Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Credit, Money, and Social Obligation

Buch | Hardcover

290 Seiten

2022
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-764717-2 (ISBN)

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In his Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber put forward a new grand narrative of world history. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, all across the Near East and Mediterranean, relationships of mutual obligation were transformed into quantifiable and legally enforceable debts. Graeber suggests that this transformation made possible new economic institutions, such as IOUs, coinage, and chattel slavery. It also led to the emergence of modes of thought that have shaped Eurasian philosophical and religious traditions ever since.

Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East explores the implications of this theory for the history of the Mediterranean and Near East. A distinguished group of ancient historians assesses how well Graeber's interpretations fit current understandings of ancient and late antique economies. At the same time, this volume offers a history of premodern credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both quantifiable economic reality and immeasurable social obligation. By exploring the diverse ways in which social relationships were quantified in different ancient and late antique societies, the work introduces a method of writing the history of premodern systems of exchange that departs from the currently dominant paradigm of neo-institutional economics.

John Weisweiler is University Lecturer in Ancient History and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East and author of From Republican Empire to Universal State: Senators, Emperors, Senators and Local Elites in Early Imperial and Late-Antique Rome.

Preface
1 The Currency-Slavery-Warfare Complex: David Graeber and the History of Value in Antiquity
John Weisweiler

2 Beyond Debt: Markets and Morality in First-Millennium-BCE Babylonia
Reinhard Pirngruber

3 Cosmic Debt in Greece and India
Richard Seaford

4 Private Debts in Classical Greece: Bond of Friendship, Curse of hatred?
Moritz Hinsch

5 Debt, Death, and Destruction in Ancient Rome
Lisa Eberle

6 The Poetics and Politics of Exchange in Roman Agronomy
Neville Morley

7 Monetization, Marketization and State Formation: The Later Roman Empire as an Axial Age Economy
John Weisweiler

8 Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber's Late Axial Age
Richard Payne

9 Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy
Michael Bonner

10 Debt's Fourth Millennium Seen From Below: How Papyri Modify the Picture
Arietta Papaconstantinou

11 After the Axial Age: Debt and Obligation in the European Early Middle Ages
Alice Rio

12 Afterword
Keith Hart

Erscheinungsdatum	19.10.2022
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	242 x 159 mm
Gewicht	572 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
ISBN-10	0-19-764717-0 / 0197647170
ISBN-13	978-0-19-764717-2 / 9780197647172
Zustand	Neuware