Why a Human Ancient Economy Should Be Posthuman

While New Institutional Economics (NIE) has grounded the homo economicus by introducing friction and its costs into economic models, its model of things has remained reductive. Since humans and things are co-constituted, NIE’s critique of the “human” of neoclassical economics is bound to be insufficient and often falls back on the human as atomic agent, whether as profit-maximizer or as biological entity. The complexity of human-thing relations needs to be folded into economic history if it aims to write a truly human story, one that takes seriously the human concerns, costs, and collectivities of economic action and one that centers humans beyond “bare life”. By foregrounding relationality, embodiment, and embeddedness, a feminist posthuman approach can both add new insights to traditional new institutionalist concerns such as bounded rationality and chart new avenues for study. Two case studies illustrate some of the potential and pitfalls of writing a posthuman ancient economy. A first case discusses how different economic subjectivities emerged in Late Republican Italy from a negotiation between villa owners and the specificities of different types of stored crops, namely grain and wine. While “grain thinking” was concerned first and foremost with risk reduction and quantity due to the stored crop’s rapid degradation, the process of fermentation enabled “wine thinking” to emphasize qualitative differences and speculation. A second case considers a blacksmithing toolset curiously abandoned after a fire at the minor center of Podere Marzuolo in Early Imperial Tuscany. It stresses the dual role of tools as both capital and human capital to link to Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities and hypothesize about the limits to skill development in a context of unequal relations of power and means. While a posthuman ancient economy cannot take the place of macro-economic models, it does ask such modeling exercises to pause and unpack some of their black boxes: the big picture might look different when the multidimensionality of human-thing relations is given its due.