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In many pre- and early industrial economies, housing has generally ranked just behind food as one... more In many pre- and early industrial economies, housing has generally ranked just behind food as one of the most significant charges on the income of all but the wealthiest classes in society. Moreover, even today, housing, along with real estate, constitutes the bulk of most families’ personal wealth, and the construction industry not only represents a significant segment of the economy, but also provides a valuable indicator of the pace of economic growth. Although modern social scientists have used the evidence of housing as a useful proxy for the distribution and level of income in poorly documented societies, and archaeological evidence permits us to reconstruct housing standards for Greeks and Romans from a wide range of social classes in considerable detail, ancient economic historians have only begun to exploit this critical evidence. Ian Morris has argued for a dramatic improvement in Greek living standards between the 9th and the 4th centuries B.C. based upon the increase in ...

In my article defending Lo Cascio’s interpretation of the Augustan census figures and the consequ... more In my article defending Lo Cascio’s interpretation of the Augustan census figures and the consequent high estimate for the population of Italy under Augustus (comparable to the population of Italy ca. 1800), I deliberately avoided any comment on the level of agricultural productivity in Roman Italy. Nor did I address in any detail the possible defence of the Beloch-Taylor-Brunt population hypothesis based upon estimates of the agricultural carrying capacity of Italy. One could argue that one is unlikely, using Greco-Roman agricultural methods, to be able to feed a population comparable to that of 19th century Italy, particularly given that anthropometric evidence suggests a level of nutrition for Roman Italy that would not be attained in Early Modern Italy until the mid-20th century. I find this argument unconvincing, however, and I will canvass a few of the arguments against it in my contribution to this colloquium. Pleket’s ground-breaking comparative analysis of Roman and Early M...

DESCRIPTION An analysis of the economic development and growth of the Greek-speaking world from t... more DESCRIPTION An analysis of the economic development and growth of the Greek-speaking world from the Archaic through the Hellenistic period.

DESCRIPTION I examine the importance of maritime trade in the Greek world of the Classical and He... more DESCRIPTION I examine the importance of maritime trade in the Greek world of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, arguing that it played a role in the economy of many Greek poleis comparable to that of the highly urbanized and prosperous civilizations of Renaissance Northern Italy or 17th century Holland, and significantly greater than in England, the early Modern world's other major international trading power, in the early 19th century. Two important indices of trade activity will be examined first: the taxes levied on maritime trade in the harbours of Athens, Delos, Rhodes and the member states of Athens' Delian league; and evidence for the size and cargo capacity of merchant ships. The rest of the paper will offer a synthesis of recent archaeological research, which corroborates this literary and epigraphic evidence for a high level of trade activity. Leaving aside agricultural products and transport amphoras, which are the subject of other papers, I will briefly discu...

The Classical Review, 2012

in E. Lo Cascio, M. P. Balbo (eds.) Popolazione e risorse nell'Italia del nord dalla romanizzazione ai Longobardi (Bari: Edipuglia, 2017) pp. 49-98.

