David Routt, University of Richmond

The Black Death was the largest demographic disaster in European history. From its arrival in Italy in late 1347 through its clockwise movement across the continent to its petering out in the Russian hinterlands in 1353, the magna pestilencia (great pestilence) killed between seventeen and twenty—eight million people. Its gruesome symptoms and deadliness have fixed the Black Death in popular imagination; moreover, uncovering the disease’s cultural, social, and economic impact has engaged generations of scholars. Despite growing understanding of the Black Death’s effects, definitive assessment of its role as historical watershed remains a work in progress.

A Controversy: What Was the Black Death?

In spite of enduring fascination with the Black Death, even the identity of the disease behind the epidemic remains a point of controversy. Aware that fourteenth—century eyewitnesses described a disease more contagious and deadlier than bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), the bacillus traditionally associated with the Black Death, dissident scholars in the 1970s and 1980s proposed typhus or anthrax or mixes of typhus, anthrax, or bubonic plague as the culprit. The new millennium brought other challenges to the Black Death—bubonic plague link, such as an unknown and probably unidentifiable bacillus, an Ebola—like haemorrhagic fever or, at the pseudoscientific fringes of academia, a disease of interstellar origin.

Proponents of Black Death as bubonic plague have minimized differences between modern bubonic and the fourteenth—century plague through painstaking analysis of the Black Death’s movement and behavior and by hypothesizing that the fourteenth—century plague was a hypervirulent strain of bubonic plague, yet bubonic plague nonetheless. DNA analysis of human remains from known Black Death cemeteries was intended to eliminate doubt but inability to replicate initially positive results has left uncertainty. New analytical tools used and new evidence marshaled in this lively controversy have enriched understanding of the Black Death while underscoring the elusiveness of certitude regarding phenomena many centuries past.

The Rate and Structure of mortality

The Black Death’s socioeconomic impact stemmed, however, from sudden mortality on a staggering scale, regardless of what bacillus caused it. Assessment of the plague’s economic significance begins with determining the rate of mortality for the initial onslaught in 1347—53 and its frequent recurrences for the balance of the Middle Ages, then unraveling how the plague chose victims according to age, sex, affluence, and place.

Imperfect evidence unfortunately hampers knowing precisely who and how many perished. Many of the Black Death’s contemporary observers, living in an epoch of famine and political, military, and spiritual turmoil, described the plague apocalyptically. A chronicler famously closed his narrative with empty membranes should anyone survive to continue it. Others believed as few as one in ten survived. One writer claimed that only fourteen people were spared in London. Although sober eyewitnesses offered more plausible figures, in light of the medieval preference for narrative dramatic force over numerical veracity, chroniclers’ estimates are considered evidence of the Black Death’s battering of the medieval psyche, not an accurate barometer of its demographic toll.

Even non—narrative and presumably dispassionate, systematic evidence — legal and governmental documents, ecclesiastical records, commercial archives — presents challenges. No medieval scribe dragged his quill across parchment for the demographer’s pleasure and convenience. With a paucity of censuses, estimates of population and tracing of demographic trends have often relied on indirect indicators of demographic change (e.g., activity in the land market, levels of rents and wages, size of peasant holdings) or evidence treating only a segment of the population (e.g., assignment of new priests to vacant churches, payments by peasants to take over holdings of the deceased). Even the rare census—like record, like England’s Domesday Book (1086) or the Poll Tax Return (1377), either enumerates only heads of households or excludes slices of the populace or ignores regions or some combination of all these. To compensate for these imperfections, the demographer relies on potentially debatable assumptions about the size of the medieval household, the representativeness of a discrete group of people, the density of settlement in an undocumented region, the level of tax evasion, and so forth.

A bewildering array of estimates for mortality from the plague of 1347—53 is the result. The first outbreak of the Black Death indisputably was the deadliest but the death rate varied widely according to place and social stratum. National estimates of mortality for England, where the evidence is fullest, range from five percent, to 23.6 percent among aristocrats holding land from the king, to forty to forty—five percent of the kingdom’s clergy, to over sixty percent in a recent estimate. The picture for the continent likewise is varied. Regional mortality in Languedoc (France) was forty to fifty percent while sixty to eighty percent of Tuscans (Italy) perished. Urban death rates were mostly higher but no less disparate, e.g., half in Orvieto (Italy), Siena (Italy), and Volterra (Italy), fifty to sixty—six percent in Hamburg (Germany), fifty—eight to sixty—eight percent in Perpignan (France), sixty percent for Barcelona’s (Spain) clerical population, and seventy percent in Bremen (Germany). The Black Death was often highly arbitrary in how it killed in a narrow locale, which no doubt broadened the spectrum of mortality rates. Two of Durham Cathedral Priory’s manors, for instance, had respective death rates of twenty—one and seventy—eighty percent (Shrewsbury, 1970; Russell, 1948; Waugh, 1991; Ziegler, 1969; Benedictow, 2004; Le Roy Ladurie, 1976; Bowsky, 1964; Pounds, 1974; Emery, 1967; Gyug, 1983; Aberth, 1995; Lomas, 1989).

Credible death rates between one quarter and three quarters complicate reaching a Europe—wide figure. Neither a casual and unscientific averaging of available estimates to arrive at a probably misleading composite death rate nor a timid placing of mortality somewhere between one and two thirds is especially illuminating. Scholars confronting the problem’s complexity before venturing estimates once favored one third as a reasonable aggregate death rate. Since the early 1970s demographers have found higher levels of mortality plausible and European mortality of one half is considered defensible, a figure not too distant from less fanciful contemporary observations.

While the Black Death of 1347—53 inflicted demographic carnage, had it been an isolated event European population might have recovered to its former level in a generation or two and its economic impact would have been moderate. The disease’s long—term demographic and socioeconomic legacy arose from it recurrence. When both national and local epidemics are taken into account, England endured thirty plague years between 1351 and 1485, a pattern mirrored on the continent, where Perugia was struck nineteen times and Hamburg, Cologne, and Nuremburg at least ten times each in the fifteenth century. Deadliness of outbreaks declined — perhaps ten to twenty percent in the second plague (pestis secunda) of 1361—2, ten to fifteen percent in the third plague (pestis tertia) of 1369, and as low as five and rarely above ten percent thereafter — and became more localized; however, the Black Death’s persistence ensured that demographic recovery would be slow and socioeconomic consequences deeper. Europe’s population in 1430 may have been fifty to seventy—five percent lower than in 1290 (Cipolla, 1994; Gottfried, 1983).

Enumeration of corpses does not adequately reflect the Black Death’s demographic impact. Who perished was equally significant as how many; in other words, the structure of mortality influenced the time and rate of demographic recovery. The plague’s preference for urbanite over peasant, man over woman, poor over affluent, and, perhaps most significantly, young over mature shaped its demographic toll. Eyewitnesses so universally reported disproportionate death among the young in the plague’s initial recurrence (1361—2) that it became known as the Childen’s Plague (pestis puerorum, mortalité des enfants). If this preference for youth reflected natural resistance to the disease among plague survivors, the Black Death may have ultimately resembled a lower—mortality childhood disease, a reality that magnified both its demographic and psychological impact.

The Black Death pushed Europe into a long—term demographic trough. Notwithstanding anecdotal reports of nearly universal pregnancy of women in the wake of the magna pestilencia, demographic stagnancy characterized the rest of the Middle Ages. Population growth recommenced at different times in different places but rarely earlier than the second half of the fifteenth century and in many places not until c. 1550.

The European Economy on the Cusp of the Black Death

Like the plague’s death toll, its socioeconomic impact resists categorical measurement. The Black Death’s timing made a facile labeling of it as a watershed in European economic history nearly inevitable. It arrived near the close of an ebullient high Middle Ages (c. 1000 to c. 1300) in which urban life reemerged, long—distance commerce revived, business and manufacturing innovated, manorial agriculture matured, and population burgeoned, doubling or tripling. The Black Death simultaneously portended an economically stagnant, depressed late Middle Ages (c. 1300 to c. 1500). However, even if this simplistic and somewhat misleading portrait of the medieval economy is accepted, isolating the Black Death’s economic impact from manifold factors at play is a daunting challenge.

Cognizant of a qualitative difference between the high and late Middle Ages, students of medieval economy have offered varied explanations, some mutually exclusive, others not, some favoring the less dramatic, less visible, yet inexorable factor as an agent of change rather than a catastrophic demographic shift. For some, a cooling climate undercut agricultural productivity, a downturn that rippled throughout the predominantly agrarian economy. For others, exploitative political, social, and economic institutions enriched an idle elite and deprived working society of wherewithal and incentive to be innovative and productive. Yet others associate monetary factors with the fourteenth— and fifteenth—century economic doldrums.

The particular concerns of the twentieth century unsurprisingly induced some scholars to view the medieval economy through a Malthusian lens. In this reconstruction of the Middle Ages, population growth pressed against the society’s ability to feed itself by the mid—thirteenth century. Rising impoverishment and contracting holdings compelled the peasant to cultivate inferior, low—fertility land and to convert pasture to arable production and thereby inevitably reduce numbers of livestock and make manure for fertilizer scarcer. Boosting gross productivity in the immediate term yet driving yields of grain downward in the longer term exacerbated the imbalance between population and food supply; redressing the imbalance became inevitable. This idea’s adherents see signs of demographic correction from the mid—thirteenth century onward, possibly arising in part from marriage practices that reduced fertility. A more potent correction came with subsistence crises. Miserable weather in 1315 destroyed crops and the ensuing Great Famine (1315—22) reduced northern Europe’s population by perhaps ten to fifteen percent. Poor harvests, moreover, bedeviled England and Italy to the eve of the Black Death.

These factors — climate, imperfect institutions, monetary imbalances, overpopulation — diminish the Black Death’s role as a transformative socioeconomic event. In other words, socioeconomic changes already driven by other causes would have occurred anyway, merely more slowly, had the plague never struck Europe. This conviction fosters receptiveness to lower estimates of the Black Death’s deadliness. Recent scrutiny of the Malthusian analysis, especially studies of agriculture in source—rich eastern England, has, however, rehabilitated the Black Death as an agent of socioeconomic change. Growing awareness of the use of “progressive” agricultural techniques and of alternative, non—grain economies less susceptible to a Malthusian population—versus—resources dynamic has undercut the notion of an absolutely overpopulated Europe and has encouraged acceptance of higher rates of mortality from the plague (Campbell, 1983; Bailey, 1989).

The Black Death and the Agrarian Economy

The lion’s share of the Black Death’s effect was felt in the economy’s agricultural sector, unsurprising in a society in which, except in the most urbanized regions, nine of ten people eked out a living from the soil.

A village struck by the plague underwent a profound though brief disordering of the rhythm of daily life. Strong administrative and social structures, the power of custom, and innate human resiliency restored the village’s routine by the following year in most cases: fields were plowed, crops were sown, tended, and harvested, labor services were performed by the peasantry, the village’s lord collected dues from tenants. Behind this seeming normalcy, however, lord and peasant were adjusting to the Black Death’s principal economic consequence: a much smaller agricultural labor pool. Before the plague, rising population had kept wages low and rents and prices high, an economic reality advantageous to the lord in dealing with the peasant and inclining many a peasant to cleave to demeaning yet secure dependent tenure.

As the Black Death swung the balance in the peasant’s favor, the literate elite bemoaned a disintegrating social and economic order. William of Dene, John Langland, John Gower, and others polemically evoked nostalgia for the peasant who knew his place, worked hard, demanded little, and squelched pride while they condemned their present in which land lay unplowed and only an immediate pang of hunger goaded a lazy, disrespectful, grasping peasant to do a moment’s desultory work (Hatcher, 1994).

Moralizing exaggeration aside, the rural worker indeed demanded and received higher payments in cash (nominal wages) in the plague’s aftermath. Wages in England rose from twelve to twenty—eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s and twenty to forty percent from the 1340s to the 1360s. Immediate hikes were sometimes more drastic. During the plague year (1348—49) at Fornham All Saints (Suffolk), the lord paid the pre—plague rate of 3d. per acre for more half of the hired reaping but the rest cost 5d., an increase of 67 percent. The reaper, moreover, enjoyed more and larger tips in cash and perquisites in kind to supplement the wage. At Cuxham (Oxfordshire), a plowman making 2s. weekly before the plague demanded 3s. in 1349 and 10s. in 1350 (Farmer, 1988; Farmer, 1991; West Suffolk Record Office 3/15.7/2.4; Harvey, 1965).

In some instances, the initial hikes in nominal or cash wages subsided in the years further out from the plague and any benefit they conferred on the wage laborer was for a time undercut by another economic change fostered by the plague. Grave mortality ensured that the European supply of currency in gold and silver increased on a per—capita basis, which in turned unleashed substantial inflation in prices that did not subside in England until the mid—1370s and even later in many places on the continent. The inflation reduced the purchasing power (real wage) of the wage laborer so significantly that, even with higher cash wages, his earnings either bought him no more or often substantially less than before the magna pestilencia (Munro, 2003; Aberth, 2001).

The lord, however, was confronted not only by the roving wage laborer on whom he relied for occasional and labor—intensive seasonal tasks but also by the peasant bound to the soil who exchanged customary labor services, rent, and dues for holding land from the lord. A pool of labor services greatly reduced by the Black Death enabled the servile peasant to bargain for less onerous responsibilities and better conditions. At Tivetshall (Norfolk), vacant holdings deprived its lord of sixty percent of his week—work and all his winnowing services by 1350—51. A fifth of winter and summer week—work and a third of reaping services vanished at Redgrave (Suffolk) in 1349—50 due to the magna pestilencia. If a lord did not make concessions, a peasant often gravitated toward any better circumstance beckoning elsewhere. At Redgrave, for instance, the loss of services in 1349—50 directly due to the plague was followed in 1350—51 by an equally damaging wave of holdings abandoned by surviving tenants. For the medieval peasant, never so tightly bound to the manor as once imagined, the Black Death nonetheless fostered far greater rural mobility. Beyond loss of labor services, the deceased or absentee peasant paid no rent or dues and rendered no fees for use of manorial monopolies such as mills and ovens and the lord’s revenues shrank. The income of English lords contracted by twenty percent from 1347 to 1353 (Norfolk Record Office WAL 1247/288×1; University of Chicago Bacon 335—6; Gottfried, 1983).

Faced with these disorienting circumstances, the lord often ultimately had to decide how or even whether the pre—plague status quo could be reestablished on his estate. Not capitalistic in the sense of maximizing productivity for reinvestment of profits to enjoy yet more lucrative future returns, the medieval lord nonetheless valued stable income sufficient for aristocratic ostentation and consumption. A recalcitrant peasantry, diminished dues and services, and climbing wages undermined the material foundation of the noble lifestyle, jostled the aristocratic sense of proper social hierarchy, and invited a response.

In exceptional circumstances, a lord sometimes kept the peasant bound to the land. Because the nobility in Spanish Catalonia had already tightened control of the peasantry before the Black Death, because underdeveloped commercial agriculture provided the peasantry narrow options, and because the labor—intensive demesne agriculture common elsewhere was largely absent, the Catalan lord through a mix of coercion (physical intimidation, exorbitant fees to purchase freedom) and concession (reduced rents, conversion of servile dues to less humiliating fixed cash payments) kept the Catalan peasant in place. In England and elsewhere on the continent, where labor services were needed to till the demesne, such a conservative approach was less feasible. This, however, did not deter some lords from trying. The lord of Halesowen (Worcestershire) not only commanded the servile tenant to perform the full range of services but also resuscitated labor obligations in abeyance long before the Black Death, tantamount to an unwillingness to acknowledge anything had changed (Freedman, 1991; Razi, 1981).

Europe’s political elite also looked to legal coercion not only to contain rising wages and to limit the peasant’s mobility but also to allay a sense of disquietude and disorientation arising from the Black Death’s buffeting of pre—plague social realities. England’s Ordinance of Laborers (1349) and Statute of Laborers (1351) called for a return to the wages and terms of employment of 1346. Labor legislation was likewise promulgated by the Córtes of Aragon and Castile, the French crown, and cities such as Siena, Orvieto, Pisa, Florence, and Ragusa. The futility of capping wages by legislative fiat is evident in the French crown’s 1351 revision of its 1349 enactment to permit a wage increase of one third. Perhaps only in England, where effective government permitted robust enforcement, did the law slow wage increases for a time (Aberth, 2001; Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999; Cohn, 2007).

Once knee—jerk conservatism and legislative palliatives failed to revivify pre—plague socioeconomic arrangements, the lord cast about for a modus vivendi in a new world of abundant land and scarce labor. A sober triage of the available sources of labor, whether it was casual wage labor or a manor’s permanent stipendiary staff (famuli) or the dependent peasant, led to revision of managerial policy. The abbot of Saint Edmund’s, for example, focused on reconstitution of the permanent staff (famuli) on his manors. Despite mortality and flight, the abbot by and large achieved his goal by the mid—1350s. While labor legislation may have facilitated this, the abbot’s provision of more frequent and lucrative seasonal rewards, coupled with the payment of grain stipends in more valuable and marketable cereals such as wheat, no doubt helped secure the loyalty of famuli while circumventing statutory limits on higher wages. With this core of labor solidified, the focus turned to preserving the most essential labor services, especially those associated with the labor—intensive harvesting season. Less vital labor services were commuted for cash payments and ad hoc wage labor then hired to fill gaps. The cultivation of the demesne continued, though not on the pre—plague scale.

For a time in fact circumstances helped the lord continue direct management of the demesne. The general inflation of the quarter—century following the plague as well as poor harvests in the 1350s and 1360s boosted grain prices and partially compensated for more expensive labor. This so—called “Indian summer” of demesne agriculture ended quickly in the mid—1370s in England and subsequently on the continent when the post—plague inflation gave way to deflation and abundant harvests drove prices for commodities downward, where they remained, aside from brief intervals of inflation, for the rest of the Middle Ages. Recurrences of the plague, moreover, placed further stress on new managerial policies. For the lord who successfully persuaded new tenants to take over vacant holdings, such as happened at Chevington (Suffolk) by the late 1350s, the pestis secunda of 1361—62 often inflicted a decisive blow: a second recovery at Chevington never materialized (West Suffolk Records Office 3/15.3/2.9—2.23).

