ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi’s greatest contribution to ancient social and economic history was his demonstration of the fundamental differences between modern capitalist market society and the pre-capitalist societies of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially Greece and western Asia, in the second and first millennia BCE. His insistence on this position aligned him with old historians of the antiquity, including Marx and Weber, and with the original institutional approach in social sciences.
This paper will review the persistent influence of Polanyi in the study of the ancient Mediterranean, especially since the assessment by Tandy and Neale (1994). For example, the ‘port of trade’ (what the Greeks called an emporion), is one of Polanyi’s enduring theoretical structures; together with his theory of ‘administered trade,’ it remains an important anchor for the study of Near Eastern overland trade.
Evidence recently collected has been employed for supporting neo-institutional modernist accounts of ancient transactions – often with an emphasis on transaction costs (thus echoing more Coase and North than Polanyi). However, such evidence can as well confirm the opposite Polanyian view of an economy ‘embedded’ in non-economic institutions.
