Toward an Historically Informed Understanding of Institutions and Economies

The contributions to this volume reflect a frustration that economic theory has led the field of Ancient History into errors both historical and ethical. An important and specific critique argues that even the New Institutional Economics fails to account for the costs—especially as they arise from state-sponsored violence on a large scale—associated with the building up of the so-called good institutions celebrated in the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World . A second critique arises out of a tension between idiographic and nomothetic methodologies in understanding and communicating about the ancient past. Despite these concerns, I argue that models, including quantitative ones, offer much of value for our historical toolkit, as long as we recognize that we need models with sufficient flexibility that they can accommodate different points of view about the desiderata that contribute to ‘the good.’ A theory of the growth of an economy as it coevolves with its institutions is explained as one giving historians the kind of model they need to understand why societies adopt the organizational forms that they do, and how those change over time.