I’ve been making a few changes to the blog recently – adding the Twitter feed, reordering some of the widgets, expanding the biographical information and the like – as a result of an interesting conversation a few months ago with a couple of people on Twitter (@lizgloyn and @EllieMackin, as I recall; apologies if I’ve forgotten others) about online presence. My move to Exeter this summer brought it home to me that this blog, plus my Twitter feed, represents my professional activities online at least as much as any official institutional profile (especially when I’m still struggling with the publications database). I’ve never trusted academiadotedu, so felt smugly reassured when their commercial orientation became more obvious this year – but that does bring to mind the things that this blog currently doesn’t do, that might be useful for some visitors.
So, over the next month or so I’m planning to expand the ‘About this Blog’ section to operate as more of an online cv – information about recent and forthcoming papers, for example. More importantly, it’s an opportunity to make available some of my older papers (old enough that I’m less likely to feel the hot breath of publishers’ lawyers on the back of my neck), if I think there’s still something worth reading in them, especially those published in hard-to-obtain edited collections. After all, the chances of anyone wanting to publish my Collected Papers are low to non-existent, and this does offer me the chance for a bit of self-indulgent reminiscing…
The bad news is that I now find that I don’t actually have decent copies of some of this older material, so this is likely to be a longer process than expected – but here’s the first: my first venture into ‘classical reception’ (or at least my very non-literary version of it), looking at C18-19 debates about what we’d now call ‘the ancient economy’. The starting-point was my work on Marx’s account of antiquity (which has partly appeared in another journal article and in sections of the Antiquity and Modernity book, and partly will feature in the book on Marx and Antiquity that I’m attempting to write, honest): it was clear not only that Marx’s engagement with antiquity was bound up with his debates with contemporary and earlier political economists – historical evidence raising doubts about their universalising claims – but also that some of those political economists had themselves been engaged in debates around the nature and dynamics of the ancient economy.
This wasn’t a field in which either classical reception people or historians of ideas had been especially active – the main exception being the work of Donald Winch, whose Riches and Poverty book became central to this project – so I just had to do the spadework myself. And, yes, it’s just the start of my long-standing polemics about the fact that social scientists often know a lot more about ancient history than we ancient historians know about social science…
Neville Morley, ‘Political Economy and Classical Antiquity’, originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998): 95-114: political-economy-and-classical-antiquity
Sphinx 
I really support your project. I’ m a non-academic fellow-traveller in economics and economic history. I read every article and WP i can get my hands on. I’m more than willing to spring for a JSTOR subscription or some reasonable access scheme – but can’t pay Wiley or Elsevier $35 a crack. So thanks for doing this.
Thanks; nice to know that someone’s interested. Like, I suspect, many academics (certainly in less policy-orientated fields), I’ve tended until very recently simply to assume without thinking that I’m writing for people like me who will automatically have access to most stuff (chapters in obscure continental collections perhaps excepted) via libraries and JSTOR. What really brought it home to me that this isn’t necessarily the case was the plight of Early Career Researchers who don’t have an academic position at the moment, as institutions have become more and more ungenerous in giving access to ‘their’ resources. But this does also bring to mind people in your position as well. Not sure how long it’s likely to take, if I have to reconstruct everything, but more recent papers should be in better shape.