Karl Julius Beloch has done more than anyone in labouring to uncover the demographic history of I... more Karl Julius Beloch has done more than anyone in labouring to uncover the demographic history of Italy. His posthumously published three volume Bevölkerunsgeschichte Italiens is still fundamental to our understanding of Medieval and early Modern Italian demographic history prior to the censuses of 1861 and 1871, his bias to lower the Medieval population prior to the Black Death notwithstanding, but his 1886 book, Die Bevölkerung der Griechisch-Römischen Welt has had a much stormier reception. Beloch’s bold and radical innovation was to dismiss the normal, and hitherto universally accepted interpretation of the Augustan census of 28 BC, enumerating 4,020,000 adult male citizens, arguing that this figure, unlike all previous census figures, referred to men, women and children with Roman citizenship. Beloch himself had dismissed and decisively refuted this conjecture in 1880, and no scholar has yet offered any plausible historical argument or any ancient source which might support this hypothesis, so it is not surprising that Seeck and Kornemann rejected it emphatically and incisively, followed by most informed scholarly opinion, until Toynbee’s impressive two volume work Hannibal’s Legacy, published in 1965, and Brunt’s intimidatingly erudite Italian Manpower of 1971. Although it would be untrue to suggest that the flaws in Brunt’s complex and finely crafted argument were not clear to many specialists, his claim that the free citizenry of Rome, and of Italy, were facing a long demographic decline, with slaves coming to represent more than 40% of the population, provided sufficient support for the reading of the Gracchan program, and the counter-revolution it provoked, as a profound demographic and social, rather than primarily political, crisis to help solidify its status as orthodox opinion among many Roman historians. In a celebrated 1994 article in the Journal of Roman Studies, and a series of subsequent studies, Elio Lo Cascio drew scholars’ attention once again to the shaky grounds for Beloch’s conjecture and ably challenged this consensus on philological, historical and demographic grounds, fundamentally shifting the debate. With the kind encouragement of Lo Cascio, I contributed an article in Athenaeum in support of the obvious reading of the Augustan census figures in 2005, highlighting the decisive importance of the extremely low population of Northern Italy, which it demands, in ruling out the Beloch hypothesis. In 2012, Luuk de Ligt published the most impressively researched and carefully argued analysis of the demography of Italy defending the re-interpretation of the Augustan census figures, since Brunt.
There is a great deal to admire, and much to agree with, in de Ligt’s extremely rich and learned book, but on the question of the Augustan census figures, his arguments only show how complex and fragile any defense of such a fundamental error must be, and that if a convincing case for an inherently unlikely proposition cannot be sustained by advocates as able as Karl Julius Beloch, Peter Brunt, Walter Scheidel and Luuk de Ligt, it had best be abandoned. Nevertheless, his most substantial new argument in defence of Beloch’s conjecture, the analysis of the urban population of Northern Italy, calls out for a detailed response, since it can be seductively plausible on a first reading. Although it is the total population of Northern Italy, rather than its urban component, which is critical to the debate on the population of Roman Italy, it is important to vindicate the clear and unambiguous testimony of our sources lauding the great wealth, large cities, and high population of Cisalpina. This is a complex and very interesting question, regardless of one’s interest in the demographic debate, given the relative dearth of archaeological, literary, documentary and epigraphical evidence for the Northern cities, and the intractable methodological problems faced by pre-historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and Classicists who attempt to extrapolate urban populations from archaeological remains of settlements in the absence of clear guidance from reliable census data. I intend to show that de Ligt’s population estimates for the cities of Northern Italy are unrealistically low, frequently contradicted by relevant literary, epigraphic, or archaeological evidence. He consistently understates the likely extent of the inhabited area of each city, ignoring the continual plundering and destruction of, and difficulty in recovering archaeological evidence for ancient habitation in urban environments continuously occupied for centuries. I also intend to discuss in some depth de Ligt’s use of ancient and Medieval Italian comparative evidence in offering estimates of likely population densities in Roman cities, in particular his calculations of low Medieval population densities, and claims about the absence of multi-storey buildings in both Medieval and Roman cities. On the latter question, I will briefly offer a new hypothesis regarding the solution of the vexed problem of the interpretation of the term insula in the Roman regionaries, and how we might use this solution to get some evidence on the density of apartment buildings in Rome and Ostia.

in F. de Callataÿ (ed.), Quantifying the Greco-Roman Economy and Beyond (Bari: Edipuglia, 2014) pp. 123-46.

"In many pre- and early industrial economies, housing has generally ranked just behind food as on... more "In many pre- and early industrial economies, housing has generally ranked just behind food as one of the most significant charges on the income of all but the wealthiest classes in society. Moreover, even today, housing, along with real estate, constitutes the bulk of most families’ personal wealth, and the construction industry not only represents a significant segment of the economy, but also provides a valuable indicator of the pace of economic growth.