Under unremitting pressure, the traditional cultivation of the demesne ceased to be viable for lord after lord: a centuries—old manorial system gradually unraveled and the nature of agriculture was transformed. The lord’s earliest concession to this new reality was curtailment of cultivated acreage, a trend that accelerated with time. The 590.5 acres sown on average at Great Saxham (Suffolk) in the late 1330s was more than halved (288.67 acres) in the 1360s, for instance (West Suffolk Record Office, 3/15.14/1.1, 1.7, 1.8).

Beyond reducing the demesne to a size commensurate with available labor, the lord could explore types of husbandry less labor—intensive than traditional grain agriculture. Greater domestic manufacture of woolen cloth and growing demand for meat enabled many English lords to reduce arable production in favor of sheep—raising, which required far less labor. Livestock husbandry likewise became more significant on the continent. Suitable climate, soil, and markets made grapes, olives, apples, pears, vegetables, hops, hemp, flax, silk, and dye—stuffs attractive alternatives to grain. In hope of selling these cash crops, rural agriculture became more attuned to urban demand and urban businessmen and investors more intimately involved in what and how much of it was grown in the countryside (Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The lord also looked to reduce losses from demesne acreage no longer under the plow and from the vacant holdings of onetime tenants. Measures adopted to achieve this end initiated a process that gained momentum with each passing year until the face of the countryside was transformed and manorialism was dead. The English landlord, hopeful for a return to the pre—plague regime, initially granted brief terminal leases of four to six years at fixed rates for bits of demesne and for vacant dependent holdings. Leases over time lengthened to ten, twenty, thirty years, or even a lifetime. In France and Italy, the lord often resorted to métayage or mezzadria leasing, a type of sharecropping in which the lord contributed capital (land, seed, tools, plow teams) to the lessee, who did the work and surrendered a fraction of the harvest to the lord.

Disillusioned by growing obstacles to profitable cultivation of the demesne, the lord, especially in the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, adopted a more sweeping type of leasing, the placing of the demesne or even the entire manor “at farm” (ad firmam). A “farmer” (firmarius) paid the lord a fixed annual “farm” (firma) for the right to exploit the lord’s property and take whatever profit he could. The distant or unprofitable manor was usually “farmed” first and other manors followed until a lord’s personal management of his property often ceased entirely. The rising popularity of this expedient made direct management of demesne by lord rare by c. 1425. The lord often became a rentier bound to a fixed income. The tenurial transformation was completed when the lord sold to the peasant his right of lordship, a surrender to the peasant of outright possession of his holding for a fixed cash rent and freedom from dues and services. Manorialism, in effect, collapsed and was gone from western and central Europe by 1500.

The landlord’s discomfort ultimately benefited the peasantry. Lower prices for foodstuffs and greater purchasing power from the last quarter of the fourteenth century onward, progressive disintegration of demesnes, and waning customary land tenure enabled the enterprising, ambitious peasant to lease or purchase property and become a substantial landed proprietor. The average size of the peasant holding grew in the late Middle Ages. Due to the peasant’s generally improved standard of living, the century and a half following the magna pestilencia has been labeled a “golden age” in which the most successful peasant became a “yeoman” or “kulak” within the village community. Freed from labor service, holding a fixed copyhold lease, and enjoying greater disposable income, the peasant exploited his land exclusively for his personal benefit and often pursued leisure and some of the finer things in life. Consumption of meat by England’s humbler social strata rose substantially after the Black Death, a shift in consumer tastes that reduced demand for grain and helped make viable the shift toward pastoralism in the countryside. Late medieval sumptuary legislation, intended to keep the humble from dressing above his station and retain the distinction between low— and highborn, attests both to the peasant’s greater income and the desire of the elite to limit disorienting social change (Dyer, 1989; Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The Black Death, moreover, profoundly altered the contours of settlement in the countryside. Catastrophic loss of population led to abandonment of less attractive fields, contraction of existing settlements, and even wholesale desertion of villages. More than 1300 English villages vanished between 1350 and 1500. French and Dutch villagers abandoned isolated farmsteads and huddled in smaller villages while their Italian counterparts vacated remote settlements and shunned less desirable fields. The German countryside was mottled with abandoned settlements. Two thirds of named villages disappeared in Thuringia, Anhalt, and the eastern Harz mountains, one fifth in southwestern Germany, and one third in the Rhenish palatinate, abandonment far exceeding loss of population and possibly arising from migration from smaller to larger villages (Gottfried, 1983; Pounds, 1974).

The Black Death and the Commercial Economy

As with agriculture, assessment of the Black Death’s impact on the economy’s commercial sector is a complex problem. The vibrancy of the high medieval economy is generally conceded. As the first millennium gave way to the second, urban life revived, trade and manufacturing flourished, merchant and craft gilds emerged, commercial and financial innovations proliferated (e.g., partnerships, maritime insurance, double—entry bookkeeping, fair letters, letters of credit, bills of exchange, loan contracts, merchant banking, etc.). The integration of the high medieval economy reached its zenith c. 1250 to c. 1325 with the rise of large companies with international interests, such as the Bonsignori of Siena and the Buonaccorsi of Florence and the emergence of so—called “super companies” such as the Florentine Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

How to characterize the late medieval economy has been more fraught with controversy, however. Historians a century past, uncomprehending of how their modern world could be rooted in a retrograde economy, imagined an entrepreneurially creative and expansive late medieval economy. Succeeding generations of historians darkened this optimistic portrait and fashioned a late Middle Ages of unmitigated decline, an “age of adversity” in which the economy was placed under the rubric “depression of the late Middle Ages.” The historiographical pendulum now swings away from this interpretation and a more nuanced picture has emerged that gives the Black Death’s impact on commerce its full due but emphasizes the variety of the plague’s impact from merchant to merchant, industry to industry, and city to city. Success or failure was equally possible after the Black Death and the game favored adaptability, creativity, nimbleness, opportunism, and foresight.

Once the magna pestilencia had passed, the city had to cope with a labor supply even more greatly decimated than in the countryside due to a generally higher urban death rate. The city, however, could reverse some of this damage by attracting, as it had for centuries, new workers from the countryside, a phenomenon that deepened the crisis for the manorial lord and contributed to changes in rural settlement. A resurgence of the slave trade occurred in the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, where the female slave from Asia or Africa entered domestic service in the city and the male slave toiled in the countryside. Finding more labor was not, however, a panacea. A peasant or slave performed an unskilled task adequately but could not necessarily replace a skilled laborer. The gross loss of talent due to the plague caused a decline in per capita productivity by skilled labor remediable only by time and training (Hunt and Murray, 1999; Miskimin, 1975).

Another immediate consequence of the Black Death was dislocation of the demand for goods. A suddenly and sharply smaller population ensured a glut of manufactured and trade goods, whose prices plummeted for a time. The businessman who successfully weathered this short—term imbalance in supply and demand then had to reshape his business’ output to fit a declining or at best stagnant pool of potential customers.

The Black Death transformed the structure of demand as well. While the standard of living of the peasant improved, chronically low prices for grain and other agricultural products from the late fourteenth century may have deprived the peasant of the additional income to purchase enough manufactured or trade items to fill the hole in commercial demand. In the city, however, the plague concentrated wealth, often substantial family fortunes, in fewer and often younger hands, a circumstance that, when coupled with lower prices for grain, left greater per capita disposable income. The plague’s psychological impact, moreover, it is believed, influenced how this windfall was used. Pessimism and the specter of death spurred an individualistic pursuit of pleasure, a hedonism that manifested itself in the purchase of luxuries, especially in Italy. Even with a reduced population, the gross volume of luxury goods manufactured and sold rose, a pattern of consumption that endured even after the extra income had been spent within a generation or so after the magna pestilencia.

Like the manorial lord, the affluent urban bourgeois sometimes employed structural impediments to block the ambitious parvenu from joining his ranks and becoming a competitor. A tendency toward limiting the status of gild master to the son or son—in—law of a sitting master, evident in the first half of the fourteenth century, gained further impetus after the Black Death. The need for more journeymen after the plague was conceded in the shortening of terms of apprenticeship, but the newly minted journeyman often discovered that his chance of breaking through the glass ceiling and becoming a master was virtually nil without an entrée through kinship. Women also were banished from gilds as unwanted competition. The urban wage laborer, by and large controlled by the gilds, was denied membership and had no access to urban structures of power, a potent source of frustration. While these measures may have permitted the bourgeois to hold his ground for a time, the winds of change were blowing in the city as well as the countryside and gild monopolies and gild restrictions were fraying by the close of the Middle Ages.

In the new climate created by the Black Death, the individual businessman did retain an advantage: the business judgment and techniques honed during the high Middle Ages. This was crucial in a contracting economy in which gross productivity never attained its high medieval peak and in which the prevailing pattern was boom and bust on a roughly generational basis. A fluctuating economy demanded adaptability and the most successful post—plague businessman not merely weathered bad times but located opportunities within adversity and exploited them. The post—plague entrepreneur’s preference for short—term rather than long—term ventures, once believed a product of a gloomy despondency caused by the plague and exacerbated by endemic violence, decay of traditional institutions, and nearly continuous warfare, is now viewed as a judicious desire to leave open entrepreneurial options, to manage risk effectively, and to take advantage of whatever better opportunity arose. The successful post—plague businessman observed markets closely and responded to them while exercising strict control over his concern, looking for greater efficiency, and trimming costs (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The fortunes of the textile industry, a trade singularly susceptible to contracting markets and rising wages, best underscores the importance of flexibility. Competition among textile manufacturers, already great even before the Black Death due to excess productive capacity, was magnified when England entered the market for low— and medium—quality woolen cloth after the magna pestilencia and was exporting forty—thousand pieces annually by 1400. The English took advantage of proximity to raw material, wool England itself produced, a pattern increasingly common in late medieval business. When English producers were undeterred by a Flemish embargo on English cloth, the Flemish and Italians, the textile trade’s other principal players, were compelled to adapt in order to compete. Flemish producers that emphasized higher—grade, luxury textiles or that purchased, improved, and resold cheaper English cloth prospered while those that stubbornly competed head—to—head with the English in lower—quality woolens suffered. The Italians not only produced luxury woolens, improved their domestically—produced wool, found sources for wool outside England (Spain), and increased production of linen but also produced silks and cottons, once only imported into Europe from the East (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The new mentality of the successful post—plague businessman is exemplified by the Florentines Gregorio Dati and Buonaccorso Pitti and especially the celebrated merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini. The large companies and super companies, some of which failed even before the Black Death, were not well suited to the post—plague commercial economy. Datini’s family business, with its limited geographical ambitions, better exercised control, was more nimble and flexible as opportunities vanished or materialized, and more effectively managed risk, all keys to success. Datini through voluminous correspondence with his business associates, subordinates, and agents and his conspicuously careful and regular accounting grasped the reins of his concern tightly. He insulated himself from undue risk by never committing too heavily to any individual venture, by dividing cargoes among ships or by insuring them, by never lending money to notoriously uncreditworthy princes, and by remaining as apolitical as he could. His energy and drive to complete every business venture likewise served him well and made him an exemplar for commercial success in a challenging era (Origo, 1957; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The Black Death and Popular Rebellion

The late medieval popular uprising, a phenomenon with undeniable economic ramifications, is often linked with the demographic, cultural, social, and economic reshuffling caused by the Black Death; however, the connection between pestilence and revolt is neither exclusive nor linear. Any single uprising is rarely susceptible to a single—cause analysis and just as rarely was a single socioeconomic interest group the fomenter of disorder. The outbreak of rebellion in the first half of the fourteenth century (e.g., in urban [1302] and maritime [1325—28] Flanders and in English monastic towns [1326—27]) indicates the existence of socioeconomic and political disgruntlement well before the Black Death.

Some explanations for popular uprising, such as the placing of immediate stresses on the populace and the cumulative effect of centuries of oppression by manorial lords, are now largely dismissed. At times of greatest stress —— the Great Famine and the Black Death —— disorder but no large—scale, organized uprising materialized. Manorial oppression likewise is difficult to defend when the peasant in the plague’s aftermath was often enjoying better pay, reduced dues and services, broader opportunities, and a higher standard of living. Detailed study of the participants in the revolts most often labeled “peasant” uprisings has revealed the central involvement and apparent common cause of urban and rural tradesmen and craftsmen, not only manorial serfs.

The Black Death may indeed have made its greatest contribution to popular rebellion by expanding the peasant’s horizons and fueling a sense of grievance at the pace of change, not at its absence. The plague may also have undercut adherence to the notion of a divinely—sanctioned, static social order and buffeted a belief that preservation of manorial socioeconomic arrangements was essential to the survival of all, which in turn may have raised receptiveness to the apocalyptic socially revolutionary message of preachers like England’s John Ball. After the Black Death, change was inevitable and apparent to all.

The reasons for any individual rebellion were complex. Measures in the environs of Paris to check wage hikes caused by the plague doubtless fanned discontent and contributed to the outbreak of the Jacquerie of 1358 but high taxation to finance the Hundred Years’ War, depredation by marauding mercenary bands in the French countryside, and the peasantry’s conviction that the nobility had failed them in war roiled popular discontent. In the related urban revolt led by étienne Marcel (1355—58), tensions arose from the Parisian bourgeoisie’s discontent with the war’s progress, the crown’s imposition of regressive sales and head taxes, and devaluation of currency rather than change attributable to the Black Death.

In the English Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381, continued enforcement of the Statute of Laborers no doubt rankled and perhaps made the peasantry more open to provocative sermonizing but labor legislation had not halted higher wages or improvement in the standard of living for peasant. It seems likely that discontent may have arisen from an unsatisfying pace of improvement of the peasant’s lot. The regressive Poll Taxes of 1380 and 1381 also contributed to the discontent. It is furthermore noteworthy that the rebellion began in relatively affluent eastern England, not in the poorer west or north.

In the Ciompi revolt in Florence (1378—83), restrictive gild regulations and denial of political voice to workers due to the Black Death raised tensions; however, Florence’s war with the papacy and an economic slump in the 1370s resulting in devaluation of the penny in which the worker was paid were equally if not more important in fomenting unrest. Once the value of the penny was restored to its former level in 1383 the rebellion in fact subsided.

In sum, the Black Death played some role in each uprising but, as with many medieval phenomena, it is difficult to gauge its importance relative to other causes. Perhaps the plague’s greatest contribution to unrest lay in its fostering of a shrinking economy that for a time was less able to absorb socioeconomic tensions than had the growing high medieval economy. The rebellions in any event achieved little. Promises made to the rebels were invariably broken and brutal reprisals often followed. The lot of the lower socioeconomic strata was improved incrementally by the larger economic changes already at work. Viewed from this perspective, the Black Death may have had more influence in resolving the worker’s grievances than in spurring revolt.

Conclusion

The European economy at the close of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) differed fundamentally from the pre—plague economy. In the countryside, a freer peasant derived greater material benefit from his toil. Fixed rents if not outright ownership of land had largely displaced customary dues and services and, despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market. Yields improved as reduced population permitted a greater focus on fertile lands and more frequent fallowing, a beneficial phenomenon for the peasant. More pronounced socioeconomic gradations developed among peasants as some, especially more prosperous ones, exploited the changed circumstances, especially the availability of land. The peasant’s gain was the lord’s loss. As the Middle Ages waned, the lord was commonly a pure rentier whose income was subject to the depredations of inflation.

In trade and manufacturing, the relative ease of success during the high Middle Ages gave way to greater competition, which rewarded better business practices and leaner, meaner, and more efficient concerns. Greater sensitivity to the market and the cutting of costs ultimately rewarded the European consumer with a wider range of good at better prices.

In the long term, the demographic restructuring caused by the Black Death perhaps fostered the possibility of new economic growth. The pestilence returned Europe’s population roughly its level c. 1100. As one scholar notes, the Black Death, unlike other catastrophes, destroyed people but not property and the attenuated population was left with the whole of Europe’s resources to exploit, resources far more substantial by 1347 than they had been two and a half centuries earlier, when they had been created from the ground up. In this environment, survivors also benefited from the technological and commercial skills developed during the course of the high Middle Ages. Viewed from another perspective, the Black Death was a cataclysmic event and retrenchment was inevitable, but it ultimately diminished economic impediments and opened new opportunity.

References and Further Reading:

Aberth, John. “The Black Death in the Diocese of Ely: The Evidence of the Bishop’s Register.” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 275—87.

Aberth, John. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348—1350, a Brief History with Documents . Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.

Aston, T. H. and C. H. E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre—Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Bailey, Mark D. “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research.” Economic History Review 49 (1996): 1—19.

Bailey, Mark D. A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Benedictow, Ole J. The Black Death, 1346—1353: The Complete History. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004.

Bleukx, Koenraad. “Was the Black Death (1348—49) a Real Plague Epidemic? England as a Case Study.” In Serta Devota in Memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux. Pars Posterior: Cultura Medievalis, edited by W. Verbeke, M. Haverals, R. de Keyser, and J. Goossens, 64—113. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995.

Blockmans, Willem P. “The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries, 1349—1500.” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 58 (1980): 833—63.

Bolton, Jim L. “‘The World Upside Down’: Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change.” In The Black Death in England, edited by M. Ormrod and P. Lindley. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996.

Bowsky, William M. “The Impact of the Black Death upon Sienese Government and Society.” Speculum 38 (1964): 1—34.

Campbell, Bruce M. S. “Agricultural Progress in Medieval England: Some Evidence from Eastern Norfolk.” Economic History Review 36 (1983): 26—46.

Campbell, Bruce M. S., ed. Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

Cipolla, Carlo M. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000—1700, Third edition. New York: Norton, 1994.

Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. London: Edward Arnold, 2002.

Cohn, Sameul K. “After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes toward Labour in Late—Medieval Western Europe.” Economic History Review 60 (2007): 457—85.

Davis, David E. “The Scarcity of Rats and the Black Death.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1986): 455—70.

Davis, R. A. “The Effect of the Black Death on the Parish Priests of the Medieval Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 62 (1989): 85—90.

