulers, who exercised power at a higher level; courts, who intermediated between rulers and locals; armies, who exercised military power but also consumed a large portion of the resources extracted by the state; and temples, which served as another space of state-population interface. In addition to (or in consequence of) their state functions, these units were both economic actors in their own right (producing, distributing, and consuming goods), and also shaped the structures within which the behavior of others took place. In addition to the coordinating behaviors mentioned above, war-making/conquest and the cultivation of urbanism (both the spread of urbanism and the patronage of capitals that became megacities) were two of the most consequential actions taken by ancient states.","PeriodicalId":128613,"journal":{"name":"Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123446062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}