Although modern social scientists have used the evidence of housing as a useful proxy for the distribution and level of income in poorly documented societies, and archaeological evidence permits us to reconstruct housing standards for Greeks and Romans from a wide range of social classes in considerable detail, ancient economic historians have only begun to exploit this critical evidence. Ian Morris has argued for a dramatic improvement in Greek living standards between the 9th and the 4th centuries B.C. based upon the increase in the size and cost of housing. Moreover, Wolfram Hoepfner and Ernst-Ludwig Schwander have argued for the social and political significance of the striking egalitarianism in Greek housing. For Rome, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Paul Zanker have analyzed housing at Pompeii and Herculaneum, pointing out the existence of a large and relatively prosperous middle-income group. For the most part, however, such studies have failed to move from impressions to a full quantification of their results. Even Wallace-Hadrill’s superb study, which was based upon a carefully compiled survey and analyzed his sample to yield fascinating and valuable statistical evidence, left a number of possible avenues of analysis unexplored and eschewed quantitative, as opposed to impressionistic, comparisons with other cultures or historical periods.

I propose to examine a number of archaeological samples of Greco-Roman housing in the light of the housing, wealth and income distribution in a number of pre- and early industrial cultures. The study of housing further supports the evidence for Greco-Roman mean heights and agricultural productivity, and suggests that the distribution of income in both Greek and Roman society was likely to have been significantly more egalitarian than in most pre-industrial cultures. To cite just one implication of this research, I will argue that previous estimates of GDP per capita for the Roman empire proposed by Goldthwaite, Temin, Maddison, Scheidel & Friesen, and by Milanovic, Lindert, & Williamson would need to be adjusted significantly upwards."

People, Land and Politics. Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC-AD14., Jan 1, 2008

"In my article defending Lo Cascio’s interpretation of the Augustan census figures and the conseq... more "In my article defending Lo Cascio’s interpretation of the Augustan census figures and the consequent high estimate for the population of Italy under Augustus (comparable to the population of Italy ca. 1800), I deliberately avoided any comment on the level of agricultural productivity in Roman Italy. Nor did I address in any detail the possible defence of the Beloch-Toynbee-Brunt population hypothesis based upon estimates of the agricultural carrying capacity of Italy. One could argue that one is unlikely, using Greco-Roman agricultural methods, to be able to feed a population comparable to that of 19th century Italy, particularly given that anthropometric evidence suggests a level of nutrition for Roman Italy that would not be attained in Early Modern Italy until the mid-20th century. I find this argument unconvincing, however, and I will canvass a few of the arguments against it in my contribution to this colloquium. Pleket’s ground-breaking comparative analysis of Roman and Early Modern agrarian history, and evidence for a significantly higher level of agricultural intensification in the Mezzogiorno during the Roman period cast doubt on Brunt’s pessimistic model of Roman agriculture. In my talk, I will briefly outline some of my own and others’ recent agronomic research on the high productivity of Roman mixed farming and animal husbandry, pointing out how archaeozoological and archaeobotanical evidence contradicts the conventional view of the poverty of Greco-Roman farming.

The core of my paper will place the model of Toynbee and Brunt into a broader comparative perspective by examining the influence upon their picture of a conscious or unconscious analogy with English agrarian capitalism of the long 18th century, as typified by the enclosure movement and the Highland clearances. The orthodox interpretation of most Classical historians, influenced by Brunt’s pessimistic estimate of the productivity of farming by small-holding owner-occupiers, is based, I will argue, upon an uncritical acceptance of the hostile (and often self-interested) ideological attacks on peasant farming by the exponents of the English model of vast concentrated landholdings and large scale commercial tenant farming using landless labourers. I intend to examine this prejudice in the light of the critique of the Genevan economist Sismondi, using evidence for the productivity of 16th century English, and 17th and 18th century Dutch peasant farming as well as that of small holders in North America. I wish to show that the model of diversified intensive small-holdings idealized by the Romans and advocated by the Gracchi is in fact highly productive and commercially viable. I will show that the methods outlined by Cato the elder, and those later advocated, based on Hellenistic and Carthaginian agronomic practice, by Varro and Columella are well adapted for small-holders.