Drancourt, Michel, Gerard Aboudharam, Michel Signoli, Olivier Detour, and Didier Raoult. “Detection of 400—Year—Old Yersinia Pestis DNA in Human Dental Pulp: An Approach to the Diagnosis of Ancient Septicemia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States 95 (1998): 12637—40.

Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200—1520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Emery, Richard W. “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan.” Speculum 42 (1967): 611—23.

Farmer, David L. “Prices and Wages.” In The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. II, edited H. E. Hallam, 715—817. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Farmer, D. L. “Prices and Wages, 1350—1500.” In The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. III, edited E. Miller, 431—94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Flinn, Michael W. “Plague in Europe and the Mediterranean Countries.” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979): 131—48.

Freedman, Paul. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Gottfried, Robert. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Gyug, Richard. “The Effects and Extent of the Black Death of 1348: New Evidence for Clerical Mortality in Barcelona.” Mediæval Studies 45 (1983): 385—98.

Harvey, Barbara F. “The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4^th ser. 16 (1966): 23—42.

Harvey, P. D. A. A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, 1240—1400. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Hatcher, John. “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death.” Past and Present 144 (1994): 3—35.

Hatcher, John and Mark Bailey. Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hatcher, John. Plague, Population, and the English Economy 1348—1530. London and Basingstoke: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1977.

Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, edited by S. K. Cohn. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Horrox, Rosemary, transl. and ed. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Hunt, Edwin S.and James M. Murray. A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200—1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Jordan, William C. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Lehfeldt, Elizabeth, ed. The Black Death. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 2005.

Lerner, Robert E. The Age of Adversity: The Fourteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Peasants of Languedoc, transl. J. Day. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Lomas, Richard A. “The Black Death in County Durham.” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989): 127—40.

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1976.

Miskimin, Harry A. The Economy of the Early Renaissance, 1300—1460. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Morris, Christopher “The Plague in Britain.” Historical Journal 14 (1971): 205—15.

Munro, John H. “The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270—1570.” Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 1—74.

Munro, John H. “Wage—Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and the Real Incomes in Late—Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300—1500: Did Money Matter?” Research in Economic History 21 (2003): 185—297.

Origo. Iris The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335—1410. Boston: David R. Godine, 1957, 1986.

Platt, Colin. King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late—Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Poos, Lawrence R. A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350—1575. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Postan, Michael M. The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages. Harmondswworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975.

Pounds, Norman J. D. An Economic History of Europe. London: Longman, 1974.

Raoult, Didier, Gerard Aboudharam, Eric Crubézy, Georges Larrouy, Bertrand Ludes, and Michel Drancourt. “Molecular Identification by ‘Suicide PCR’ of Yersinia Pestis as the Agent of Medieval Black Death.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97 (7 Nov. 2000): 12800—3.

Razi, Zvi “Family, Land, and the Village Community in Later Medieval England.” Past and Present 93 (1981): 3—36.

Russell, Josiah C. British Medieval Population. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948.

Scott, Susan and Christopher J. Duncan. Return of the Black Death: The World’s Deadliest Serial Killer. Chicester, West Sussex and Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004.

Shrewsbury, John F. D. A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Twigg, Graham The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal. London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984.

Waugh, Scott L. England in the Reign of Edward III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. London: Penguin, 1969, 1987.

Citation: Routt, David. “The Economic Impact of the Black Death”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. July 20, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/

Timothy Cuff, Westminster College

Historical anthropometrics is the study of patterns in human body size and their correlates over time. While social researchers, public health specialists and physical anthropologists have long utilized anthropometric measures as indicators of well-being, only within the past three decades have historians begun to use such data extensively. Adult stature is a cumulative indicator of net nutritional status over the growth years, and thus reflects command over food and access to healthful surroundings. Since expenditures for these items comprised such a high percentage of family income for historical communities, mean stature can be used to examine changes in a population’s economic circumstances over time and to compare the well-being of different groups with similar genetic height potential. Anthropometric measures are available for portions of many national populations as far back as the early 1700s. While these data often serve as complements to standard economic indicators, in some cases they provide the only means of assessing historical economic well-being, as “conventional” measures such as per capita GDP, wage and price indices, and income inequality measures have been notoriously spotty and problematic to develop. Anthropometric-based research findings to date have contributed to the scholarly debates over mortality trends, the nature of slavery, and the outcomes of industrialization and economic development. Height has been the primary indicator utilized to date. Other indicators include height-standardized weight indices, birth weight, and age at menarche. Potentially even more important, historical anthropometrics broadens the understanding of “well-being” beyond the one dimensional “ruler” of income, providing another lens through which the quality of historical life can be viewed.

This article:

• provides a brief background of the field including a history of human body measurement and analysis and a description of the biological foundations for historical anthropometrics,
• describes the current state of the field (along with methodological issues) and future directions, and
• provides a selective bibliography.

Anthropometrics: Historical and Bio-Medical Background

The Evolution of Body Measurement and Analysis in Context

The measurement and description of the human form in the West date back to the artists of classical civilizations, but the rationale for systematic, large-scale body measurement and record keeping emerged out of the needs of early modern military organizations. By the mid-eighteenth century height commonly provided a means of classifying men into and of identifying them within military units and the procedures for measuring individuals entering military service were well established. The military’s need to identify recruits has provided most historical measurements of young men.

Scientific curiosity in the eighteenth century also spurred development of the first textbooks on human growth, although they were more concerned with growth patterns throughout life than with stature differences across groups or over time. In the nineteenth century class differences in height were easily observable in England. The moral outrage generated by the “tiny children” (Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twists”) along with the view that medicine had a preventive as well as a curative function, meant that anthropometry was directed primarily at the poor, especially children toiling in the factories of English and French industrial cities. Later, fear in Britain over the “degeneration” of its men and their potential as an effective fighting force provided motivation for large-scale anthropometric surveys, as did efforts evolving out of the child-welfare movement. The early-twentieth century saw the establishment of a series of longitudinal population surveys (which follow individuals as they age) in North America and in Europe. In some cases this work was directed toward the generation of growth standards, while other efforts evaluated social-class differences among children. Such studies can be seen as transitional steps between contemporary and historical anthropometrics. Since the 1950s, anthropometry has been utilized for a variety of purposes in both the developed and underdeveloped world. Population groups have been measured in order to refine growth standards, to monitor the nutritional status of individuals and populations during famines and political disturbances, and to evaluate the effectiveness of economic development programs.

Anthropometric studies today can be classified as one of three types. Auxologists perform basic research, collecting body measurements over the human life cycle to further detail standards of physical development for twenty-first century populations. The second focus, a continuation of nineteenth century work, documents the living standards of children often supporting regulatory legislation or government aid policies. The third direction is historical anthropometrics. Economists, historians, and anthropologists specializing in this field seek to assess, in physical terms, the well-being of previous societies and the factors which influenced it.

Human Growth and Development: The Biological Foundations of Historical Anthropometrics

While historical anthropometric research is a relatively recent development, an extensive body of medical literature relating nutrition and epidemiological conditions to physical growth provides a strong theoretical underpinning. Bio-medical literature, along with the World Health Organization, describes mean stature as one of the best measures of overall health conditions within a society.

Final attained height and height by age both result from a complex interaction of genetic endowment and environmental effects. At the level of the individual, genetics is a strong but not exclusive influence on the determination of final height and of growth patterns. Genetics is most important when net nutrition is optimal. However, when evaluating differences among groups of people in sub-optimal nutritional circumstances environmental influences predominate.

The same nutritional regime can result in different final stature for particular individuals, because of genetic variation in the ability to continue growing in the face of adverse nutritional circumstances, epidemiological environments, or work requirements. However, the genetic height potential of most Europeans, Africans, and North Americans of European or African ancestry is comparable; i.e., under equivalent environmental circumstances the groups have achieved nearly identical mean adult stature. For example, in many parts of rural Africa, mean adult heights today are similar to those of Africans of 150 years ago, while well-fed urban Africans attain final heights similar to current-day Europeans and North Americans of European descent. Differences in nutritional status do result in wide variation in adult height even within populations of the same genetic make-up. For example, individuals from higher socio-economic classes tend to be taller than their lower class counterparts whether in impoverished third-world countries or in the developed nations.

Height is the most commonly utilized, but not the only, anthropometric indicator of nutritional status. The growth profile is another. Environmental conditions, while affecting the timing of growth (the ages at which accelerations and decelerations in growth rates occur), do not affect the overall pattern (the sequence in which growth/maturation events occur). The body seems to be self-stabilizing, postponing growth until caloric levels will support it and maintaining genetically programmed body proportions more rigidly than size potential. While final adult height and length of the growth period are not absolutely linked, populations which stop growing earlier usually, although not universally, end up being taller. Age at menarche, birth weight, and weight-for-height are also useful. Age at menarche (i.e. the first occurrence of menstruation) is not a measure of physical size, but of sexual maturation. Menarche generally occurs earlier among well-nourished women. Average menarcheal age in the developed West is about 13 years, while in the middle of the nineteenth century it was between 15 and 16 years among European women. Areas which have not experienced nutritional improvement over the past century have not witnessed decreases in the age at menarche. Infant birth weight, an indicator of long-term maternal nutritional status, is influenced by the mother’s diet, work intensity, quality of health care, maternal size and the number of children she has delivered, as well as the mother’s health practices. The level of economic inequality and social class status are also correlated with birth weight variation, although these variables reflect some of the factors noted above. However, because the mother’s diet and health status are such strong influences on birth weight, it provides another useful means of monitoring women’s well-being. Height-for-weight indices, particularly the body mass index (BMI), have seen some use by anthropometric historians. Contemporary bio-medical research which links BMI levels and mortality risk hints at the promise which this measure might hold for historians. However, the limited availability of weight measurements before the mid-nineteenth century will limit the studies which can be produced.

Improvements in net nutritional status, both across wide segments of the population in developed countries and within urban areas of less-developed countries (LDCs), are generally accepted as the most salient influence on growth patterns and final stature. The widely experienced improvement in net nutrition which was apparent in most of the developed world across most of the twentieth century and more recently in the “modern” sector of some LDCs has lead to a secular trend, the unidirectional trend toward greater stature and faster maturation. Before the twentieth century, height cycling without a distinct direction was the dominant historical pattern. (Two other sources of stature increase have been hypothesized but have garnered little support among the medical community: the increased practice of infantile smallpox vaccination and heterosis (hybrid vigor), i.e. varietal cross-breeding within a species which produces offspring who are larger or stronger than either parent.)

The Definition and Determination of Nutritional Status

“Nutritional status” is a term critical to an understanding of anthropometrics. It encompasses more than simply diet, i.e. the intake of calories and nutrients, and is thus distinct from the more common term “nutrition.” While nutrition refers to the quantity and quality of food inputs to the human biological system, it makes no reference to the amounts needed for healthy functioning resulting from nutrient demand placed on the individual. Nutritional status, or synonymously “net nutrition,” refers to the summing up of nutrient input and demand on those nutrients. While work intensity is the most obvious demand, it is just one of many. Energy is required to resist infection. Pregnancy adds caloric and nutrient demands, as does breast-feeding. Calories expended in any of these fashions are available neither for basal metabolism, nor for growth. The difference between nutrition and nutritional status/net nutrition is important for anthropometrics, because it is the latter, not the former, for which auxological measurements are a proxy.

Human biologists and medical scientists generally agree that within genetically similar populations net nutrition is the primary determinant of adult physical stature. Height, as Bielicki notes, is “socially induced variation.” Figure 1 indicates the numerous channels of influence on the final adult stature of any individual. Anthropometric indicators reflect the relative ease or difficulty of acquiring sufficient nutrients to provide for growth in excess of the immediate needs of the body. Nutritional status and physical stature clearly are composite measures of well-being linked to economic processes. However, the link is mediated through a variety of social circumstances, some volitional, others not. Hence, anthropometric historians must evaluate each situation within its own economic, cultural, and historical context.

In earlier societies, and in some less developed countries today, access to nutrients was determined primarily by control of arable land. As markets for food developed and urban living became predominant, for increasing percentages of the population, access to nutrients depended upon the ability to purchase food, i.e. on real income. Additionally, food allocation within the family is not determined by markets but by intra-household bargaining as well as by tastes and custom. For example, in some cultures households distribute food resources so as to ensure nutritional adequacy for those family members engaged in income or resource-generating activity in order to maximize earning power. The handful of studies which include historical anthropometric data for women reveal that stature trends by gender do not always move in concert. Rather, in periods of declining nutritional status, women often exhibited a reduction in stature levels before such changes appeared among males. This is somewhat paradoxical because biologists generally argue that women’s growth trajectories are more resistant to a diminution in nutritional status than are those of men. Though too little historical research has been done on this issue to speak with certainty, the pattern might imply that, in periods of nutritional stress, women bore the initial brunt of deprivation.

Other cultural practices, including the high status accorded to the use of certain foods, such as white flour, polished rice, tea or coffee may promote greater consumption of nutritionally less valuable foods among those able to afford them. This would tend to reduce the resultant stature differences by income. Access to nutrients also depends upon other individual choices. A small landholder might decide to market much of his farm’s high-value, high-protein meat and dairy products, reducing his family’s consumption of these nutritious food products in order to maximize money income. However, while material welfare would increase, biological welfare, knowingly or unknowingly, would decline.

Disease-exposure variation occurs as a result of some factors under the individual’s control and other factors which are determined at the societal level. Pathogen prevalence and potency and the level of community sanitation are critical factors which are not directly affected by individual decision making. However, housing and occupation are often individually chosen and do help to determine the extent of disease exposure. Once transportation improvements allow housing segregation based on socio-economic status to occur within large urban areas, residence location can become an important influence. However, prior to such, for example in mid-nineteenth century United States, urban childhood mortality levels were more influenced by the number of children in a family than by parental occupation or socio-economic status. The close proximity of the homes of the wealthy and the poor seems to have created a common level of exposure to infectious agents and equally poor sanitary conditions for children of all economic classes.

Work intensity, another factor determining nutritional status, is a function of the age at which youth enter the labor force, educational attainment, the physical exertion needed in a chosen occupation, and the level of technology. There are obvious feedback effects from current nutritional status to future nutritional status. A low level of nutritional status today might hinder full-time labor-force participation, and result in low incomes, poor housing, and substandard food consumption in subsequent periods as well, thereby reinforcing the cycle of nutritional inadequacy.

Historical Anthropometrics

Early Developments in the Field

Le Roy Ladurie’s studies of nineteenth-century French soldiers published in the late 1960s and early 1970s are recognized as the first works in the spirit of modern historical anthropometrics. He documented that stature among French recruits varied with their socio-economic characteristics. In the U.S., the research was carried forward in the late 1970s, much based on nineteenth-century records of U.S. slaves transported from the upper to the lower South. Studies of Caribbean slaves followed.

In the 1980s numerous anthropometric works were generated in connection with a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) directed study of American and European mortality trends from 1650 to the present, coordinated by Robert W. Fogel. Motivated in great part by the desire to evaluate Thomas McKeown’s hypothesis that improvements in nutrition were the critical component in mortality declines in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the project has lead to the creation of numerous large anthropometric data bases. These have been the starting point for the analysis of trends in physical stature and net nutritional status on both sides of the Atlantic. While most historical anthropometric studies published in the U.S. during the early and mid-1980s were either outgrowths of the NBER project or were conducted by students of Robert Fogel, such as Richard Steckel and John Komlos, mortality trends were no longer the sole focus of historical anthropometrics. Anthropometric statistics were used to analyze the effect of industrialization on the populations experiencing it, as well as the characteristics of slavery in the United States. The data sources were primarily military records or documents relating to slaves. As the 1980s became the 1990s the geographic range of stature studies moved beyond Europe and North American to include Asia, Australia, and Africa. Other data sources were utilized. These included records from schools and utopian communities, certificates of freedom for manumitted slaves, voter registration cards, newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants, insurance applications, and a variety of prison inmate records. The number of anthropometric historians also expanded considerably.

Findings to Date

Major achievements to date in historical anthropometrics include 1) the determination of the main outlines of the trend in physical stature in Europe and North America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and 2) the emergence of several well-supported, although still debated, hypotheses pertaining to the relationship between height and the economic and social developments which accompanied modern economic growth in these centuries.

Historical research on human height has indicated how much healthier the New World environment was compared to that of Europe. Europeans who immigrated to North America, on average, obtained a net nutritional status far better than that which was possible for them to attain in their place of birth. Eighteenth century North Americans attained mean heights not achieved by Europeans until the twentieth century. The combination of lower population density, lower levels of income inequality, and greater food resources bestowed a great benefit upon those growing up in North America. This advantage is evident not only in adult heights but also in the earlier timing of the adolescent growth spurt, as well as the earlier attainment of final height.

Table 1
Mean Heights of Adult Males (in inches)

Table 1
Mean Heights of Adult Males (in inches)–>

Sources: U.S. whites, 1775-1783: Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor, “The Early Achievement of Modern Stature in America,” Social Science History 6 (1982): 453-481. U.S. whites, 1861-65: Robert Margo and Richard Steckel, “Heights of Native-Born Whites during the Antebellum Period,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 167-174. U.S. whites and blacks, 1943-44: Bernard D. Karpinos, “Height and Weight of Selective Service Registrants Processed for Military Service during World War II,” Human Biology 40 (1958): 292-321, Table 5. U.S. blacks, 1811-1861: Robert Margo and Richard Steckel, “The Height of American Slaves: New Evidence on Slave Nutrition and Health,” Social Science History 6 (1982): 516-538, Table 1. Hungary: John Komlos. Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century Habsburg Monarchy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, Table 2.1, 57. Britain: Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health, and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, Table 4.1, 148. Sweden: Lars G. Sandberg and Richard Steckel, “Overpopulation and Malnutrition Rediscovered: Hard Times in 19th-Century Sweden,” Explorations in Economic History 25 (1988): 1-19, Table 2, 7.

Note: Dates refer to dates of measurement.

