Temin on Morley, _Trade in Classical Antiquity_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (June 2008)

Neville Morley, _Trade in Classical Antiquity_. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2007. xiv + 118 pp. $30 (paperback), ISBN: 
978-0-521-63416-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter Temin, Department of Economics, MIT.


This book is one of Cambridge University Press's series of Key Themes 
in Ancient History. These brief books are designed to introduce 
various topics of ancient history to graduate students and interested 
laypeople alike. They presuppose little professional knowledge of the 
topic and provide an overview of the state of knowledge. The books 
have single authors, and they express the opinions of the authors 
more than a typical text.

Morley is a distinguished ancient historian, and this book fits the 
general pattern. It provides a summary view of trade in the ancient 
world, but the average economic historian needs a reader's guide to 
extract this information. The problem is that Morley feels obliged to 
introduce his book with two chapters on methodology that easily will 
put off the non-ancient historian. In his words, "The aim of this 
book is not to offer a chronological history of the development of 
trade and commerce or to draw up lists of the goods that were traded 
between regions, but to identify the different structures -- 
physical, social, ideological -- that shaped the distribution of 
goods and the practices of exchange across the ancient world" (p. 15).

My advice to readers of this review is to skip the first two chapters 
and start reading at Chapter 3. The rest of the book will repay a 
careful read. Morley argues in Chapter 3 that the distinction between 
luxuries and necessities is culturally determined. You cannot decide 
which is which without knowing the culture of the trading people. 
Since ancient peoples of whom we know lived above biological 
subsistence, part of their consumption was devoted to 
culturally-determined goods, that is, goods that established their 
place in the local hierarchy. Chapter 4 is devoted to the 
institutions of trade, revealing the impact that Doug North has had 
on ancient history. This material is covered also in Kessler and 
Temin (2007), which apparently was not visible to Morley.

Morley confronts the morality of traders in Chapter 5. He argues that 
most ancient traders and office holders were law abiding in the 
modern sense. Just as today most contracts are honored without the 
intervention of a court, so Morley says ancient people dealt with 
each other on a trusting basis. Since law enforcement is expensive, 
this is a very important point, and Morley raises but does not answer 
the question of where this morality comes from. Perhaps that should 
be the topic of another book in this series. In the sixth and final 
chapter, Morley assesses the extent of what he calls "ancient 
globalization."

One problem for the modern economic historian is Morley's practice of 
hopping back and forth between Classical Greece and Republican Rome. 
These two venues were separated by time and -- more importantly -- 
scale. In modern terms, Athens was a small open economy, while Rome 
was the largest economy in the ancient world. Small and large 
countries differ even today, and we might infer that there were 
differences then too. This question does not appear to have occurred 
to Morley.

Another problem is Morley's ambivalent attitude toward globalization. 
On the one hand, he says, "Farmers were never wholly isolated from 
society or wholly divorced from the market" (p. 45). On the other 
hand, he argues in Chapter 6 that globalization was severely limited 
by poor technology in transportation and information transmission. 
Morley does not appear to have a way to resolve this issue. 
Fortunately, two recent papers help to resolve this puzzle. Both 
papers were the outcomes of Harvard senior theses in economics.

Geraghty (2007) argues that the extension of Roman trade across the 
Mediterranean led Roman farmers to shift out of wheat into wine and 
truck farming for the neighboring city of Rome. This paper 
complements and extends Morley's analysis of Roman farming in his 
1996 book. Kessler and Temin (2008) show that Roman trade was so 
extensive that there was a single monetary system and a single wheat 
market across the whole Mediterranean Sea. Wheat prices were highest 
in the center of consumption, the city of Rome, and fell with the 
distance from Rome. While Morley's new book is a worthy addition to 
the Key Themes series, I recommend that readers of this review start 
with the articles I have mentioned here and continue on to Morley if 
they want more evidence.

References:

Geraghty, Ryan M., "The Impact of Globalization in the Roman Empire, 
200 BC - AD 100," _Journal of Economic History_ 67 (December 2007): 
1036-61.

Kessler, David, and Peter Temin, "The Organization of the Grain Trade 
in the Early Roman Empire," _Economic History Review_ 60 (May 2007): 
313-32.

Kessler, David, and Peter Temin, "Money and Prices in the Early Roman 
Empire" in William V. Harris, editor, _The Monetary Systems of the 
Greeks and Romans_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 137-59.

Morley, Neville, _Metropolis and Hinterland: The City of Rome and the 
Italian Economy, 200 BC - AD 200_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1996).


Recent articles by Peter Temin include "The Economy of the Early 
Roman Empire," _Journal of Economic Perspectives_ (2006); "Interest 
Rate Restrictions in a Natural Experiment: Loan Allocation and the 
Change in the Usury Laws in 1714" (with Joachim Voth), _Economic 
Journal_, forthcoming; and "The German Crisis of 1931: Evidence and 
Tradition," Cliometrica, forthcoming.

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