For Those Who Curse the Candle: A Culturally and Historically Relativistic Proposal for Rethinking the Approach to the Ancient Economy (via Archaic Rome)

This chapter addresses, in its first part, the theme of the peculiar “morality” through which most economic historians of antiquity have approached their research topic, namely a fundamentally ethnocentric point of view presupposing the superiority of modern economies vis-à-vis ancient ones. This attitude is strongly connected to the failure by scholarship of the ancient economy to understand Karl Polanyi’s critique of the Western economy and of his (and his school’s) relativism. Current dominant approaches in ancient economic history like those rooted in New Institutional Economics and in Ian Morris’  Social Development Model account for this anti-relativistic standpoint up to this time. In the second part of the chapter a proposal for a relativistic method of approach to the ancient economy is put forward. This approach tends to privilege an emic analysis of the different corpora of ancient sources, meant to capture “how natives think” (Sahlins), rather than the etic one which privileges the (purportedly superior) observer’s point of view. In order to explain practically how to work on the ancient economy through this method, a case study about the “economic” transformations in sixth-century BC Rome is developed, seeking to flesh out the native concepts, models and intentions that contributed to generate and give shape to certain phenomena that we would roughly call “economic,” but that their Roman actors perceived and articulated otherwise.