Stature Cycles in Europe and America

The early finding that there was not a unidirectional upward trend in stature since the 1700s startled researchers, whose expectations were based on recent experience. Extrapolating backward, Floud, Wachter, and Gregory note that such surprise was misplaced, for if the twentieth century’s rate of height increase had been occurring for several centuries, medieval Europeans would have been dwarfs or midgets. Instead, in Europe cycles in height were evident. Though smaller in amplitude than in Europe, stature cycling was a feature of the American experience, as well. At the time of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II, the mean height of adult, native-born white males was a fraction over 68 inches (Table 1), but there was some variation in between these periods with a small decline in the years before the Civil War and perhaps another one from 1860 into the 1880s. Just before the turn of the twentieth century, mean stature began its relatively uninterrupted increase which continues to the present day. These findings are based primarily on military records drawn from the early national army, Civil War forces, West Point Cadets, and the Ohio National Guard, although other data sets show similar trends. The free black population seems to have experienced a downturn in physical stature very similar to that of whites in the pre-Civil War period. However, an exception to the antebellum diminution in nutritional status has been found among slave men.

Per Capita Income and Height

In addition to the cycling in height, anthropometric historians have documented that the intuitively anticipated positive correlation between mean height and per capita income holds at the national level in the twentieth century. Steckel has shown that, in cross-national comparison, the correlation between height and per capita income is as high as .84 to .90. However, since per capita income is highly correlated with a series of other variables that also affect height, the exact pathway through which income affects height is not fully clear. Among the factors which help to explain the variation are better diet, medicine, improvements in sanitary infrastructure, longer schooling, more sedentary life, and better housing. Intense work regimes and psycho-social stress, both of which affect growth negatively, might also be mitigated by greater per capita income. However, prior to the twentieth century the relationship between height and income was not monotonic. U.S. troops during the American Revolution were nearly as tall as U.S. soldiers sent to Europe and Japan in the 1940s, despite the fact that per capita income in the earlier period was substantially below that in the latter. Similarly, while per capita income in the U.S. in the late 1770s was below that of the British, the American troops had a height advantage of several inches over their British counterparts in the War of Independence.

Height and Income Inequality

The level of income inequality also has a powerful influence on mean heights. Steckel’s analysis of data for the twentieth century indicates that a 0.1 decrease in the Gini coefficient (indicating greater income equality) is associated with a gain in mean stature of about 3.7 cm (1.5 inches). In societies with great inequality, increases in per capita income have little effect on average stature if the gains accrue primarily to the wealthier segments of the society. Conversely, even without changes in average national per capita income, a reduction in inequality can have similar positive impact upon the stature and health of those at the lower rungs of the income ladder.

The high level of social inequality at the onset of modern economic growth in England is exemplified by the substantial disparity between the height of students of the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, an elite institution, and the Marine Society, a home for destitute boys in London. The difference in mean height at age fourteen exceeded three inches in favor of the gentry. In some years the gap was even greater. Komlos has documented similar findings elsewhere: regardless of location, boys from “prestigious military schools in England, France, and Germany were much taller than the population at large.” A similar pattern existed in the nineteenth-century U.S. However, the social gap in the U.S. was miniscule compared to that prevailing in the Old World. Stature also varied by occupational groups. In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and North America, white collar and professional workers tended to be significantly taller than laborers and unskilled workers. However, farmers, being close to the source of nutrients and with fewer interactions with urban disease pools, tended to be the tallest, though their advantage disappeared by the twentieth century.

Regional and Rural-Urban Differences

Floud, Wachter, and Gregory have shown that, in early nineteenth century Britain, regional variation in stature dwarfed occupational differences. In 1815, Scotsmen, rural and urban, as well as the Irish, were about one-half an inch taller than the non-London urban English of the day. The rural English were slightly shorter, on average, than Englishmen born in small and medium sized towns. Londoners, however, had a mean height almost one-third of an inch less than other urban dwellers in England and more than three-quarters of an inch below the Irish or the Scots. A similar pattern held among convicts transported to New South Wales, Australia, except that the stature of the rural English was well above the average for all other English transported convicts. Floud, Wachter, and Gregory show a trend of convergence in height among these groups after 1800. The tendency for low population density rural areas in the nineteenth century to be home to the tallest individuals was apparent from the Habsburg Monarchy to Scotland, and in the remote northern regions of late nineteenth-century Sweden and Japan as well. In colonial America the rural-urban gradient did not exist. As cities grew, the rural born began to display a stature advantage over their urban brethren. This divergence persisted into the nineteenth century, and disappeared in the early twentieth century, when the urban-born gained a height advantage.

The Early-Industrial-Growth and Antebellum Puzzles

These patterns of stature variation have been put into a framework in both the European and the American contexts. Respectively they are known as the “early-industrial-growth puzzle” and the “Antebellum puzzle.” The commonality which has been identified is that in the early stages of industrialization and/or market integration, even with rising per capita incomes, the biological well-being of the populations undergoing such change does not, necessarily, improve immediately. Rather, for at least some portions of the population, biological well-being declined during this period of economic growth. Explanations for these paradoxes (or puzzles) are still being investigated and include: rising income inequality, the greater spread of disease through more thoroughly developed transportation and marketing systems and urban growth, the rising real price of food as population growth outstripped the agricultural system’s ability to provide, and the choice of farmers to market rather than consume high value/high protein crops.

Slave Heights

Research on slave heights has provided important insight into the living standards of these bound laborers. Large differences in stature have been documented between slaves on the North American mainland and those in the Caribbean. Adult mainland slaves, both women and men, were approximately two inches taller than those in the West Indies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Steckel argues that the growth pattern and infant mortality rates of U.S. slave children indicate that they were moderately to severely malnourished, with mean heights for four to nine year olds below the second percentile of modern growth standards and with mortality rates twice those estimated for the entire United States population. Although below the fifth percentile throughout childhood, as adults these slaves were relatively tall by nineteenth-century standards, reaching about the twenty-fifth percentile of today’s height distribution, taller than most European populations of the time.

Height’s Correlation with Other Biological Indicators

The evaluation of McKeown’s hypothesis that much of the modern decline in mortality rates could be traced to improvements in nutrition (food intake) was one of the early rationales for the modern study of historical stature. Subsequent work has presented evidence for the parallel cycling of height and life expectancy in the United States during the nineteenth century. The relationship between the body-mass index, morbidity, and mortality risk within historical populations has also been documented. Along a similar line, Sandberg and Steckel’s data on Sweden have pointed out the parallel nature of stature trends and childhood mortality rates in the mid-nineteenth century.

Economic and social history are not the only two fields which have felt historical anthropometrics’ impact. North American slave height-by-age profiles developed by Steckel have been used by auxologists to exemplify the range of possible growth patterns among humans. Based on findings within the biological sciences, historical studies of stature have come full circle and are providing those same sciences with new data on human physical potential.

Methodological Issues

Accuracy problems in military-based data sets arise predominantly from carelessness of the measurer or from intentional misreporting of data rather than from lack of orthodox practice. Inadequate concern for accuracy can most often be noticed in heaping (height observations rounded to whole feet, six inch increments, or even numbered inches) and lack of fractional measurements. These “rounding” errors tend to be self-canceling. Of greater concern is intentional misreporting of either height or age, because minimum stature and age restrictions were often applied to military recruits. Young men, eager to discover the “romance” of military life or receive the bounty which sometimes accompanied enlistment, were not impervious to slight fabrication of their age. Recruiting officers, hoping to meet their assigned quotas quickly, might have been tempted to round measurements up to the minimum height requirement. Hence, it is not uncommon to find height and age heaping at either the age or stature minima.

For anthropometric historians, the issue of the representativeness of the population under study is similar to that for any social historian, but several specific caveats are appropriate when considering military samples. In time of peace military recruits tend to be less representative of the general population than are wartime armies. The military, with fewer demands for personnel, can be more selective, often instituting more stringent height minima, and occasionally maxima, for recruits. Such policies, as well as the self-interested behaviors noted above, require those who would use military data sets to evaluate and potentially adjust the data to account for the observations missing due to either left or right tail truncation. A series of techniques to account for such difficulties in the data have been developed, although there is still debate over the most appropriate technique. Other data sets also exhibit selectivity biases, although of different natures. Prison registers clearly do not provide a random sample of the population. The filter, however, is not based on size or desire for “exciting” work – rather on the propensity for criminal activity and on the enforcement mechanism of the judicial system. The representativeness of anthropometric samples can also be affected by previous selection by the Grim Reaper. Within Afro-Caribbean slave populations in Trinidad, death rates were significantly higher for shorter individuals (at all ages) than for the taller ones. The result is that a select group of more robust and taller individuals remained alive for eventual measurement.

One difficulty faced by anthropometric historians is the association of this research, more imagined than real, with previous misuses of body measurement. Nineteenth century American phrenologists used skull shape and size as a means of determining intelligence and as a way of justifying the enslavement of African-Americans. The Bertillon approach to evaluating prison inmates included the measurement and classification of lips, ears, feet, nose, and limbs in an effort to discern a genetic or racial basis for criminality. The Nazis attempted to breed the perfect race by eliminating what they perceived to be physically “inferior” peoples. Each, appropriately, has made many squeamish in regard to the use of body measurements as an index of social development. Further, while the biological research which supports historical anthropometrics is scientifically well founded and fully justifies the approach, care must be exercised to ensure that the impression is not given that researchers either are searching for, or promoting, an “aristocracy of the tall.” Being tall is not necessarily better in all circumstances, although recent work does indicate a series of social and economic advantages do accrue to the tall. However, for populations enduring an on-going sub-optimal net nutritional regime, an increase in mean height does signify improvement in the net nutritional level, and thus the general level of physical well-being. Untangling the factors responsible for change in this social indicator is complicated and height is not a complete proxy for the quality of life. However, it does provide a valuable means of assessing biological well-being in the past and the influence of social and economic developments on health.

Future Directions

Historical anthropometrics is maturing. Over the past several years a series of state-of-the-field articles and anthologies of critical works have been written or compiled. Each summarizes past accomplishments, consolidates isolated findings into more generalized conclusions, and/or points out the next steps for researchers. In 2004, the editors of Social Science History devoted an entire volume to anthropometric history, drawing upon both current work and remembrances of many of the field’s early and prominent researchers, including an integrative essay by Komlos and Baten. Anthropometric history now has its own journal, as John Komlos, who has literally established a center for historical anthropometrics in Munich, created Economics and Biology, “devoted to the exploration of the effect of socio-economic processes on human beings as biological organisms.” Early issues highlight the wide geographic, temporal, and conceptual range of historical anthropometric studies. Another project which shows the great range of current effort is Richard Steckel’s work with anthropologists to characterize very long term patterns in the movement of mean human height. Already this collaboration has produced, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, a compilation of essays documenting the biological well-being of New World populations beginning in 5000 B.C. using anthropological evidence. Its findings, consistent with those of some other recent anthropological studies, indicate a decline in health status for members of Western Hemisphere cultures in the pre-Columbian period as these societies began the transition from economies based on hunting and gathering to ones relying more heavily on settled agriculture. Steckel has been working to expand this approach to Europe via a collaborative and interdisciplinary project funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, titled, “A History of Health in Europe from the Late Paleolithic Era to the Present.”

Yet even with these impressive steps, continued work, similar to early efforts in the field, is still needed. Expansion of the number and type of samples are important steps in the confirmation and consolidation of early results. One of the field’s on-going frustrations is that, except for slave records, few data sets contain physical measurements for large numbers of females. To date, female slaves and ex-slaves, some late nineteenth century U.S. college women, along with transported female convicts are the primary sources of female historical stature. Generalizations of research findings to entire populations are hindered by the small amount of data on females and the knowledge, from that data which are extant, that stature trends for the two sexes do not mimic each other. Similarly, upper class samples of either sex are not common. Future efforts should be directed at locating samples which contain data on these two understudied groups.

As Riley noted, the problem which anthropometric historians seek to resolve is not the identification of likely influences on stature. The biological sciences have provided that theoretical framework. The task at hand is to determine the relative weight of the various influences or, in Fogel’s terms, to perform “an accounting exercise of particularly complicated nature, which involves measuring not only the direct effect of particular factors but also their indirect effects and their interactions with other factors.”

More localized studies, with sample sizes adequate statistical analysis, are needed. These will allow the determination of the social, economic, and demographic factors most closely associated with human height variation. Other key areas of future investigation include the functional consequences of differences in biological well-being proxied by height, including differences in labor productivity and life expectancy. Even with the strides that have been made, in some corners, skepticism remains about the approach. To combat this, researchers must be careful to stress repeatedly what anthropometric indicators proxy, what their limits are, and how knowledge of anthropometric trends can appropriately influence our understanding of economic and social history as well as inform social policy. The field promises many future insights into the nature of and influences on historical human well-being and thus clues about how human well-being, the focus of economics generally, can be more fully and more widely advanced.

Selected Bibliography

Survey/Overview Publications

Engerman, Stanley. “The Standard of Living Debate in International Perspective: Measures and Indicators.” In Health and Welfare during Industrialization, edited by Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud, 17-46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Floud, Roderick, and Bernard Harris. “Health, Height, and Welfare: Britain 1700-1980.” In Health and Welfare during Industrialization, edited by Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud, 91-126. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Floud, Roderick, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabelle Gregory. “The Heights of Europeans since 1750: A New Source for European Economic History.” In Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, edited by John Komlos, 10-24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Floud, Roderick, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabelle Gregory. Height, Health, and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Fogel, Robert W. “Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality since 1700: Some Preliminary Findings.” In Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, edited by Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, 439-527. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Haines, Michael R. “Growing Incomes, Shrinking People – Can Economic Development Be Hazardous to Your Health? Historical Evidence for the United States, England, and the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century.” Social Science History 28 (2004): 249-70.

Haines, Michael R., Lee A. Craig, and Thomas Weiss. “The Short and the Dead: Nutrition, Mortality, and the ‘Antebellum Puzzle’ in the United States.” Journal of Economic History 63 (June 2003): 382-413.

Harris, Bernard. “Health, Height, History: An Overview of Recent Developments in Anthropometric History.” Social History of Medicine 7 (1994): 297-320.

Harris, Bernard. “The Height of Schoolchildren in Britain, 1900-1950.” In Stature, Living Standards and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, edited by John Komlos, 25-38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Komlos, John, and Jörg Baten. The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspectives: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Munich, January 18-23, 1997. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999.

Komlos, John, and Jörg Baten. “Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Anthropometric Research and the Development of Social Science History.” Social Science History 28 (2004): 191-210.

Komlos, John, and Timothy Cuff. Classics of Anthropometric History: A Selected Anthology, St. Katharinen, Germany: Scripta Mercaturae, 1998.

Komlos, John. “Anthropometric History: What Is It?” Magazine of History (Spring 1992): 3-5.

Komlos, John. Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Komlos, John. The Biological Standard of Living in Europe and America 1700-1900: Studies in Anthropometric History. Aldershot: Variorum Press, 1995.

Komlos, John. The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Essays in Anthropometric History. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Steckel, Richard H., and J.C. Rose. The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Steckel, Richard H., and Roderick Floud. Health and Welfare during Industrialization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Steckel, Richard. “Height, Living Standards, and History.” Historical Methods 24 (1991): 183-87.

Steckel, Richard. “Stature and Living Standards in the United States.” In American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, edited by Robert E. Gallman and John J. Wallis, 265-310. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Steckel, Richard. “Stature and the Standard of Living.” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995): 1903-40.

Steckel, Richard. “A History of the Standard of Living in the United States.” In EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples, http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia/contents/steckel.standard.living.us.php

Seminal Articles in Historical Anthropometrics

Aron, Jean-Paul, Paul Dumont, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Anthropologie du Conscrit Francais. Paris: Mouton, 1972.

Eltis, David. “Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819-1839.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1982): 453-75.

Engerman, Stanley. “The Height of U.S. Slaves.” Local Population Studies 16 (1976): 45-50.

Floud, Roderick and Kenneth Wachter. “Poverty and Physical Stature, Evidence on the Standard of Living of London Boys 1770-1870.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 422-52.

Fogel, Robert W. “Physical Growth as a Measure of the Economic Well-being of Populations: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, second edition, volume 3, edited by F. Falkner and J.M. Tanner, 263-281. New York: Plenum, 1986.

Fogel, Robert W., Stanley Engerman, Roderick Floud, Gerald Friedman, Robert Margo, Kenneth Sokoloff, Richard Steckel, James Trussell, Georgia Villaflor and Kenneth Wachter. “Secular Changes in American and British Stature and Nutrition.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1983): 445-81.

Fogel, Robert W., Stanley L. Engerman, and James Trussell. “Exploring the Uses of Data on Height: The Analysis of Long-Term Trends in Nutrition, Labor Welfare, and Labor Productivity.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 401-21.

Friedman, Gerald C. “The Heights of Slaves in Trinidad.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 482-515.

Higman, Barry W. “Growth in Afro-Caribbean Slave Populations.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 50 (1979): 373-85.

Komlos, John. “The Height and Weight of West Point Cadets: Dietary Change in Antebellum America.” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 897-927.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, N. Bernageau, and Y. Pasquet. “Le Conscrit et l’ordinateur: Perspectives de recherches sur les Archives Militaries du XIXieme siecle Francais.” Studi Storici 10 (1969): 260-308.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. “The Conscripts of 1868: A Study of the Correlation between Geographical Mobility, Delinquency and Physical Stature and Other Aspects of the Situation of the Young Frenchmen Called to Do Military Service That Year.” In The Territory of the Historian. Translated by Ben and Sian Reynolds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Margo, Robert and Richard Steckel. “Heights of Native Born Whites during the Antebellum Period.” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 167-74.

Margo, Robert and Richard Steckel. “The Height of American Slaves: New Evidence on Slave Nutrition and Health.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 516-38.

Steckel, Richard. “Height and per Capita Income.” Historical Methods 16 (1983): 1-7.

Steckel, Richard. “Slave Height Profiles from Coastwise Manifests.” Explorations in Economic History 16 (1979): 363-80.

Articles Addressing Methodological Issues

Heintel, Markus, Lars Sandberg and Richard Steckel. “Swedish Historical Heights Revisited: New Estimation Techniques and Results.” In The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, edited by John Komlos and Jörg Baten, 449-58. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998.

Komlos, John, and Joo Han Kim. “Estimating Trends in Historical Heights.” Historical Methods 23 (1900): 116-20.

Riley, James C. “Height, Nutrition, and Mortality Risk Reconsidered.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1994): 465-92.