In addition, I wish to briefly address some weaknesses in the modern interpretation of the phenomenon of latifundia and the concentration of land-holdings contrary to the Licinian Sextian laws. Critical problems emerge in the conventional view as soon as one situates it within a broader historical perspective. Our ancient epigraphical and archaeological evidence argues strongly for the continued viability of small farms in the Gracchan period and beyond, a marked contrast with the profound proletarianization of the English rural populaton revealed in Bateman’s survey of landed property in Victorian England. Further, I will argue that the attitudes of wealthy Romans towards the acquisition and management of landed property strongly favour relatively small capital intensive farms rather than large or extensive estates, and will have placed far less pressure than is typically allowed upon the land available for small-holders. The Gracchan agrarian reforms can be seen as the acceleration of a long-standing and relatively uncontroversial Roman tradition of providing land grants to poor or landless farmers, so dramatically different from the adamant opposition of the English landed interest to the acquisition even of small garden plots by their labourers. The alarm of the Roman optimates ought therefore to be seen in terms of the broader political implications of the aggressive use of tribunician legislation to relax their grip on power, coming as it did, in the context of the successful popularis campaign to introduce the secret ballot, which had succeeded only a few years earlier, in 139 BC. Finally, I will argue that Rosenstein's critique of the Brunt thesis is even more compelling if one corrects for the low population estimate and pessimistic estimate of the productivity of peasant farms. It is highly likely that paid military service, supplemented with booty from successful campaigns, would have served as an important safety-valve to cushion the impact of the chronic land-hunger of Roman and Italian small-holders."

in J. Wilkins, R. Nadeau (eds.), Companion to Food in Antiqujity (Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, 2015) pp. 160-72.

An examination of Etruscan nutrition, health and living standards, based on a survey of recent wo... more An examination of Etruscan nutrition, health and living standards, based on a survey of recent work by physical anthropologists on ancient skeletal remains. The evidence of physical anthropology, both of mean final heights, and of skeletal markers of chronic under-nutrition, disease, or stress, suggests that the Etruscans, like the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks, enjoyed reasonably good health and nutrition, marginally better than much of the population of Roman Italy, and significantly better than that of the working classes of 19th century Western Europe. Arguing from this data, as well as the literary and archaeological evidence, I also question the traditional view of Etruscan society as more hierarchical and inegalitarian than Rome.

The Classical Review, 2012

in E. Lo Cascio, M. P. Balbo (eds.) Popolazione e risorse nell'Italia del nord dalla romanizzazione ai Longobardi (Bari: Edipuglia, 2017) pp. 49-98.

in F. de Callataÿ (ed.), Quantifying the Greco-Roman Economy and Beyond (Bari: Edipuglia, 2014) pp. 123-46.

People, Land and Politics. Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC-AD14., Jan 1, 2008

in J. Wilkins, R. Nadeau (eds.), Companion to Food in Antiqujity (Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, 2015) pp. 160-72.

The Deep History of Slavery, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University. November 1-2,, 2019

A brief talk recently given at the Langford Colloquium on New Perspectives on Roman Slavery, orga... more A brief talk recently given at the Langford Colloquium on New Perspectives on Roman Slavery, organized by Brent D. Shaw. I argue that white it is hardly controversial that Roman slavery differed profoundly from that of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, particularly in the United States because of the explicitly and consciously racialized nature of the latter, the full significance of this distinction for the understanding of both slave systems has yet to be explored with any depth or rigor. This brief talk argues that racism rather than the institution of slavery itself is key to understanding the failure of the United States to wean itself off dependent and forced labour, racial terrorism, and the subversion of democracy. Any slave system undermines the foundations of democracy and social justice, but the racist ideology which characterize slavery, and neo-slavery in the United States represents an existential threat, and one which is consistently trivialized and obfuscated. The inspiration leading Nazi leaders took from US racist ideology and practice in constructing what Wipperman and Burleigh call the Racial State, offers a powerful tool for understanding the much longer-lasting and total racial state in the U.S. and the pervasiveness of racist beliefs in U.S. society, among leaders in big business, academe, journalism, and politics.

