ABSTRACT

In a gentlemanly and mostly implicit way, the papers given at the St Andrews Conference touched on some of the most intractable questions of ancient economic history. My brief off-the-cuff summing up in the final session attempted to sketch the components of a possible framework of wider reference, within which the chapters published in this volume could be related to each other and could find a comfortable home. The chapter which follows here, transformed and much enlarged from those initial remarks, 1 is that sketch. It is undoubtedly inadequate, and is quite probably incompetent. All I claim for it is that by recognising how wide the spectrum of approaches to the subject currently is, by acknowledging their various legitimacies, and by sketching (however crudely) their components and their inter-relationships, it attempts to map the field of ideas in such a way as to help the tiro to orient herself. If A. N. Other can replace this crude model by a more precise or a more wide-ranging one, so much the better.