Abstract

Douglass North is the hero of this project. He is an Americanist economic historian who was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change". Can it be that North has rescued scholars from the formalist/substantivist, modernizer/primitivist debates that have been distracting the study of the ancient economies for more than a hundred years? The editors of this volume tell us that North has urged scholars of economic history to emphasize "the structure and performance of economies through time". By performance he means how much is produced, how stable that production is, how product and its costs are distributed. By structure he means the political, economic, and cultural institutions, the demographics, and the technology within which the performance is accomplished and measured. North provides guiding principles for this collection of first-class studies of aspects of antiquity's economies. Except where noted below, the emphases in the twenty-eight chapters, each about thirty pages and each successful in their own ways, are regularly production, distribution, and consumption, what I will call the Northian Triad. Many of the best chapters adhere to the editorial imperative that, if it can be measured, measure it. This means new approaches to especially the Greek materials, including new efforts at estimating populations and the effects of changing demographics on production and consumption.