The reconstruction of the demography, biological standard of living, and class structure of the a... more The reconstruction of the demography, biological standard of living, and class structure of the ancient world is challenging, but our fragmentary documentary and archaeological evidence does offer a coherent vision, if properly interpreted in the light of recent research into the social and economic transformation of Europe and North America between the 18th and 20th centuries, a period of the contested revival of democratic political institutions. I will focus on how we can read the effect of systems of land tenure and agricultural production, as well as differences in wealth, income and social power, through their effects upon the bodies of human beings and domestic animals, and upon the built environment. Special emphasis will be placed on how physical anthropological, archaeozoological and archaeobotanical data, long neglected by Classical archaeologists and historians, as well as a more systematic study of domestic architecture, have begun to provide significant new concrete evidence to support the long unfashionable ‘modernizing’ analysis of the great German historians of the late 19th and early 20th century, Meyer, Beloch, Pöhlmann, and Friedländer. Finally, any discussion of the explanatory power of social inequality and of the scientific power of anthropometry, particularly in these times, ought to note how class differences in height, properly attributed to the effects of under-nutrition and poverty by Villermé and Quetelet, were simultaneously exploited by Galton and many reactionaries as evidence for the biological superiority of the upper classes and a justification for eugenics.

Although the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and extend... more Although the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and extended citizenship and the right to vote to millions of African-Americans, long held as slaves, in the aftermath of the Civil War, chattel slavery is, as Moses Finley observed, only one technique of exploiting labour and perpetuating poverty and social injustice. As has long been well-documented, but is rarely acknowledged by the general public, disenfranchisement, lynching, torture, forced labour, peonage, debt-slavery, and the exploitation of legal and undocumented immigrant labour persisted in the United States, particularly the States of the former Confederacy, through much of the 20th century, and most modern representative democracies today arguably acquiesce, to a lesser or greater extent, in the exploitation of refugees, visible minorities, guest workers and the foreign workforces of their multi-national corporations. While the slave system of the United States, and what Douglas Blackmon calls the neo-slavery of the late 19th and 20th century, differs in many ways from that of Greco-Roman antiquity, in the numbers of slaves or peons involved, as a proportion of the population, the difficulty of manumission or escape, and in the central importance of capitalist and white supremacist ideologies in assuaging any guilt over the cruelty and injustice of the system, the rich 'cliometric' and historical literature on American slavery and the continuing challenges of segregation, discrimination, voting rights abuses and mass incarceration faced by African Americans and other minorities offers considerable resources for comparative study. Although scholars such as Walter Scheidel, Konstantina Katsari, Paul Cartledge, and Keith Bradley, among others, have used this comparative evidence to considerable effect, they have paid little attention to the evidence for the persistence, and in some cases, intensification of exploitation after the formal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States, and in the Americas. I intend, therefore, to broaden the focus from the traditional concern with chattel slavery, to examine some of the values, customs and laws regulating or influencing the exploitation of labour in the United States, in order to prepare the groundwork for examining the impact these practices had on the level of inequality in the society, and how they might inform our reading of the likely effect of chattel slavery in the Greco-Roman world.