Steckel, Richard. “Percentiles of Modern Height: Standards for Use in Historical Research.’ Historical Methods 29 (1996): 157-66.

Wachter, Kenneth, and James Trussell. “Estimating Historical Heights.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 77 (1982): 279-303.

Wachter, Kenneth. “Graphical Estimation of Military Heights.” Historical Methods 14 (1981): 31-42.

Publications Providing Bio-Medical Background for Historical Anthropometrics

Bielecki, T. “Physical Growth as a Measure of the Economic Well-being of Populations: The Twentieth Century.” In Human Growth, second edition, volume 3, edited by F. Falkner and J.M. Tanner, 283-305. New York: Plenum, 1986.

Bogin, Barry. Patterns of Human Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Eveleth, Phyllis B. “Population Differences in Growth: Environmental and Genetic Factors.” In Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, second edition, volume 3, edited by F. Falkner and J.M. Tanner, 221-39. New York: Plenum, 1986.

Eveleth, Phyllis B. and James M. Tanner. Worldwide Variation in Human Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Tanner, James M. “Growth as a Target-Seeking Function: Catch-up and Catch-down Growth in Man.” In Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, second edition, volume 1, edited by F. Falkner and J.M. Tanner, 167-80. New York: Plenum, 1986.

Tanner, James M. “The Potential of Auxological Data for Monitoring Economic and Social Well-Being.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 571-81.

Tanner, James M. A History of the Study of Human Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

World Health Organization. “Use and Interpretation of Anthropometric Indicators of Nutritional Status.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 64 (1986): 929-41.

Predecessors to Historical Anthropometrics

Bowles, G. T. New Types of Old Americans at Harvard and at Eastern Women’s Colleges. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952.

Damon, Albert. “Secular Trend in Height and Weight within Old American Families at Harvard, 1870-1965.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 29 (1968): 45-50.

Damon, Albert. “Stature Increase among Italian-Americans: Environmental, Genetic, or Both?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 23 (1965) 401-08.

Gould, Benjamin A. Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers. New York: Hurd and Houghton [for the U.S. Sanitary Commission], 1869.

Karpinos, Bernard D. “Height and Weight of Selective Service Registrants Processed for Military Service during World War II.” Human Biology 40 (1958): 292-321.

Publications Focused on Nonstature-Based Anthropometric Measures

Brudevoll, J.E., K. Liestol, and L. Walloe. “Menarcheal Age in Oslo during the Last 140 Years.” Annals of Human Biology 6 (1979): 407-16.

Cuff, Timothy. “The Body Mass Index Values of Nineteenth Century West Point Cadets: A Theoretical Application of Waaler’s Curves to a Historical Population.” Historical Methods 26 (1993): 171-83.

Komlos, John. “The Age at Menarche in Vienna.” Historical Methods 22 (1989): 158-63.

James M. Tanner. “Trend towards Earlier Menarche in London, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Netherlands, and Hungary.” Nature 243 (1973): 95-96.

Trussell, James, and Richard Steckel. “The Age of Slaves at Menarche and Their First Birth.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1978): 477-505.

Waaler, Hans Th. “Height, Weight, and Mortality: The Norwegian Experience.” Acta Medica Scandinavica, supplement 679, 1984.

Ward, W. Peter, and Patricia C. Ward. “Infant Birth Weight and Nutrition in Industrializing Montreal.” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 324-45.

Ward, W. Peter. Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women’s Living Standards in the Industrializing West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Articles with a Non-western Geographic Focus

Cameron, Noel. “Physical Growth in a Transitional Economy: The Aftermath of South African Apartheid.” Economic and Human Biology 1 (2003): 29-42.

Eltis, David. ‘Welfare Trends among the Yoruba in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Anthropometric Evidence.” Journal of Economic History 50 (1990): 521-40.

Greulich, W.W. “Some Secular Changes in the Growth of American-born and Native Japanese Children.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 45 (1976): 553-68.

Morgan, Stephen. “Biological Indicators of Change in the Standard of Living in China during the Twentieth Century.” In The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, edited by John Komlos and Jörg Baten, 7-34. Struttart: Franz Steiner, 1998.

Nicholas, Stephen, Robert Gregory, and Sue Kimberley. “The Welfare of Indigenous and White Australians, 1890-1955.” In The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, edited by John Komlos and Jörg Baten, 35-54. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner: 1998.

Salvatore, Ricardo D. “Stature, Nutrition, and Regional Convergence: The Argentine Northwest in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” Social Science History 28 (2004): 297-324.

Shay, Ted. “The Level of Living in Japan, 1885-1938: New Evidence.’ In The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Explorations in Anthropometric History, edited by John Komlos, 173-201. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Articles with a North American Focus

Craig, Lee, and Thomas Weiss. “Nutritional Status and Agriculture Surpluses in antebellum United States.” In The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, edited by John Komlos and Jörg Baten, 190-207. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998.

Komlos, John, and Peter Coclanis, “On the ‘Puzzling’ Antebellum Cycle of the Biological Standard of Living: The Case of Georgia,” Explorations in Economic History 34 (1997): 433-59.

Komlos, John. “Shrinking in a Growing Economy? The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 779-802.

Komlos, John. “Toward an Anthropometric History of African-Americans: The Case of the Free Blacks in Antebellum Maryland.” In Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel, edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, 267-329. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Murray, John. “Standards of the Present for People of the Past: Height, Weight, and Mortality among Men of Amherst College, 1834-1949.” Journal of Economic History 57 (1997): 585-606.

Murray, John. “Stature among Members of a Nineteenth Century American Shaker Commune.” Annals of Human Biology 20 (1993): 121-29.

Steckel, Richard. “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity.” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986): 721-41.

Steckel, Richard. “Health and Nutrition in the American Midwest: Evidence from the Height of Ohio National Guardsmen, 1850-1910.” In Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, edited by John Komlos, 153-70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Steckel, Richard. “The Health and Mortality of Women and Children.” Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 333-45.

Steegmann, A. Theodore Jr. “18th Century British Military Stature: Growth Cessation, Selective Recruiting, Secular Trends, Nutrition at Birth, Cold and Occupation.” Human Biology 57 (1985): 77-95.

Articles with a European Focus

Baten, Jörg. “Economic Development and the Distribution of Nutritional Resources in Bavaria, 1797-1839.” Journal of Income Distribution 9 (2000): 89-106.

Baten, Jörg. “Climate, Grain production, and Nutritional Status in Southern Germany during the XVIIIth Century.” Journal of European Economic History 30 (2001): 9-47.

Baten, Jörg and John Murray “Heights of Men and Women in the Nineteenth-century Bavaria: Economic, Nutritional, and Disease Influences.” Explorations in Economic History 37 (2000): 351-69.

Komlos, John. “Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 1149-61.

Komlos, John. “The Nutritional Status of French Students.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1994): 493-508.

Komlos, John. “The Secular Trend in the Biological Standard of Living in the United Kingdom, 1730-1860.” Economic History Review 46 (1993): 115-44.

Nicholas, Stephen and Deborah Oxley. “The Living Standards of Women during the Industrial Revolution, 1795-1820.” Economic History Review 46 (1993): 723-49.

Nicholas, Stephen and Richard Steckel. “Heights and Living Standards of English Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770-1815.” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 937-57.

Oxley, Deborah. “Living Standards of Women in Prefamine Ireland.” Social Science History 28 (2004): 271-95.

Riggs, Paul. “The Standard of Living in Scotland, 1800-1850.” In Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, edited by John Komlos, 60-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1994.

Sandberg, Lars G. “Soldier, Soldier, What Made You Grow So Tall? A Study of Height, Health and Nutrition in Sweden, 1720-1881.” Economy and History 23 (1980): 91-105.

Steckel, Richard H. “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era.” Social Science History 28 (2004): 211-30.

Citation: Cuff, Timothy. “Historical Anthropometrics”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 29, 2004. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/historical-anthropometrics/

Darel Tai Engen, California State University – San Marcos

Introduction ¹

The ancient Greek economy is somewhat of an enigma. Given the remoteness of ancient Greek civilization, the evidence is minimal and difficulties of interpretation abound. Ancient Greek civilization flourished from around 776 to 30 B.C. in what are called the Archaic (776-480), Classical (480-323), and Hellenistic (323-30) periods.² During this time, Greek civilization was very different from our own in a variety of ways. In the Archaic and Classical periods, Greece was not unified but was comprised of hundreds of small, independent poleis or “city-states.” During the Hellenistic period, Greek civilization spread into the Near East and large kingdoms became the norm. Throughout these periods of ancient Greek civilization, the level of technology was nothing like it is today and values developed that shaped the economy in unique ways. Thus, despite over a century of investigation, scholars are still debating the nature of the ancient Greek economy.

Moreover, the evidence is insufficient to employ all but the most basic quantitative methods of modern economic analysis and has forced scholars to employ other more qualitative methods of investigation. This brief article, therefore, will not include any of the statistics, tables, charts, or graphs that normally accompany economic studies. Rather, it will attempt to set out the types of evidence available for studying the ancient Greek economy, to describe briefly the long-running debate about the ancient Greek economy and the most widely accepted model of it, and then to present a basic view of the various sectors of the ancient Greek economy during the three major phases of its history. In addition, reference will be made to some recent scholarly trends in the field.

Sources of Evidence

Although the ancient Greeks achieved a high degree of sophistication in their political, philosophical, and literary analyses and have, therefore, left us with a significant amount of evidence concerning these matters, few Greeks attempted what we would call sophisticated economic analysis. Nonetheless, the ancient Greeks did engage in economic activity. They produced and exchanged goods both in local and long distance trade and had monetary systems to facilitate their exchanges. These activities have left behind material remains and are described in various contexts scattered throughout the extant writings of the ancient Greeks.

Most of our evidence for the ancient Greek economy concerns Athens in the Classical period and includes literary works, such as legal speeches, philosophical dialogues and treatises, historical narratives, and dramas and other poetic writings. Demosthenes, Lysias, Isokrates, and other Attic Orators have left us with numerous speeches, several of which concern economic matters, usually within the context of a lawsuit. But although these speeches illuminate some aspects of ancient Greek contracts, loans, trade, and other economic activity, one must analyze them with care on account of the biases and distortions inherent in legal speeches.

Philosophical works, especially those of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, provide us with an insight into how the ancient Greeks perceived and analyzed economic matters. We learn about the place of economic activities within the Greek city-state, value system, and social and political institutions. One drawback of such evidence, however, is that the authors of these works were without exception members of the elite, and their political perspective and disdain for day-to-day economic activity should not necessarily be taken to represent the views of all or even the majority of ancient Greeks.

The ancient Greek historians concerned themselves primarily with politics and warfare. But within these contexts, one can find bits of information here and there about public finance and other economic matters. Thucydides, for example, does takes care to describe the financial resources of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

Poems and dramas also contain evidence concerning the ancient Greek economy. One can find random references to trade, manufacturing, the status of businessmen, and other economic matters. Of course, one must be careful to account for genre and audience in addition to the personal perspective of the author when using such sources for information about the economy. The plays of Aristophanes, for example, make many references to economic activities, but such references are often characterized by stereotyping and exaggeration for comedic purposes.

One of the most extensive collections of economic documents is the papyri from Greek-controlled Egypt during the Hellenistic period. The Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt developed an extensive bureaucracy to oversee numerous economic activities and like all bureaucracies, they kept detailed records of their administration. Thus, the papyri include information about such things as taxes, government-controlled lands and labor, and the unique numismatic policies of the Ptolemies.

Epigraphic evidence comes in the form of stone inscriptions from public and private institutions. Boundary markers placed on land used as security for loans, called horoi, were often inscribed with the terms of the loans. States such as Athens inscribed honorary decrees for those who had done outstanding services for the state, including economic ones. States also inscribed accounts for public building projects and leases of public lands or mines. In addition, religious sanctuaries frequently inscribed accounts of monies and other assets, such as produce, land, and buildings, under their control. Although accounts tend to be free of human biases, honorary decrees are much more complex and the historian must be careful to consider the perspective of their issuing institutions when interpreting them.

Archaeological evidence is free of some of the representational complexities of the literary and epigraphic evidence. Pottery finds can tell us about pottery manufacture and trade. The vase types indicate the goods they contained, such as olive oil, wine, or grain. The distribution of finds of ancient pottery can, therefore, tell us the extent of trade in various goods. Finds of hoarded coins are also invaluable for the information they reveal about the volume of coins minted by a given state at a given time and the extent to which a state’s coinage was distributed geographically. But such archaeological evidence is not without its drawbacks as well. The same “muteness” that frees such evidence from human biases also makes it incapable of telling us who traded the goods, why they were traded, how they were traded, how much they cost, and how many middlemen they went through before reaching their find spots. Furthermore, it is always dangerous to attempt to extrapolate broad conclusions about the economy from a small number of finds, since we can never be sure if those finds are representative of larger phenomena or merely exceptional cases that archaeologists happened to stumble upon.

Some of the most spectacular and informative finds in recent years have been made under the waters of the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas by what is known as marine (or nautical) archaeology. Ancient shipwrecks containing goods for trade have opened new doors to the study of ancient Greek merchant vessels, manufacturing, and trade. Although the field is relatively new, it has already yielded much new data and promises great things for the future.

The Debate about the Ancient Greek Economy

As stated above, the ancient Greek economy has been the subject of a long-running debate that continues to this day. Briefly stated, the debate began in the late nineteenth century and revolved around the issue of whether the economy was “primitive” or “modern.” These were a poor choice of terms with which to conceptualize the ancient Greek economy and are to a great extent responsible for the intractability of the debate. These terms are clearly normative in character so that essentially the argument was about whether the ancient Greek economy was like our “modern” economy, which was never carefully defined, but apparently assumed to be a free enterprise, capitalistic one with interconnected price-making markets. In addition, confusion arose over whether the ancient Greek economy was like a modern economy in quantity (scale) or quality (its organizing principles). Lastly, such terms clearly attempt to characterize the ancient Greek economy as a whole and do not distinguish differences among regions or city-states of Greece, time periods, or sectors of the economy (agriculture, banking, long distance trade, etc.).

Seeing extensive trade and use of money in Greece from the fifth century B.C. onward, the modernists extrapolated the existence of a market economy in Classical Greece. On the other hand, seeing traditional Greek social and political values that disdained the productive, impersonal, and industrial nature of modern market economies, the primitivists downplayed the existence of extensive trade and the use of money in the economy. Neither primitivists nor modernists could conceive of the existence of extensive trade and the use of money unless the ancient Greek economy was organized according to market principles. Moreover, neither side in the debate could call activities “economic” unless such activities were productive and aimed at growth.

Historical methods were also a factor in the debate. Traditional ancient historians who relied on philology and archaeology tended to side with the modernist interpretation, whereas historians who employed new methods drawn from sociology and anthropology tended to hold to the primitivist view. For example, Michael Rostovtzeff assembled a wealth of archaeological data to argue that the scale of the ancient Greek economy in the Hellenistic period was so great that it could not be considered primitive. On the other hand, Johannes Hasebroek used sociological methods developed by Max Weber to argue that the ancient Greek citizen was a homo politicus (“political man”) and not a homo economicus (“economic man”) – he disdained economic activities and subordinated them to traditional political interests.

A turning point in the debate came with the work of Karl Polanyi who drew on anthropological methods to argue that economies need not be organized according to the independent and self-regulating institutions of a market system. He distinguished between “substantivist” and “formalist” economic analysis. The latter, which is typical of economic analysis today, is appropriate only for market economies. Market economies operate independently of non-economic institutions and their most characteristic feature is that prices are set according to an aggregate derived from the impersonal forces of supply and demand among a group of interconnected markets. But material goods may be produced, exchanged, and valued by means other than market institutions. Such means may be tied to non-economic social and political institutions, including gift exchange or state-controlled redistribution and price-setting. Hence, other tools of analysis, namely “substantivist” economics, must be employed to understand them. Polanyi concluded that ancient Greece did not have a developed market system until the Hellenistic period. Before that time, the economy of ancient Greece did not comprise an independent sphere of institutions, but rather was “embedded” in other social and political institutions. Thus, Polanyi opened the door through which scholars could begin to examine the ancient Greek economy free from the normative parameters originally imposed on the debate. Unfortunately, the grip of the old parameters has been very strong and the debate has never completely freed itself from their influence.

The Finley Model and Its Aftermath

At present the most widely accepted model of the ancient Greek economy is that which was first set forth by Moses Finley in 1973. This view owes much to the Weber-Hasebroek-Polanyi line of analysis and holds that the ancient Greek economy was fundamentally different from the market economy that predominates in most of the world today. Not only was the ancient Greek economy much smaller in scale than economies today, it also differed greatly in quality.

Although the ancient Greek word oikonomia is the root of our modern English word “economy,” the two words are not synonymous. Whereas today “economy” refers to a distinct sphere of human interactions involving the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, oikonomia meant “household management,” a familial activity that was subsumed or “embedded” in traditional social and political institutions. True, the Greeks produced and consumed goods, engaged in various forms of exchanges including long-distance trade, and developed monetary systems employing coinage, but they did not see such activities as being part of a distinct institution which we call the “economy.”

According to Finley’s model, the subordination of economic activities to social and political ones was a byproduct of a Greek value system that emphasized the wellbeing of the community over that of the individual. Economic activity was necessary in this system only in so far as the individual male citizen had to provide sustenance for himself and his family. This could be accomplished simply by farming a small plot of land. Beyond that, the male citizen was expected to devote himself to the wellbeing of the community by participating in the public religious, political, and military life of the polis.

On the other hand, ancient Greek values held in low esteem economic activities that were not subordinated to the traditional activities of managing the family farm and obtaining goods for necessary consumption. So-called banausic work, which included manufacturing, business, and trade (which were not tied to the land and the family farm), and what we would call “capitalism” (investing money to make more money) were considered to be incompatible with active participation in the affairs of the polis and even as unnatural and morally corrupting. A life on the land, farming to produce only so much as was needed for consumption and leaving enough leisure time for active participation in the public life of the polis, was the social ideal. Production and exchange were to be undertaken only for personal need, to help out friends, or to benefit the community as a whole. Such activities were not to be undertaken simply to make a profit and certainly not to obtain capital for future investment and economic growth.

