"Some serious questions could be raised about Graeber’s account of ancient slavery, about his neglect of Sparta and his habit of taking Athens as representative of an entire era, about his assumptions re the high level of literacy in this period and his account of the history of the Roman Republic (very compressed, hence tending to conflate events that were centuries apart). Actually, though, I was impressed with how well he knows the relevant scholarship (much better on Greece than Rome, admittedly, perhaps because there is more of a tradition in that sub-field of the sort of ‘culturalist’ approach to economic history that’s amenable to his own project); compared with some of the atrocities committed by economists and business historians seeking to reclaim ancient economic history from the ancient historians (something of a trend in recent years – which seems to call for an explanation) this is a credible and sophisticated interpretation of the subject.
More importantly, these occasional mis-steps and arguable interpretations presented as undisputed fact do not necessarily undermine the credibility or usefulness of the overall narrative and interpretative framework – unless, like many historians, you reject the idea of any such over-arching framework on the grounds that they’re too literary and rhetorical and don’t conform to our experience of history as somewhat erratic and contingent (which is of course only another narrative…). That’s not to say that I’m yet convinced by the account itself, but from a purely parochial perspective it’s important, and ought to be read by all historians of pre-modern economies: it offers a sophisticated alternative to mainstream economics as an interpretative framework for pre-modern economic behaviour, it raises a new set of ideas about how to think about ‘economic thought’ and what texts and institutions should be considered under that heading, and it gives an added impetus to the enterprise by showing how the past might indeed illuminate the present, as the roots of our current condition are located thousands of years ago rather than in the relatively recent birth of ‘modernity’ or ‘capitalism’." Based on this Brad Delong, you seem to present a much more misleading picture of Neville Morley's opinion of David's work then David presents of Roman history. Neville seems to think that the very nature of the book and the limitations of the space available to Rome in his book meant that events he wanted to cover could seem to occur in a much shorter period then they did. He also seems to think that these issues "do not necessarily undermine the credibility or usefulness of the overall narrative and interpretative framework". http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-return-of-grand-narrative-in-the-human-sciences/ -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
