Sphinx

Okay, we all know that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; what about judging it by its index? This thought is prompted by the especially detailed index of the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, edited by Walter Scheidel, a copy of which has just been delivered (the cover, incidentally, has a perfectly decent picture of a sculptural relief showing a ship arriving at Ostia – of course, we could think about the impression that such an image, rather than alternatives, is intended to create – and is a very nice red colour). I’m not going to have a chance to read the thing properly until some time next year, and as I have a short contribution therein to a discussion on Roman trade (because choosing any single one of the different contributors to write a single chapter on this controversial topic would have been problematic, I guess – or Walter wanted to stay on all our Christmas card lists) I’m not going to be asked to review it properly; I can therefore indulge in a few snap judgements without any serious consequences, or at least explore the results of making snap judgements on the basis of the index.

Actually I’m thinking of the bit in Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller where books are analysed in terms of the frequency of different words, and the result is that both very common words (excluding things like ‘an’ and ‘the’, of course) and relatively infrequent words turn out to be very revealing of the nature of each text analysed. In the index of an academic work like this Companion, we’re dealing with the editor’s view (at least I’m assuming it’s the editor’s view) of what is most important in what his contributors have actually provided. Clearly this isn’t an infallible guide to what’s actually in the book; for example, one of the things I first looked for, because it relates to one of my current interests, was ‘ecology’, and the result was five entries (all of which, however, relate to the same couple of pages in Scheidel’s Introduction, where he argues for the importance of ecological approaches but mostly then talks about demography) and a cross-reference to climate change, which yields seven references, all to the same couple of pages as the ecology refs. Actually this starts to suggest that maybe the indexing was done by someone else, or even by a programme… Anyway, I would say that in my contribution to the volume I make some remarks that relate to ecological approaches to the ancient economy, even if I don’t actually use the word; if I’d been indexing my own piece, I’d definitely have used the term. So, definitely not infallible – but let’s look at the results anyway.

For the moment, because it’s been a long day, I’m going to focus on absences, rather than do a proper analysis of what has actually been listed; I don’t see why these shouldn’t be equally revealing. As far as approaches to the study of pre-industrial economy are concerned, there’s not a lot of ecology here, as mentioned, and no anthropology at all, or sociology. Adam Smith gets twice as many references as Max Weber, and there’s no Marx at all – but we do get some Polanyi. Douglass C. North beats all of them, which suggests that New Institutional Economics is still being pushed as the best answer to our problems as ancient economic historians – though my sense is that the book as a whole is steering clear of explicit theoretical debates. As for topics, I started with poverty (at the front of my mind, given yesterday’s Poor Us film): nowt. No wealth, either, but to be fair there are a couple of references to inequality. No exploitation, though of course there is slavery. There’s also a whole chapter on human capital, which I can’t help feeling is a way of redescribing some of the things one might consider under the headings of poverty and exploitation so that their political connotations are quietly obscured. Lots of markets, not a lot of reciprocity or redistribution, no gifts. No ideology, economic or otherwise; what looks like lots of attention to the more neutral ‘Roman economic thought’, but all the references turn out to refer to the single chapter on that topic – presumably economic ideas aren’t an issue for the study of trade or manufacturing or the like, or perhaps we can simply take it for granted that they thought more or less in the same way that we do </irony>.

The one really interesting introduction to the repertoire of terminology – yes, I know I said I was going to focus on absences – is ‘predation’, as a new way of talking about Roman imperialism (courtesy of Peter Bang). Of course, at least as far as the index is concerned, it’s a way of talking about Roman imperialism without mentioning the word ‘imperialism’ – another term with too many contemporary overtones…

Oh, and I’m delighted to see that my arguments about whether the term ‘globalisation’ is appropriate or relevant to the Roman Empire have evidently been taken on board, so that it’s simply omitted – despite the fact that I actually talk about this topic quite explicitly…