ABSTRACT
From the 1900s onwards, economic historians tended to view economic development as ‘modern’ during and after the Industrial Revolution and as largely Malthusian before. The differences between the two kinds of societies can be defined in several ways. The demographic difference is probably the most apparent: in a traditional society both fertility and mortality are supposedly related to per capita income, while modernization gradually changes this relationship. Another way of defining the difference is to look at markets. The difference in the distributional mechanisms of these societies has been subject of a debate for about five decades now. Modernists believe that markets played an important role even in the ancient societies, while primitivists, among whom Finley (1973), following Polanyi (1968), is the most prominent, believe that it is a mistake to project market mechanisms of our days back into the past. In their view we should rather look on the ancient economies as mainly consisting of small economic units engaged in sustenance agriculture (Andreau 2002, 33–49; see also Van der Spek et al., Chapter 1, this volume). 1
