ABSTRACT
A generation ago, analysis of the economic structure of the ancient world, where it did not concentrate on the effects of slavery, tended to be in terms of the polarity between a ‘primitivist’ and a ‘modernist’ interpretation. Early twentiethcentury ‘modernists’ such as Meyer and Hasebroek emphasised those elements which seemed to have analogues in nineteenth-century economics such as the search for colonies in response to the need for raw materials, long-distance trade and increased population; the ‘primitivists’, influenced by Marx, Weber and Polanyi, saw the ancient economy as embedded in social structures and therefore quite different to a modern industrial world in which capitalism had made the economy autonomous and supreme. In his discussion in the 1970s of the origins of the Peloponnesian War, de Ste Croix minimised the role of the commercial interests which Cornford in the heyday of European imperialism had posited as controlling Athenian policy. Finley in particular preferred to see the ancient economy as based on small-scale units of production centred on the individual oikos or domus, and aiming at self-sufficiency rather than producing for the marketplace.1