A number of scholars (Patterson 1982; Bradley 1987; Bradley 1994; Del Lago & Katsari 2008; Schei... more A number of scholars (Patterson 1982; Bradley 1987; Bradley 1994; Del Lago & Katsari 2008; Scheidel 2008; 2012) have considered the potential value of evidence from America's ante-bellum South for the understanding of Greco-Roman slavery, yet it is fair to say that this rich vein of comparative evidence has only just begun to be exploited. It is widely, and surely correctly, observed that there are some profound historical differences between these two slave systems, most notably in the absence of an ideology asserting the innate superiority of master over slave in ancient world, radical differences in rates of manumission, and very significant contrasts in the relative size of the slave population. Nevertheless, the experience of slaves and freedmen in the American South, both in the ante-bellum period, as well as after emancipation (Myrdal 1944; Woodward 1974; Schweniger 1990; Blackmon 2008), offers significant insights for our reconstruction of ancient slavery, not only because of the mass of documentary and econometric evidence available (Fogel & Engerman 1974; Fogel et al. 1992), but also because both societies were forced to confront, in a way more avowedly hierarchical and undemocratic slave-owning societies were not, the problem of maintaining control, by law and by force, of an un-free population in a society of free citizens.
I propose to concentrate on one specific issue, comparing and contrasting the opportunities for economic and social mobility on the part of the freed slave in Greco-Roman antiquity and the American South, and the ways in which legal restrictions, broader social attitudes and ideologies either encouraged or constrained these opportunities. The striking wealth and political, cultural and social influence attained by certain prominent Greek and Roman freedmen has long attracted considerable attention from modern scholars (Treggiari 1969; Christes 1979; Kudlien 1986; Mouritsen 2011), and their thorough integration into ancient society has elicited some sharp disapproval from the more conservative (Frank 1916; Duff 1928; cf. McKeown 2007: 11-29), but in the absence of reliable statistics, it can be difficult to interpret our evidence. A much fuller picture, both personal and statistical, can be drawn for the lives of manumitted slaves and free blacks in the American South, however, and clearly shows that a number of freedmen, despite facing much lower prospects of manumission, significantly harsher legal restrictions, less access to education, and persistent hostility, discrimination and racist violence, succeeded in achieving a measure of economic independence and even wealth (Franklin 1943; Sterkx 1972; Berlin 1975; Coger 1985; Johnson & Roark 1986; Schweniger 1990). I intend to explore how a detailed comparison of the structural impediments, social prejudices and legal disabilities faced by freedmen in each society, and of the opportunities held out to freedmen for acceptance in the mainstream can permit us to explain the level of social mobility attested in the American South, and to estimate, however crudely, what realistic prospects of higher socio-economic status Greco-Roman freedmen are likely to have enjoyed.

References:
Berlin, Ira. 1975. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by another name: the re-enslavement of black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday.

Booth, Alan D. 1979. "Schooling for slaves in first-century Rome," Transactions of the American Philological Association 109: 11-19.

Bradley, Keith. 1987. Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bradley, Keith. 1994. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Christes, Johannes. 1979. Sklaven und Freigelassene als Grammatiker und Philologen im antiken Rom. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Coger, Larry. 1985. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. Columbia: South Carolina Press.

Del Lago, Enrico, Katsari, Konstantina. 2008. "Ideal models of slave management in the Roman world and in the ante-bellum American South," in Slave Systems Ancient and Modern, edited by E. Del Lago, K. Katsari, 187-213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duff, A.M. 1928. Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fogel, Roger W., Engerman, Stanley L. 1974. Time on the Cross, 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Fogel, Robert W., Galantine, Ralph A., Manning, Richard L. 1992. Without consent or contract, 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton.

Frank, Tenney. 1916. "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," The American Historical Review 21: 689-708.

Franklin, John Hope. 1943. The Free Negro in North Carolina 1790-1860. New York: Russell & Russell.

Johnson, Michael P., Roark, James L. 1986. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Kudlien, Fridolf. 1986. Die Stellung des Arztes in der römischen Gesellschaft: freigeborene Römer, Eingebürgerte, Peregrine, Sklaven, Freigelassene als Ärzte. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.

McKeown, Niall. The Invention of ancient slavery.

Mouritsen, Henrik. 2011. The Freedman in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy. New York-London: Harper & Brothers.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Scheidel, Walter. 2008. "The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world," in Slave Systems Ancient and Modern, edited by E. Del Lago, K. Katsari, 105-126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scheidel, Walter. 2012. "Slavery," in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, edited by W. Scheidel, 89-113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schweniger, Loren. 1990. Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Sterkx, H. E. 1972. The Free Negro in ante-bellum Louisiana. Rutherford-Madison-Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Treggiari, Susan. 1969. Roman Freedman during the late Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Woodward, C. Vann. 1974. Strange career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press.
"

"From the demonstrations of the 99% movement, to the work of Wilkinson-Pickett, Saez and Pikkety,... more "From the demonstrations of the 99% movement, to the work of Wilkinson-Pickett, Saez and Pikkety, the problems of wealth and income inequality have come under increasing scrutiny in the past decade.
However, few economic historians have given proper consideration to the role of democratic social change, the welfare state, and the consumer demand of a robust middle class, rather than industrial technology, in the rise of the 'affluent society' after World War II.
In this talk, I compare nutrition, health and living standards, social inequality, and political institutions in early industrial England and the Greco-Roman world, in order to provide a deeper perspective on the social origins of laissez-faire capitalist ideology, and its continuing toxic legacy of stifling economic growth and perpetuating social injustice and neo-colonial exploitation."