Given the limits put on economic activity by traditional values and the absence of a modern conception of the economy, agriculture comprised the bulk of production and exchange. Most production, therefore, was carried out in the countryside and cities were net consumers rather than producers, living off the surplus of the countryside. With limited technology and no understanding of economies of scale, cities were not hubs of industry, and manufacturing existed only on a small scale. Cities were mainly places for people to live as well as religious and governmental centers. Their contribution to the economy was only to demand the surplus produce of the countryside, manufacture limited amounts of goods, and provide market places and ports of trade for the exchange of goods.

Since the bulk of economic wealth was produced from the land and banausic occupations were not esteemed, the elite of ancient Greek society were landowners who consequently dominated politics, even in democratic poleis like Athens. Such men had little interest in manufacturing, business, and trade and, like their society as a whole, did not consider the economy as a distinct sphere separate from social and political concerns. Thus, their official policies with regard to the economy were much different from that of modern states.

Modern states undertake policies with specifically economic goals, desiring in particular to make their national economy more productive, to expand or grow, thereby increasing the per capita wealth of the state. Ancient Greek city-states, on the other hand, had an interest and involvement in what we would call economic activities (trade, minting coins, production, etc.) that, like oikonomia on the household level, were consumptive in nature and fulfilled traditional social and political needs, not strictly economic ones.

Finley’s model also holds that there was neither a “market mentality” nor interconnected markets that could operate according to impersonal price-setting market mechanisms. Individual city-states certainly had “market places” (agorai), but such markets existed largely in isolation with minimal connections among them. Thus, prices were set according to local conditions and personal relationships rather than in accordance with the impersonal forces of supply and demand. This was so in part because of the Greek socio-political emphasis on self-sufficiency (autarkeia), but also because the physical environment and industry of the eastern Mediterranean tended to produce similar goods, so that there were few items that a city-state needed which could not be obtained from within its own boundaries.

Moreover, according to Finley’s model, the interests of Greek city-states in trade were likewise limited by traditional political concerns to the consumptive goals of ensuring the import of adequate supplies of “material wants,” such as food at reasonable prices for their citizens, and revenue which could be obtained from taxes on trade. The former goal could be fulfilled by making laws that required or provided incentives for traders to bring grain into the city. Laws such as these were merely extensions of traditional political policies, like conquest and plunder, but in which a less violent form of acquisition would now be undertaken. But though the means had changed, the ends were still political; there was no interest in the economy per se. The same holds true for the traditional need of city-states for revenue to pay for public projects, such as temple building and road maintenance. Here again, old and often violent methods of obtaining revenue were augmented through such things as taxes on trade.

Finley’s model has had a great impact on those who study the ancient Greek economy and is still widely accepted today. But although the general picture it presents of the ancient Greek economy has not been superceded, the model is not without flaws. It was inevitable that Finley would overstate his model, since it attempted to encompass the general character of the ancient Greek economy as a whole. Thus, the model makes little distinction between different regions or city-states of Greece, even though it is clear that the economies of Athens and Sparta, for example, were quite different in many respects. Finley also treats the various sectors of the economy (agriculture, labor, manufacturing, long-distance trade, banking, etc.) as if they were all governed equally in accordance with the general tenets of the model, despite the fact that, for example, there were significant differences between the values that applied in the landed economy and those that prevailed in overseas trade. Lastly, Finley’s model is synchronic and hardly acknowledges changes in both the quantity and the quality of the economy over time.

Some close examinations of the various sectors of the ancient Greek economy in different places and at different times have supported Finley’s model in its general outlines. But they have been matched by just as many studies that have revealed exceptions to the model. Thus, one recent trend in the scholarship has been to try to revise the Finley model in light of focused studies of particular sectors of the economy at specific times and places. Another trend has been simply to ignore the Finley model and bypass the old debate altogether by examining the ancient Greek economy in ways that make them irrelevant. Basically, given the quantity and the quality of the available evidence, our attempts to understand the ancient Greek economy are greatly affected by the perspective from which we approach it. We can choose to try to characterize the entire ancient Greek economy in general, to see the forest as it were, and debate whether it was more or less similar to our own. Or we can focus in on the trees and undertake narrow studies of particular sectors of the ancient Greek economy at specific times and places. Both approaches are useful and not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The Archaic Period

Finley’s model holds most true for the Archaic period (c. 776-480 B.C.) of ancient Greek history. Archaeological evidence and literary references from such works as the epic poems of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), the Works and Days of Hesiod, and the works of the lyric poets attest to an economy that was generally small in scale and centered on household production and consumption. This is not surprising, since it was during the Archaic period that Greek civilization was re-emerging from a “Dark Age” of upheaval and forming its basic social, legal, political, and economic institutions. The fundamental political unit, the polis or independent city-state, appears at this time as do non-monarchal governments allowing for at least some degree of political participation among a broad swath of citizens.

For the most part, governments did not actively involve themselves in economic matters, except during the occasional political upheavals between “haves” and “have-nots” in which land might be confiscated from the few and redistributed to the many. Despite the fact that much of the Greek mainland is mountainous and the rivers generally small, there was enough fertile land and winter rainfall so that agriculture could account for the bulk of economic production, as it would in all civilizations before the modern industrial era. But unlike the large kingdoms of the Near East, Greece had a free-enterprise economy and most land was privately owned. Agriculture was carried out primarily on small family farms, though the Homeric epics indicate that there were also some larger estates controlled by the elite and worked with the help of free landless thetes whose labor would be needed especially at harvest time. Slaves existed, but not in such large numbers as to make the economy and society dependent on them.

As the populations of cities were fairly small, crafts and manufacturing were largely carried out within households for internal consumption. Both literary accounts and material remains, however, indicate that there was a certain amount of specialization. Artisans are referred to in the Homeric epics and the level of craftsmanship seen on items, such as metal work and painted pottery, was not likely to have been accomplished by non-specialists. Nevertheless, without large-scale manufacturing, safety from brigands on land and pirates at sea, and a monetary system employing coinage (until late in the sixth century), markets were necessarily small, devoted to local products, and certainly not interconnected into a price-setting market economy. Trade was limited mostly to local exchanges between the countryside and the urban center of city-states. Farmers might load up their surplus goods on a small ship to sell them in a neighboring city, as Hesiod attests, but long-distance sea-borne trade was devoted almost exclusively to luxury items, such as precious metals, jewelry, and finely-painted pottery. Moreover, gift exchanges in accordance with social traditions were as prominent if not more so than impersonal exchanges for profit. In general, those who engaged in banausic occupations on more than a part-time basis and sought profit from such activities were looked down on and did not hold positions of prestige in society or government.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the scale of the Greek economy grew during the Archaic period and if not per capita, at least in proportion to the clear growth in population. Population increases and the desire for more land were the primary impetuses for a colonizing movement that established Greek poleis throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions during this period. These new city-states put more land under cultivation, thereby providing the agriculture necessary to sustain the growing population. Moreover, archaeological evidence for the dispersal of Greek products (particularly pottery) over a wide area indicate that trade and manufacturing had also expanded greatly since the Dark Age. It is probably no coincidence that the end of the Archaic period witnessed for the first time a divergence between the designs of merchant vessels and warships, a distinction that would become permanent. Also, after the invention of coinage in Asia Minor in the early sixth century B.C., even though various other forms of money and barter continued to be employed throughout the course of ancient Greek history, the Greeks were quick to adopt coinage and it became the predominant means of exchange from the end of the sixth century onward. The aforementioned economic trends are traced in an important recent book by David Tandy, who argues that they had a fundamental impact on the development of the social and political organization and values of the Archaic polis.

Key Economic Sectors of the Classical Period

During the Classical period of ancient Greek history (480-323 B.C.), continued increases in population as well as political developments influenced various sectors of the economy to the extent that one can see a growing number of deviations from the Finley model. Evidence concerning the economy also becomes more abundant and informative. Thus, a more detailed description of the economy during the Classical period is possible and more attention to the distinctions between its various sectors is also desirable.

In light of the cautionary statements made earlier in this article about overgeneralization, it is important to note that great variation existed among the regions and city-states of the ancient Greek world, especially during the Classical period. Athens and Sparta are famous examples of two almost polar opposites in their social and political organizations and this is no less true with regard to their economic institutions. Given, however, the fact that Athens is the best documented and most studied place in ancient Greek history, the various sectors of the ancient Greek economy during the Classical period will be discussed primarily as they existed in Athens, despite the fact that it was in many ways exceptional. Significant variations from the Athenian example will be noted, however, as will some recent trends in scholarship.

Public and Private Economic Sectors

It is first necessary to distinguish between the public and private sectors of the economy. Throughout most of ancient Greek history before the Hellenistic period, a free enterprise economy with private property and limited government intervention predominated. This places Greece in sharp contrast to most other ancient civilizations, in which governmental or religious institutions tended to dominate the economy. The main economic concerns of the governments of the Greek city-states were to maintain harmony within the private economy (make laws, adjudicate disputes, and protect private property rights), make sure that food was available to their citizenries at reasonable prices, and obtain revenue from economic activities (through taxes) to pay for government expenses.

Athens had numerous laws to protect private property rights and had officials and law courts to enforce them. In addition, there were officials who oversaw such things as weights, measures, and coinage to make sure that people were not cheated in the market place. Athens also had laws to ensure an adequate supply of grain for its citizens, such as a law against the export of grain and laws to encourage traders to import grain. Athens even had agreements with other states in which the latter gave favorable treatment to traders bound for Athens with grain.

On the other hand, Athens did not tax its citizens directly except in cases of state emergencies (eisphorai) and in requiring the wealthiest citizens to perform public services (liturgies). Most taxes were indirect: market taxes, port taxes, import-export taxes, and taxes on foreigners who took up long-term residence in Athens. Taxes were collected by companies of private tax farmers who bid on contracts issued by the state. In addition to taxes, Athens obtained revenue from leases of publicly owned lands and mines. Revenue was necessary for various government expenditures, including administrative costs, public festivals, and maintenance of widows and orphans of soldiers who died in battle as well as building ships’ hulls for the navy, walls for the city, and temples for the gods. Such state expenditures could have a significant impact on the economy, as is clear from the large quantities of money and labor that appear in the inscribed accounts of the building projects on the Athenian acropolis.

Although the Finley model is right in many respects with regard to the limited interest and involvement of the state in the economy, one recent trend has been to show through carefully focused examinations of specific phenomena that Finley pressed his case too far. For example, Finley drew too sharp a distinction between the interests of non-citizen (and, therefore, non-landowning) traders and the landed citizens who dominated Athenian government. It is true that the latter might not have exactly the same economic interests as the former, but the interests of the two were nevertheless complementary, for how could Athens get the grain imports it required without making it in the interest of traders to bring it to Athens?. Moreover, it has been argued that the policies of Athens with regard to its coinage betray a state interest in the export of at least one locally produced commodity (namely silver), something completely discounted by the Finley model.

But again, Finley was probably right to argue that during the Archaic and Classical periods the vast majority of economic activity was left untouched by government and carried out by private individuals. On the other hand, by the Classical period a self-sufficient household economy was an ideal that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as the various sectors of economic activity became more specialized, more impersonal, and more profit oriented as well.

Land

As in the Archaic period, the most important economic sector was still tied to the land and the majority of agriculture continued to be carried out on the subsistence level by numerous small family farms, even though the distribution of land among the population was far from equal. Primary crops were grains, mostly barley but also some wheat, which were usually sown on a two-year fallowing cycle. Olives and grapes were also widely produced throughout Greece on land unsuitable for grains. Animal husbandry focused on sheep and goats, which could be moved from their winter lowland pasturage to the moister and cooler mountainous regions during the hot summer months. Cattle, horses, and donkeys, though less numerous, were also significant. While usually sufficient to support the population of ancient Greece, unpredictable rainfall made agriculture precarious and there is much evidence for periodic crop failures, shortages, and famines. Consequently, competition for fertile land was a hallmark of Greek history and the cause of much social and political strife within and between city-states.

One recent trend in the study of ancient Greek agriculture is the use of ethnoarchaeology, which attempts to understand the ancient economy through comparative data from better-documented modern peasant economies. In general, studies employing this method have supported the prevailing view of subsistence agriculture in ancient Greece. But caution is necessary, since there have been changes in the physical environment of and settlement patterns in Greece over time that can skew comparative analyses. Ethnoarchaeology has also been used to show that Greek farmers in both ancient and modern times have had to be flexible in their responses to wide variations in local topographical and climatic conditions and, thus, varied their crops and fallowing regimes to a significant degree. Rational exploitation of fluctuations in production brought on by such variations might have been the means by which some farmers were able to obtain enough wealth to rise above their peers and become members of a landed elite and this might point to a productive mentality at odds with the Finley model.

Metals were another important landed resource of Greece and so mining occupied an important place in the economy. Ancient Greeks typically used bronze and iron tools and weapons. There is little evidence that copper, the principal metal in bronze, was ever mined in abundance on mainland Greece. It had to be imported from the island of Cyprus, where it existed in large quantities, and other more distant regions. Tin, the other metal in bronze, was also rare in Greece and had to be imported from as far away as Britain. Iron is relatively plentiful throughout Greece and there is archaeological evidence of iron mining; however, literary references to it are few and so we know little about the process.

Precious metals were used in jewelry, art, and coinage. Athens had an abundance of silver and we know much about its mining industry from surviving inscriptions of government mine leases to private entrepreneurs. The mines were extremely productive, providing Athens with an income of 200 talents per year for twelve years from 338 B.C. onward. One talent was the equivalent of around nine year’s worth of wages for single skilled laborer working five days a week, 52 weeks a year, according to the wage rates we know from 377 B.C. Though productive in silver, ancient Greece was not as rich in gold, which was found primarily in Thrace and on the islands of Thasos and Siphnos.

Recent scholarship continues to focus on the silver mines of Athens, drawing not only on the inscribed mine leases, but also on extensive archaeological investigation of the mines themselves. They tend to indicate that, contrary to the Finley model, mining in Athens was specialized enough and extensive enough to constitute an “industry” in the modern sense of the word and one geared toward growth. In a study of mine-leasing records Kirsty Shipton has shown that the elite of Athens preferred mines leases, with their potential for greater profits, to land leases. Thus, the traditional preference of the elite for the consumptive acquisition of land and disdain for productive investments for profit postulated by the Finley model might be a characteristic feature of the ancient Greek world as a whole, but it does not entirely hold for Athens in the Classical period.

Stone for building and sculpture was another valuable natural resource of Greece. Limestone was available in abundance and fine marble could be found in Athens on the slopes of Mount Pentelikos and on the island of Paros. The former was used in building the Parthenon and the other structures of the Athenian acropolis while the latter was often used for the most famous ancient Greek free-standing and relief sculptures.

Labor

It is notoriously difficult to estimate the population of Athens or any other Greek city-state in ancient times. Generally accepted figures for Athens at the height of its power and prosperity in 431 B.C., though, are in the range of approximately 305,000 people, of which perhaps 160,000 were citizens (40,000 male, 40,000 female, 80,000 children), 25,000 were free resident foreigners (metics), and 120,000 were slaves. Athens was the largest polis and the populations of most city-states were probably much smaller. Citizens, metics, and slaves all performed labor in the economy. In addition, many city-states included forms of dependent labor somewhere in between slave and free.

As stated above, much of the agriculture of ancient Greece was carried out by small farmers who were exclusively free citizens, since non-citizens were barred from owning land. But although being a farmer was the social ideal, good land was scarce in Greece and it is estimated that in Athens about a quarter of the male citizens did not own land and had to take up other occupations for their livelihoods. Such occupations existed in the manufacturing, service, retail, and trade sectors. These “business” occupations were not only socially disesteemed, but they also tended to be small scale. Wage earning was very much looked down upon, since working for another person was thought of as an impingement on freedom and akin to slavery. Thus, free men doing the same work side by side with metics and slaves on the Acropolis building projects earned the same wages. Yet wages appear to have been adequate to make a living. In Athens the typical wage for a skilled laborer was one drachma per day at the end of the fifth century and two and a half drachmai in 377. In the fifth century a Greek soldier on campaign received a ration of 1 choinix of wheat per day. The price of wheat in Athens at the end of the fifth century was 3 drachmai per medimnos. There are 48 choinices in a medimnos. Thus, one drachma could buy enough food for 16 days for one person, four days for a family of four.

One thing that made up for the limited number of free citizens who were willing or had to become businessmen or wage earners was the existence of metics, foreign-born, free non-citizens who took up residence in a city-state. It is estimated that Athens had about 25,000 metics at its height and since they were barred from owning land, they engaged in banausic occupations that tended to be looked down upon by the free citizenry. The economic opportunities afforded by such occupations in Athens and other port cities where they were particularly abundant must have been significant. They attracted metics despite the fact that metics had to pay a special poll tax and serve in the military even though they could not own land or participate in politics and had to have a citizen represent them in legal matters. This is confirmed by the numerous metics in Athens who became wealthy and whose names we know, such as the bankers Pasion and Phormion and the shield-maker Cephalus, the father of the orator, Lysias.

Foreign-born, free non-citizen transients known as xenoi also played an important role in the ancient Greek economy, since it is apparent that many, though certainly not all, those who carried out long-distance trade were such men. Like metics, they too were subject to special taxes, but few rights.

Slaves comprised an undeniably large part of the labor force of ancient Greece. In fact, it is fair to say, as Finley did, that ancient Greece was a “slave dependent society.” There were so many slaves; they were so essential to the economy; and they became so thoroughly embedded into the every day life and values of the society that without slavery, ancient Greek civilization could not have existed in the manner it did. In Classical Athens it has been estimated that there were around 120,000 slaves. Thus, slaves comprised over a third of the total population and outnumbered adult male citizens by three to one.

The slaves of Athens were chattel, that is the private property of their owners, and had few, if any, rights. The demand for them was high as they performed almost every kind of work imaginable from agricultural labor to mining labor to shop assistants to domestic labor even to serving as the police force and secretaries for the government in Athens. About the only thing slaves did not normally do was military service, except in emergencies, when they did that too.

