The Other Side of the Ledger: Calculating the Costs and Benefits of Energy Capture

An area of recent concern in economic history has been the development of approaches and mechanisms for measuring economic performance in the past. One such approach focuses on energy capture, the quantity of energy per capita that a given economic system can extract from the human and environmental resources available in the surrounding ecosystem. Societies and states that capture more energy score higher in terms of economic performance. The current paper argues that this system of assessing performance requires more nuance, and that the human costs of increased energy capture must be considered alongside its benefits. Via a series of case studies, the paper proposes a system for assigning an overall human benefit score to ancient building projects, integrating both the positive and negative impacts of investing human energy in large-scale architecture.