As Walter Scheidel recently pointed out, Sir Moses Finley remains, after Peter Brown, the most ci... more As Walter Scheidel recently pointed out, Sir Moses Finley remains, after Peter Brown, the most cited ancient historian in English language scholarship. One of the most important reasons for this remarkable influence is his facility in using cross-cultural comparisons. Mohammad Nafissi has offered a compelling analysis of Finley's use (and abuse) of some of his strongest and most obvious influences, namely Polanyi, Weber, and Marx, but his dependence on the philosophes of the French and Scottish Enlightenment has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, I explore how Finley's critique of the alleged rentier values of the ancient elites, and his portrayal of Greco-Roman society as a warlike and imperialistic slave society, drew heavily upon two strands in early Modern thought: the bourgeois critique of the feudal aristocracies and the reaction against the revival of ancient democratic ideals during the French Revolution.

Karl Julius Beloch, in a remarkable analysis of the ancient Greek economy, first noted the devel... more Karl Julius Beloch, in a remarkable analysis of the ancient Greek economy, first noted the development of what he called Massenkonsum or mass consumption as a powerful indicator of Classical Greek economic development. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, scholars, dissuaded by Finley’s scornful attack on the ‘modernism’ of Beloch and his contemporary Eduard Meyer, have largely ignored Beloch’s insight. Decades of research have increasingly undermined Finley’s caricature of a technologically stagnant Greco-Roman economy, but scholars have rarely addressed the critical questions of ancient demand, consumption and living standards. Despite modern industrial technology, real per capita incomes for the working classes of England remained stagnant through much of the late 19th and early 20th century. Yet anthropometric evidence for ancient nutrition and diet, as well as work on ancient housing suggest that the middle classes and even relatively poor farmers and craftsmen of Greco-Roman antiquity enjoyed a fairly high standard of material comfort. I propose to concentrate, however, more upon social attitudes than on actual living standards, and upon the more difficult case, the more inegalitarian society of Roman Italy. Improvements in modern European living standards were long constrained by the widespread conviction that the working poor deserved, and could never achieve, more than the barest subsistence, but were Roman attitudes similar? As Balsdon and de Martinis have pointed out most clearly, inscriptions show the deep pride Roman craftsmen took in their work and their aspirations for material success, and I will argue that a range of literary sources show broad acceptance of the notion that working people, and even slaves, deserved to, and did, share in the affluence of Roman society.

Cicero was wont to gently mock his constant rival, the orator Hortensius, and the fabulously weal... more Cicero was wont to gently mock his constant rival, the orator Hortensius, and the fabulously wealthy general Lucullus, as piscinarii, aptly translated by Shackleton-Bailey as 'fish-fanciers.' Other wits labeled Lucullus 'Xerxes in a toga' for digging canals linking his massive fishponds with the sea, accused Antonia, wife of Drusus, of putting gold ear-rings on a pet moray eel, and even circulated malicious gossip that Hortensius bawled, when one of his prized fish died.

Behind all of the clever jokes, however, lay a remarkable economic achievement. All along the Tyrrhenian coast, and beyond, these Roman fish-fanciers built massive hydraulic concrete fish-ponds, expertly designed to support fish-farming more intensive than any which would be seen before the 1970s and 80's. But mariculture, or the farming of sea fish, was only the most demanding and capital intensive branch of a remarkable Roman agricultural industry dubbed pastio villatica. Building on centuries of Greek experience, the Romans also published elaborate manuals for the expert farming of game such as wild boar, red and fallow deer, elk, hares and rabbits, as well as an astonishing list of game-birds. Not content with such prosaic classics as ducks and geese, squab, pheasant, grouse, partridge, quail and pea-fowl, Roman tables were loaded with thrushes and other songbirds, as well as such exotic birds as flamingoes, swans, cranes, even ostrich.