Slaves were supplied by a variety of sources. Many were war captives. Some were enslaved for failure to pay debts, though this was outlawed in Athens in the early sixth century B.C. Some were foundlings, abandoned children rescued and reared in return for their labor as slaves. Of course, the children of slaves would also be slaves. In addition, there was an extensive and regular slave trade that trafficked in people who had become slaves by all the means mentioned previously.

In part because of the diverse means by which slaves were supplied, there was no particular race that was singled out for enslavement. Anyone could become a slave if unfortunate enough, including Greeks. It does appear, however, that a large percentage of slaves in Greece originated in the Black Sea and Danubian regions. In most cases they were probably captives from internecine tribal wars and sold to slave traders who shipped them to various parts of the Greek world.

The treatment of chattel slaves varied, depending on the whims of individual slave owners and the types of jobs done by the slaves. Slaves who worked in the silver mines of Athens, for example, worked in dangerous conditions in large numbers (as many as 10,000 at a time) and had virtually no contact with their owners that could result in human bonds of affection (they were usually leased out). On the other hand, slaves who worked in households assisting the matron of the family in her household tasks were probably treated much better as a rule. Their labor was less strenuous and since they worked in close proximity with their owners’ families, at least some human bonds of affection were likely to form between them and their owners. Some slaves even lived on their own and ran their owners’ businesses largely unsupervised.

One aspect of ancient Greek slavery that is often cited as evidence for it being more “humane” than other slavery regimes is manumission. There is enough evidence for slaves being freed to make us believe that manumission was not uncommon and many slaves could probably hope for freedom, even if most of them never actually obtained it. But manumission was quite self-serving for slave owners, since it made slaves much less likely to risk rebellion in the hope that they might some day be given their freedom. As it turns out, there were only two noteworthy large-scale rebellions of chattel slaves in the history of ancient Greece. Moreover, inscriptions from the religious sanctuary of Delphi from the Hellenistic period show that slaves almost always had to compensate their owners for their freedom, either in the form of cash or some other valuable commodity, like their own children, who would also be slaves of the master and eventually replace their aging parents with young labor. So it is a dubious matter to say that the manumission of slaves is a testament to the humanity of ancient Greek slavery. Individual slaves might benefit, but the practice allowed the institution of slavery to flourish throughout Greek history.

When slaves were freed, they did not become citizens, but rather metics. Yet even though they still could not possess the full rights and privileges of citizens, they could prosper economically, just as other metics could. In Athens the prominent and wealthy metic banker, Pasion, for example, was originally a slave who assisted his masters Antisthenes and Archestratus. By the terms of his will, Pasion in turn manumitted his own slave assistant, Phormion, and not only left him his bank, but also stipulated that Phormion marry his widow and manage the inheritance of his son, Apollodorus.

In addition to chattel slavery, there were other forms of dependent labor in the ancient Greek world. One famous example is helotry, known principally from the city-state of Sparta. The helots of Sparta were agricultural serfs, indigenous peoples conquered by the Spartans and forced to work their former lands for their Spartan overlords. They were not the private property of the individual Spartans, who were allotted the former lands of the helots, and could not be bought or sold. But their mobility was completely restricted; they had very few rights; they had to turn over a large percentage of their produce to their Spartan overlords; and they were routinely terrorized as a matter Spartan state policy. The one drawback for the Spartans of using helot labor, though, was that the helots, living still on their former homeland and having a sense of ethnic unity, were prone to revolt and did so on several occasions at great cost both to themselves and to the Spartans.

With the exception of Sparta and a few other city-states, women in ancient Greece, free citizens or otherwise, could not control land. They could own it in name only and were not allowed to dispose of it as they saw fit, but were legally obliged to yield control of it to a male representative. Since land was the chief source of wealth in the ancient Greek economy, the inability to control it severely constrained the economic role of women. The ideal was for women to get married, have children, raise them, and carry out the indoor tasks of the household, such as cooking and textile production.

Of course, not all women could live up to such an ideal at all times. Women undoubtedly helped outdoors on the farm during harvest time. Those of poorer families might by necessity have to sell in the market place what little surplus produce their households could generate or perform service-oriented jobs for others for wages. Female metics and slaves did similar work and also comprised the majority of the prostitutes of Athens, which was a legal profession. Prostitutes, though, ranged from lowly brothel workers to high-class call girls, the latter of which, such as Aspasia, sometimes obtained prominence in Athenian society.

Despite their disdain for certain types of work and their dependence on slave labor, most Greeks had to work hard to make a living. Yet they did not develop a “work ethic” and did not consider work to be ennobling, but simply necessary. Hence, if one could afford a slave to do one’s work, then one bought a slave. The availability of cheap slaves was a major factor in Greek attitudes toward labor and may also explain why there were no labor unions in Greece. For how could wage-earners pressure their employers for better conditions or wages when the latter could always replace them with slaves if necessary?

Manufacturing

Slavery also affected manufacturing in ancient Greece. It is often said that technology and industrial organization stagnated in ancient Greece because the availability of cheap slave labor obviated any imminent need to improve them. If one wanted to produce more, one merely bought a few more slaves. Thus, most manufactured products were literally hand-made with simple tools. There were no assembly lines and no big factories. The largest manufacturing establishment we know of was a shield factory owned by the metic, Cephalus, the father of the orator, Lysias, which employed 120 slaves. Most manufacturing was carried out in small shops or within households. Hence, in comparison with agriculture, manufacturing comprised a small part of the ancient Greek economy.

Nevertheless, documentary and archaeological evidence attests to a wide variety of manufactured items and some in large quantities. Among the most extensively manufactured products was clay pottery, the remains of which archaeologists have found scattered throughout the Mediterranean world. The wheel-made pots took many shapes appropriate for their contents and use, which ranged from hydria for water to amphorae for olive oil and wine to pithoi for grain to aryballoi for perfume to kylikes for drinking cups. Finely painted vases were also manufactured for decorative and ritual purposes. The finest, most numerous, and widely dispersed of these were made in Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and Rhodes.

Literary accounts as well as scenes from painted vases make it clear that the ancient Greeks left textile production largely to women. The principal material they worked with was wool, but linen from flax was also common. Textiles were used in turn in the manufacture of clothing. Again, women were largely responsible for this and it was done primarily within the household. Textiles were often dyed, the most desirable dye being a reddish purple color derived from aquatic murex snails. These had to be harvested, mashed into a jelly, and then boiled to extract the dye.

Although the trees of Greece were for the most part not particularly good for woodworking materials and especially not for large-scale building, the Greeks did use wood extensively and, therefore, had to import good timber from places like Macedonia, the Black Sea region, and Asia Minor. Given the countless islands of Greece, it is not surprising that shipbuilding was an important sector of manufacturing. Vessels were needed for commercial as well as military uses. In Athens the state obtained the necessary timber for the ships (and oars) of its navy, but it contracted with carpenters who worked under the supervision of state officials to craft the timber into the warships that were so vital for Athenian power in the Classical period.

Buildings ranged from private houses to monumental stone temples. The former tended to be rather humble, made of unbaked mud brick laid on a stone foundation and covered by a thatched or tiled roof. On the other hand, the great temples of ancient Greece required much organization, many resources, and incredible technical skill. As is evidenced by the extant accounts for the construction of the buildings of the Athenian acropolis, the work was normally contracted out in small units to private individuals who either worked alone or in charge of others to do anything from quarrying marble to transporting wooden beams to sculpting facades. The degree of specialization varied. In some cases we see contractors carrying out a variety of tasks, whereas in others we see them specializing in only one.

Metal crafts were highly specialized. The Greeks smelted iron, but only in wrought form. They were unable to achieve furnace temperatures high enough to make pig iron and did not have the technical know-how to add carbon to the smelting process with enough precision to make steel with any consistency. Blacksmiths crafted body armor, shields, spears, swords, farm implements, and household utensils. Bronze casting reached the level of fine art in Classical Greece. Sculptors used the lost-wax method, in which they first made a clay model of a statue, then covered the model with a layer of wax, which they then covered again with another layer of clay. Small openings were left in the outer clay covering, into which molten bronze was poured. The hot molten bronze melted the wax, which then flowed out another opening in the outer clay covering. After the bronze cooled the outer clay covering was broken off, leaving the cast bronze.

It is clear that in the Classical period in Athens there was much specialization in manufacturing and that the quantity of goods was far greater than that which could have been produced in a purely “household economy.” At the same time, however, the scale and organization of manufacturing was a far cry from those of industrialized civilizations of recent centuries.

Markets and Prices

According to the Finley model, there was no network of interconnected markets to form a price-setting market economy in the ancient Greek world. Although this is true for the most part, like other aspects of the Finley model, the case is overstated. There do, for example, appear to be connections between markets for some commodities, such as grain and probably precious metals as well. In the case of grain, it can be shown that supply and demand over long-distances did have an impact on prices and traders sought to take advantage of the lag-time between price adjustments in order to make a profit. Obviously, though, this is nothing like the modern world in which the price of crude oil changes instantly worldwide in reaction to a change in supply from one of the major producers. For the most part in ancient Greece, prices were set in accordance with local conditions, personal relationships, and haggling.

Government price-fixing was limited. Although there is evidence that Athens, for example, fixed the retail price of bread in proportion to the wholesale price of grain, there is no evidence that it fixed the price of the latter. Even in times of severe grain shortages, Athens was content to allow traders bringing grain to Athens to charge the going rate. In such cases, the state alleviated the crises for its citizens by paying the going rate for the grain and then reselling it to its citizenry at a lower price.

Despite the general absence of interconnected markets, however, there were market places. Each city-state had at least one market place (agora) in the heart of city and a port market (emporion) as well, if it had a good harbor. The agora was a place of much activity, serving not only as a center of economic exchange, but also as a political, religious, and social center. In the agora one could find law courts, offices for public officials, and coin mints as well as shrines and temples. In fact, agorai were considered sacred places to the degree that they were marked off with boundary stones across which no one who had the stain of religious pollution could cross. Within the agora economic activities were segregated by types of goods, services, and labor so that there were specific places where one could regularly find the fishmongers, blacksmiths, money changers, and so on.

Ancient Greek city-states regulated the economic activities that took place in their markets to a certain degree. Public officials oversaw weights, measures, scales, and coinage to limit and resolve disputes in exchanges as well as to ensure state interests. For example, Athens employed a publicly owned slave to check coins and guard against counterfeiters. In this way, Athens protected the integrity of its own coinage as well as the interests of buyers and sellers. The state ensured the affordability of key goods, such as bread, by fixing its retail prices relative to the wholesale price of grain. Various activities in the market place were also taxed by the state. Port and transit taxes affected exchanges in emporia like the Piraeus of Athens and xenoi had to pay a special tax for engaging in transactions in the agora.

Trade

Local trade between countryside and urban center and on the retail level within cities continued largely as it had in the Archaic period. But rather than producers transporting and selling their surplus goods directly in city markets, specialized retailers (kapeloi) who profited as middlemen between producers and consumers became more the norm. Local trade goods could be probably transported over short distances on land. But long-distance trade over land was difficult and time consuming, given the mountainous topography of Greece and the fact that the fragmented city-states of Greece never built an extensive system of paved roads that tied them together in the manner of the Roman Empire. Most “roads” between cities were single track and suitable only for pack animals, though there were some on which wheeled carts could be pulled by oxen, donkeys, or mules.

Long-distance trade was primarily done by merchant ships over the waters of the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black Seas. Evidence from the Attic Orators indicates that during the Classical period overseas trade developed into a specialized and important sector of the economy. Trade was carried out by private individuals and not organized by the state. A typical trading venture involved a non-citizen trader (emporos) who either owned his own ship or rented space on a ship owned by another (naukleros). In most cases described by the orators, the traders typically borrowed money from a citizen lender to finance the venture. There is some dispute among scholars whether such loans constituted productive borrowing on the part of the traders or were just a type of insurance, because the loans would only have to be repaid if the ship and cargo reached their contracted destinations. From the perspective of the lenders, the loans were certainly productive, since they charged interest at a rate much higher than that which applied to loans on the security of land, anywhere from 12 to 30%.

Marine archaeology has recently increased our knowledge of merchant vessels and their cargoes tenfold by the discovery of several ancient shipwrecks. The ships appear to have been generally small by modern standards. In 1968 the well-preserved wreck of a merchant ship from c. 300 B.C. was found off the coast of Kyrenia in Cyprus. Being only 35 feet long and 15 feet wide with a capacity of 30 tons, it is probably the kind of merchant vessel that made short hauls and kept within sight of the coastline. But other shipwrecks as well as evidence from the Attic Orators seem to indicate that the typical capacity of merchant vessels that traveled over long distances on the open sea was some 80 tons.

Many of the goods traded throughout ancient Greek history were luxury goods, manufactured items, such as jewelry and finely painted vases, as well as specialty agricultural products like fine wine and honey. Necessities were also traded, however, for without long-distance trade, many Greek cities would not have been able to obtain metals, timber, wine, and slaves. One of the most extensively traded necessity items was grain, which came to Athens typically from the Black Sea region, Thrace, and Egypt. According to the orator, Demosthenes, Athens imported some 400,000 medimnoi (approximately 4,800,000 liters) of grain per year in the late fourth century from the Crimean kingdom of the Bosporus alone.

Chiefly because of the need for certain imports, such as grain and timber, and for revenue drawn from taxes on trade, many cities did have an interest and involvement in overseas trade. Athens in particular made laws that prohibited the export of grain produced in Athens and required that loans on trading ventures be for cargoes of grain and that ships bringing grain into the Piraeus sell one-third of it on the spot and the remaining two-thirds in Athens. Athens also instituted special courts to expedite the adjudication of disputes involving traders, granted honors and privileges to anyone who performed extraordinary services relating to trade for the city, and made agreements with other states to obtain favorable conditions for those bringing grain to Athens.

In all the aforementioned examples Athens’ chief interest was to supply itself with imported grain so that its citizenry could obtain food at reasonable prices. Athens was not particularly concerned with helping traders and enhancing their profits per se or in obtaining a trade surplus or to protect home produced goods against imported foreign ones. To this extent, then, the Finley model holds true, even if it is clear that the Athenian state recognized that its interests were complementary with those of foreign traders and, thus, had to help them in order to help itself.

Moreover, it does appear that Athens had some concern about its home produced products as well, at least in the case of silver. Xenophon, an Athenian writer from the fourth century, noted that Athens could always be assured of traders bringing their goods into Athens, because traders knew they could always get a valuable trade commodity, namely silver in the form of Athenian coinage, in exchange. To ensure the demand for its silver, Athens took great care to maintain the reputation of its coinage for high quality and to associate that reputation with a familiar design that went unchanged for several centuries. Such a policy attests to a state interest in production and exports, at least in this sector of the economy.

Athens was also motivated to encourage trade to obtain revenue from taxes. Both transient and resident foreigner traders had to pay poll taxes in Athens that citizens did not. Athens also had various port, transit, and market taxes that would benefit by increased trade, including a two percent tax on all imports and exports.

Money and Banking

With few exceptions (Sparta being the most famous), the Greeks of the Classical period had a thoroughly monetized economy employing coinage whose value was based on precious metals, principally silver. The value of the coinage was commensurate to the value of the precious metal it contained with a small mark-up, since the value of the metal was guaranteed by its issuing state. The tie of the Greek monetary system to the supply of precious metals limited the ability of governments to influence their economies through the manipulation of their money supplies. However, we do know of cases when states debased their coinages for such purposes.

Ancient Greek coins are similar in appearance to modern ones. But like other manufactured products in ancient Greece, they were made by hand. A blank metal circular “flan” was placed on an obverse die that rested on an anvil and then was struck with a hammer bearing a reverse die. The nature of the process naturally produced coins in which the image was often poorly centered on the flan. Nevertheless, the issuing authority, usually a government, was clear as the designs or “types” of the coins expressed an image symbolic of the issuing authority and were often augmented by a “legend” of letters that spelled out an abbreviation of the issuing authority’s name.

Coinage was issued in a variety of denominations and weight standards by various city-states. The chief weight standards of the Classical period were the Attic, Aeginetan, Euboiic, and Corinthian. The basis of the Attic standard was the silver tetradrachm of 17.2 grams, which retained the design of the head of Athena on the obverse and her symbolic owl on the reverse throughout the Classical period. It was the most widely circulated coinage during this time and appears in large numbers of hoards found throughout the Greek world and beyond. This was due not only to the far reach of Athenian trade, but also to Athenian imperialism. Athens used its coinage to pay for its military operations abroad and even issued the “Standards Decree,” which for a few decades of the fifth century required the many cities of the Aegean Sea under its control to discontinue their local types and use only Athenian coinage. The local coinage had to be turned in, melted down, and re-struck as Athenian coinage for a fee. Unlike that of Athens, most city-states’ coinages circulated only locally. When such local issues were taken abroad, they were probably treated as bullion, as can be inferred from test-cuts often found on them.

A recent debate among scholars concerns the degree to which coinage was an economic or a political phenomenon in the ancient Greek world. Finley’s model, of course, holds that coinage had strictly political functions. Finley believed that coinage was merely a tool designed to reinforce and project a city-state’s civic identity. States minted coins not to facilitate economic transactions among their citizens, but merely for state purposes so that, for example, it had a convenient medium through which to collect taxes or make state expenditures. Athens’ “Standards Decree” was not undertaken for economic gain, but for political purposes to facilitate tribute payments and to show Athens’ subjects who was boss.

But here again Finley goes too far. Although the type of a Greek coin certainly expressed political symbols and could, therefore, serve as a political tool, such symbolism was largely lost on people who used the coins in places like Egypt, the Levant, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia, where hoards of Greek coins have been found in abundance. The fact that they could use the coins independently of their original political context (and for what else besides economic purposes then?) is a good reason to believe that the Greeks could do so as well. Moreover, as Henry Kim has recently argued, the minting of large quantities of small-denomination coinage from the outset in Greece shows that the state did have a concern for the wide use of coinage at the micro-level by common people in day-to-day economic exchanges, not just for large-scale public and political purposes.

