The Creation of Wealth and Inequality in the Graeco-Roman World: Tactics from Law and Racial Capitalism

How is wealth created? And how is it distributed? These are the foundational questions of political economy, and they can be understood in radically different ways from the NIE approach prevalent in Graeco-Roman history today. Drawing on intellectual tactics culled from the fields of Law and Racial Capitalism, I suggest that these questions should be the subject of open-ended historical inquiries focusing on how the creation of wealth and inequality worked at a technical level and what it meant for the people involved. By investigating how contemporaries partook in and experienced what historians today have tended to render as graphs and curves stretching over centuries, this new understanding pierces the quantitative membrane in which the questions of political economy are often enveloped, introducing different forms of time (more human, less millenarian) into investigations thereof. Ultimately, I contend, it allows us to grasp the true import of the economic: the fact that the creation of wealth and inequality is imbricated in so much more than economic value. As such, this approach not only offers a promising handle on the intersection of different forms of inequality in the Graeco-Roman past but may also afford our students new and different ways of relating to this past. To substantiate these claims, I present some of my ongoing research on the processes of resource accumulation, primitive and other, in the hands of Romans and Italians that accompanied the establishment of Roman provinces during the middle and late republic.