Using literary sources, mosaics, wall-paintings, as well as archaeological evidence, primarily actual fishponds and villas, and the remains of birds, fish, game and shellfish, I will show how the Romans were able to provide a diet as rich in fish and game as that of contemporary Parisians.

American Journal of Philology 139.1: pp. 153-7., 2018

Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2016

In this expanded version of a previously posted talk, I explore the ways in which the restriction... more In this expanded version of a previously posted talk, I explore the ways in which the restrictions on social mobility and acceptance for African American slaves continued after emancipation and the end of Radical Reconstruction, and were grounded in racist theories of biological inferiority, leading to efforts to create and maintain distinct and 'pure' racial groups through bans on miscegenation. Moreover, I discuss the ways in which the tactics used to force or intimidate the general public into accepting these racist theories and practices inspired the Nazis to make similar restrictions on sex and marriage between 'Aryans' and Jews and racialized minorities.

The original abstract of the paper follows:
A number of scholars (Patterson 1982; Bradley 1987; Bradley 1994; Del Lago & Katsari 2008; Scheidel 2008; 2012) have considered the potential value of evidence from America's ante-bellum South for the understanding of Greco-Roman slavery, yet it is fair to say that this rich vein of comparative evidence has only just begun to be exploited. It is widely, and surely correctly, observed that there are some profound historical differences between these two slave systems, most notably in the absence of an ideology asserting the innate superiority of master over slave in ancient world, radical differences in rates of manumission, and very significant contrasts in the relative size of the slave population. Nevertheless, the experience of slaves and freedmen in the American South, both in the ante-bellum period, as well as after emancipation (Myrdal 1944; Woodward 1974; Schweniger 1990; Blackmon 2008), offers significant insights for our reconstruction of ancient slavery, not only because of the mass of documentary and econometric evidence available (Fogel & Engerman 1974; Fogel et al. 1992), but also because both societies were forced to confront, in a way more avowedly hierarchical and undemocratic slave-owning societies were not, the problem of maintaining control, by law and by force, of an un-free population in a society of free citizens.
I propose to concentrate on one specific issue, comparing and contrasting the opportunities for economic and social mobility on the part of the freed slave in Greco-Roman antiquity and the American South, and the ways in which legal restrictions, broader social attitudes and ideologies either encouraged or constrained these opportunities. The striking wealth and political, cultural and social influence attained by certain prominent Greek and Roman freedmen has long attracted considerable attention from modern scholars (Treggiari 1969; Christes 1979; Kudlien 1986; Mouritsen 2011), and their thorough integration into ancient society has elicited some sharp disapproval from the more conservative (Frank 1916; Duff 1928; cf. McKeown 2007: 11-29), but in the absence of reliable statistics, it can be difficult to interpret our evidence. A much fuller picture, both personal and statistical, can be drawn for the lives of manumitted slaves and free blacks in the American South, however, and clearly shows that a number of freedmen, despite facing much lower prospects of manumission, significantly harsher legal restrictions, less access to education, and persistent hostility, discrimination and racist violence, succeeded in achieving a measure of economic independence and even wealth (Franklin 1943; Sterkx 1972; Berlin 1975; Coger 1985; Johnson & Roark 1986; Schweniger 1990). I intend to explore how a detailed comparison of the structural impediments, social prejudices and legal disabilities faced by freedmen in each society, and of the opportunities held out to freedmen for acceptance in the mainstream can permit us to explain the level of social mobility attested in the American South, and to estimate, however crudely, what realistic prospects of higher socio-economic status Greco-Roman freedmen are likely to have enjoyed.

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is m... more In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states. I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control. I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s. On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus. This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

conference paper "Growth and Factors of Growth in the Ancient Economy", Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 2011

A discussion of the factors which are likely to influence economic growth in Greco-Roman antiquit... more A discussion of the factors which are likely to influence economic growth in Greco-Roman antiquity, with some attention to ideological distortions of economic history and evidence motivated by economic theory and the limited significance of growth as opposed to living standards in assessing economic prosperity. Another important theme is the critical importance of social equality in promoting prosperity and economic growth and ways in which economic theorists attempt to use distorted claims of economic growth to deflect attention from mass poverty and economic underdevelopment caused by social inequality.