Nevertheless, one of the most active areas of research on ancient Greek money and coinage today concerns its representational nature and place within sectors other than the economy, including religion, society, and politics. Both Leslie Kurke and Sitta von Reden have argued that the advent of a monetized economy employing coinage need not have undermined traditional values or led to a disembedding of the economy. Rather, the symbolic aspect of coinage could be manipulated to reinforce traditional social and religious practices that were non-economic in the modern sense. In her analysis of the poetry of Pindar, for example, Kurke argues that the poet re-embedded money within traditional social values, thereby allowing the landed aristocratic elite to embrace money and its potential for de-personalizing social interactions without discarding the old social ties and values that bolstered their privileged place in society. Although von Reden believes that the use of coinage arose within an embedded economic context and, therefore, did not have to be re-embedded, she has argued that coinage and other forms of money did not have an intrinsically economic use or meaning in ancient Greece, but rather multiple meanings that were determined by the context within which they were used, which could be social, religious, or political as well as economic.

Given that the ancient Greeks did have a monetized economy, it is not surprising that they also developed banking and credit institutions. It is generally agreed that at the very least, bankers, who were metics as a rule (note Pasion and Phormion above), performed various functions from money-changing to securing deposits in cash and other assets. The question whether bankers lent out money deposited by others at interest, however, is the subject of some debate. Paul Millett, a student of Finley, not surprisingly argues in his book, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens, that bankers did not loan out other peoples money for interest and he formulates a model in which lending and borrowing were predominantly done for consumptive purposes and, therefore, thoroughly embedded in traditional social relations. In contrast, Edward Cohen’s book, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective, employs a close philological analysis of the evidence in his assertion that productive lending and borrowing, divorced from concerns for personal relationships, were common in Classical Athens and that bankers did indeed lend out deposited money at interest. Although Millett may be right that much of the lending and borrowing in Athens was for consumptive purposes, particularly those secured by landed property, it is hard to deny that the evidence of productive lending and borrowing from banking practices, numerous maritime loans, and even temple loans in the Classical period constitute something more than just exceptions to the rule.

Economic Changes during the Hellenistic Period

In large part owing to the Near Eastern conquests of Alexander the Great, but also because of social and economic changes that had already been occurring during the Classical period, the economy of the Hellenistic period (323-30 B.C.) grew immensely in scale. The Finley model is probably right in general to hold that the essentially consumptive nature of the economy in the traditional Greek homelands changed little during this time. But it is clear that there were significant innovations in some places and sectors on account of the collision and fusion of Greek notions of the economy with those of the newly won lands of the Near East. Thus, we see greatly increased government control over the economy, as evidenced most strikingly in the surviving papyrus records of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt.

A large percentage of the land and, therefore, agriculture, was controlled by the Greek royal dynasties that ran the Hellenistic kingdoms. Peasants whose status lay somewhere between slave and free not only worked the king’s lands, but were also often required to labor on other royal projects. The Ptolemies of Egypt dominated agriculture to such an extent that they instituted an official planting schedule for various crops and even loaned out the tools used by farmers on state-owned lands. Almost all produce from these estates was turned over to the government and redistributed for sale to the population. Some crown lands, however, were assigned to government officials or soldiers and though technically still the property of the state, they often came to be treated as de facto private property.

The Ptolemaic state also involved itself in various manufacturing processes, such as olive oil production. Not only were the olives cultivated on state-controlled lands by peasant labor, but the oil was extracted by contracted labor and sold at the retail level by licensed dealers at fixed prices. However, the state probably had no intention to improve efficiency or to provide better quality olive oil at lower prices to its citizens. The Ptolemies instituted a tax on imported olive oil of 50 percent that was essentially a protective tariff. The goal of the government seems to have been to protect the profits of its state-run business.

Yet for all its interference in the economy, the Ptolemaic government did not assemble a state merchant fleet and instead contracted with private traders to transport grain to and from public granaries. It also left it up to private traders to import the few goods that Egypt needed from abroad, including various metals, timber, horses, and elephants, all of which were essential for the Ptolemies’ standing mercenary army and fleet. But although the Ptolemies also exported wheat and papyrus, for the most part, the economy of Egypt was a closed one. Unlike the other Hellenistic kingdoms, Egypt minted coins on a lighter standard than the Attic one universalized by Alexander the Great. Moreover, in 285, the Ptolemies barred the use of foreign coins in Egypt and required them to be turned in to government officials, melted down, and re-minted as Egyptian coinage for a fee. Although Egypt controlled gold mines in Nubia, it did not produce silver and had chronic shortages of silver coins for daily transactions. Thus, many exchanges were performed in kind rather than in cash, even though value was always expressed in cash equivalents.

Despite its chronic shortages of silver coins and its closed coinage system, Egypt still had a coin-based economy largely because of Alexander the Great, who flooded the economies of the eastern Mediterranean with coins and monetized some places in the Near East for the first time. Along with coinage, Greek banking practices also made their way into these areas. Thus, the general scale of economic activities increased as large kingdoms of the Near East and the Greek mainland and islands became more interconnected. Although this was offset to some degree by political instability and warfare during the Hellenistic period, in general we do see economic activity on a larger scale and increased specialization as some places, such as Tyre and Sidon in Phoenicia, became renowned for particular products, in this case purple dye and glassware respectively. Moreover, thousands of amphorae whose handles were stamped with names of issuing magistrates have been found that, if nothing else, reveal a very high volume of pottery production and may also allow scholars some day to reconstruct in more detail other aspects of the economy, such as agricultural production, land tenure, and trade patterns.

The Hellenistic period is known for its technological innovation and some new technologies did have an impact on the economy. Archimedes’ screw-like pump was used to remove water from mines and to improve irrigation for agriculture. In addition, new varieties of wheat and the increased use of iron ploughs improved yield while better grape and olive presses facilitated wine and oil production. Unfortunately, some of the most impressive technological innovations of the Hellenistic period, such as Heron’s steam engine, were never applied in any significant way. Thus, most production continued to be low tech and labor intensive.

All in all, then, although the scale of the economy increased during the Hellenistic period, consumption still seems to have been the primary goal. Technology was not applied as much as it might have been to increase production. States were much more involved in economic affairs, both in controlling production and in collecting taxes on countless items and activities, but mostly just to extract as much revenue from them as possible. The revenue was spent in turn in royal benefactions (euergetism), but mostly only for ostentatious display that threw money into non-productive sink holes.

Conclusion

The foregoing survey shows that the Finley model provides a reasonable, if simplified, general picture of the ancient Greek economy. Overall, the ancient Greek economy was very different from our own. It was much smaller in scale and differed in quality as well, since it generally lacked the productive growth mentality and the interconnected markets that are so characteristic of most of the world economy today. With regard to the details, however, recent studies are showing that the Finley model does at least need to be revised. As more research is done, it may even be necessary to replace the Finley model altogether in favor of one that fits the evidence better. In the meantime, though, we can still use Finley’s model as a basic description while being careful to acknowledge the contradictory evidence provided by recent studies and continuing to investigate the various sectors of the ancient Greek economy at various times and places.

Select Annotated Bibliography

The bibliography on the ancient Greek economy is enormous and it would be counterproductive to list all works here. Therefore, I list only a selection of the essential primary and secondary works, preferring more recent works in English for the sake of students. Further and more specialized works may be found within the bibliographies of the works listed below.

Primary Sources

Literary Works

Many of the literary works listed below are available in the Loeb Classical Library and Penguin Classics series in English translations.

Aristotle, Politics (particularly 1.1258b37-1.1259a5)

In his study of the polis, Aristotle devotes this section to modes of acquisition and criticizes what we would call “capitalism.”

[Aristotle], Oikonomikos (Economics – “household management”)

Book 2 shows how states obtain revenues. The methods are largely coercive, not productive, such as cornering the market in grain during a famine, debasing coinage, etc.

Demosthenes and [Demosthenes], speeches

Especially useful are several speeches for lawsuits involving economic matters.

Hesiod, Works and Days

A poem containing advice and attitudes about farming in the early Archaic period, c 700 B.C.

Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

Two great epic poems with much information about economic practices at the outset of the Archaic period, c. 800-750 B.C.

Isokrates, speeches (especially Trapezitikos and On the Peace)

On the Peace argues for economic activity rather than warfare as a means of obtaining revenues for the state. Trapezitikos concerns a lawsuit involving trade and banking.

Lysias, speeches (especially On the Grain Retailers)

Plato, Republic and Laws

These two dialogues concern the organization of the polis. Although the Republic represents the ideal city-state and the Laws presents a more realistic picture, both betray an elitist disdain for non-landed economic activities.

Xenophon, Oikonomikos (Economics – “household management”) and Poroi (Revenues)

Two extended essays on household management and the means by which the state may obtain more revenues, respectively. The latter is one of the most important documents concerning state interests in trade and mining.

[Xenophon] “The Old Oligarch” (or “Constitution of the Athenians”)

This is an anonymous mid-fifth-century B.C. political pamphlet that argues that the life-blood of Athenian democracy is the economic exploitation of the so-called “allies” of Athens.

Collections of Primary Sources: Documentary, Epigraphic, and Material

Burstein, S.M. The Hellenistic Age from the Battle of Ipsos to the Death of Kleopatra VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

A collection of documents, including inscriptions, translated into English.

Fornara, C.W. From Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A collection of documents, including inscriptions, translated into English.

Harding, P. From the End of the Peloponnesian War to the Battle of Ipsus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

A collection of documents, including inscriptions, translated into English.

Meijer, F. and O. van Nijf. Trade, Transport, and Society in the Ancient World. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

A sourcebook of documents translated into English.

Thompson, M., O. Mørkholm, and C.M. Kraay, editors. An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1973.

Essential listing of all discovered hoards of ancient Greek coins up to 1973.

Wiedemann, T. Greek and Roman Slavery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

Excellent collection of documents on Greek and Roman slavery translated into English.

Secondary Sources

General Works and Surveys

Austin, M.M. and P. Vidal-Naquet. Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Provides both a survey of the subject and excerpts from the primary sources of evidence. It adheres to the Finley model in general.

Austin, M.M. 1988. “Greek Trade, Industry, and Labor.” In Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, volume 2, edited by M. Grant and R. Kitzinger, 723-51. New York: Scribner’s.

Often insightful overview of the ancient Greek economy primarily from the Finley perspective.

Cambridge Ancient History (CAH), second edition. Several volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The standard encyclopedia of ancient history with entries on various subjects, including the ancient Greek economy at different periods, by leading scholars.

Finley, M. I. The Ancient Economy, second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1985. (Now available in an “Updated Edition” with a foreword by Ian Morris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.)

The most influential book on the subject since its initial publication in 1973. It takes a synchronic approach to the Greek and Roman economies and argues that they cannot be analyzed or understood in terms appropriate for modern economic analysis. In general, the ancient Greek economy was “embedded” in “non-economic” social and political values and institutions. Heavily influenced by Weber, Hasebroek, and Polanyi.

Hasebroek, J. Trade and Politics in Ancient Greece. Translated by L.M. Fraser and D.C. MacGregor. Reprint. London, 1933. (Originally published as Staat und Handel im alten Griechenland [Tübingen, 1928].)

A classic that greatly influenced Finley.

Hopper, R.J. Trade and Industry in Classical Greece. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979.

Survey of various aspects of the ancient Greek economy in the Classical period.

Humphreys, S.C. “Economy and Society in Classical Athens.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 39 (1970):1-26.

An important survey that also argues for focused studies on individual sectors of the ancient Greek economy at particular times and places.

Lowry, S.T. “Recent Literature on Ancient Greek Economic Thought.” Journal of Economic Literature 17 (1979): 65-86.

Michell, H. The Economics of Ancient Greece, second edition. Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1963.

Slightly dated, but useful survey.

Morris, Ian. “The Ancient Economy Twenty Years after The Ancient Economy.” Classical Philology 89 (1994): 351-366.

Excellent survey of new approaches to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman economies since Finley, to whose model the author is generally sympathetic.

Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), third revised edition, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Includes brief entries by leading scholars on various aspects of the ancient Greek economy.

Pearson, H.W. “The Secular Debate on Economic Primitivism.” In Trade and Market in the Early Empires, edited by K. Polanyi, C.M. Arensberg, and H.W. Pearson, 3-11. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957.

A concise statement of the influential ideas of Karl Polyani about the ancient Greek economy.

Rostovtzeff, M. The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Monumental “modernist” approach to a wealth of archaeological evidence about the economy during the Hellenistic period.

Samuel, A.E. From Athens to Alexandria: Hellenism and Social Goals in Ptolemaic Egypt. Lovanii, 1983.

A good survey with an important discussion of ancient Greek attitudes toward economic growth.

Starr, C.G. The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800-500 B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Modernist survey.

Weber, M. Economy and Society. Translated by E. Fischoff et al. Edited by G. Roth and C.

Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. (Originally published as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [Tübingen, 1956].)

A classic that greatly influenced Hasebroek and Finley.

Collections

Archibald, Z.H., J. Davies, and G. Oliver. Hellenistic Economies. London: Routledge, 2001.

Collection of articles that take the study of the economy in the Hellenistic period beyond Rostovtzeff.

Cartledge, P., E.E. Cohen, and L. Foxhall. Money, Labour, and Land: Approaches to the Economies of Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 2002.

Finley, M.I. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. Edited by B.D. Shaw and R.P. Saller. New York: Viking, 1982.

Garnsey, P. Non-Slave Labour in the Graeco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1980.

Garnsey, P., K. Hopkins, and C.R. Whittaker. Trade in the Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

A collection of articles along Finley lines.

Mattingly, D.J. and J. Salmon. Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World. London: Routledge, 2001.

A collection of articles that focuses on the non-agrarian sectors of the ancient Greek and Roman economies with a mind to revising the Finley model.

Meadows, A. and K. Shipton. Money and Its Uses in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

A collection of articles on the use of money and coinage in ancient Greece.

Parkins, H. and C. Smith. Trade, Traders, and the Ancient City. London: Routledge, 1998.

Scheidel, W. and S. von Reden. The Ancient Economy. London: Routledge, 2002.

An excellent collection of some of the most important articles on the ancient Greek and Roman economy from the last 30 years with a helpful introduction, notes, and glossary. Especially useful is their “Guide to Further Reading,” pp. 272-278.

Specialized Works

Brock, R. “The Labour of Women in Classical Athens.” Classical Quarterly 44 (1994): 336-346.

Burke, E.M. “The Economy of Athens in the Classical Era: Some Adjustments to the Primitivist Model.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992): 199-226.

A good argument that attempts to adjust the Finley model.

Carradice, I. and M. Price. Coinage in the Greek World. London: Seaby, 1988.

A brief, accessible survey.

Cohen, E. E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

A close philological study of the evidence for banking practices in Classical Athens that argues for a disembedded economy with productive credit transactions.

Engen, D.T. Athenian Trade Policy, 415-307 B.C.: Honors and Privileges for Trade-Related Services. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1996. (This dissertation is currently being revised for publication as a book tentatively entitled, Honor and Profit: Athenian Trade Policy, 415-307 B.C.E.)

Examines Athenian state honors for those performing services relating to trade and argues for a revision of some aspects of the Finley model.

Engen, D.T. “Trade, Traders, and the Economy of Athens in the Fourth Century B.C.E.” In Prehistory and History: Ethnicity, Class, and Political Economy, edited by David W. Tandy, 179-202. Montreal: Black Rose, 2001.

Argues for the diversity of those responsible for trade involving Classical Athens.

Engen, D.T. “Ancient Greenbacks: Athenian Owls, the Law of Nikophon, and the Ancient Greek Economy.” Historia, forthcoming(a).

Argues that the numismatic policies of Athens may indicate a state interest in exports.

­­­­­Engen, D.T. “Seeing the Forest for the Trees of the Ancient Economy.” Ancient History Bulletin, forthcoming(b).

A review article of Meadows and Shipton, 2001, and Scheidel and von Reden, 2002, that argues for the mutual compatibility of broad and detailed studies of the ancient Greek and Roman economies.

Finley, M.I. The World of Odysseus, revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

A brief and highly readable survey of the early Archaic period.

Fisher, N.R.E. Slavery in Classical Greece. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993.

A brief survey.

Garlan, Y. Slavery in Ancient Greece, revised edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

The standard survey of slavery in ancient Greece.

Garnsey, P. Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Examines private and public strategies to ensure food supplies.

Isager, S. and J.E. Skydsgaard. Ancient Greek Agriculture: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1992.

Kim, H.S. “Archaic Coinage as Evidence for the Use of Money.” In Money and Its Uses in the Ancient Greek World, edited by A. Meadows and K. Shipton, 7-21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Argues that the existence of large quantities of small-denomination coins from the earliest of coinage in ancient Greece is evidence of the economic use of coinage.

Kraay, C.M. Archaic and Classical Greek Coins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Long the standard survey of ancient Greek coinage.

Kurke, L. The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Takes the new cultural history approach to analyzing the poetry of Pindar and how it represents money within the social and political value system of ancient Greece.

Kurke, L. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, 1999. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Millett, P. Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Reinforces the Finley model by arguing that lending and borrowing was primarily for consumptive purposes and embedded among traditional communal values in Athens.

Osborne, R. Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside. London: George Philip, 1987.

Explores rural production and exchange within political and religious contexts.

Sallares, R. The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth, 1991.

Interdisciplinary analysis of a massive amount of information on a wide variety of aspects of the ecology of ancient Greece.

Schaps, David M. The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Shipton, K. “Money and the Elite in Classical Athens.” In Money and Its Uses in the Ancient Greek World, edited by A. Meadows and K. Shipton, 129-44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Argues that the elite of Athens preferred leasing high-profit silver mines to public land.

Tandy, D. Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Traces developments in the economy of the Archaic period and argues that they had an important impact in the formation of the basic social and political institutions of the polis.

Von Reden, S. Exchange in Ancient Greece. London: Duckworth. 1995.

Employs the methods of new cultural history to argue that exchange in ancient Greece was thoroughly embedded in non-economic social, religious, and political institutions and practices.

Von Reden, S. “Money, Law, and Exchange: Coinage in the Greek Polis.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1997): 154-176.

A cultural historical study of the representational uses of coinage in the social, political, and economic life of ancient Greece at the advent of the use of coinage.

White, K.D. Greek and Roman Technology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984.