Taco Terpstra. Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean

In the important Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions, Taco Terpstra explores the impact of state-generated institutions on trade and exchange in the ancient Mediterranean world. The central claim of the book is that the development and consolidation of states in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, beginning with those of the Iron Age and culminating with imperial Rome, had an overall positive impact on economic development. This was true not because states consciously enacted growth-oriented policies or because they acted as third-party enforcers of economic transactions (neither of which they normally did), but because the elites who governed them established institutions and ideologies that permitted various forms of private-order enforcement to flourish even as they pursued their own selfish interests. Terpstra develops this argument in four analytical chapters. Chapters 2 and 5 examine institutions that supported private-order enforcement by structuring relationships between individual polities and trade diasporas, networks of merchants and traders linked by ethnic affiliation who conducted business in a foreign community. Chapter 2 explores the impact of political and institutional change on how members of trade diasporas made credible commitments that they would honor agreements with citizens of host communities. Dedicatory inscriptions from Greek cities of the classical and Hellenistic periods demonstrate that prominent members of trade diasporas competed with one another to receive public honors from their host communities, including titles like “public friend” (proxenos) and immunity from taxation. Their desire to retain these honors motivated them to act as cross-cultural intermediaries, chiefly by mediating contract disputes; in so doing, they reassured their host communities that contracts with diaspora members would be enforced. By the Roman period, public friendship had fallen out of fashion, and members of trade diasporas established credibility by making public dedications honoring the Roman imperial state or the cult of the emperors, thus visibly endorsing their commitment to the wider Roman order. Chapter 5 complements this view by making the bold claim that state-sponsored religious change in late antiquity—specifically, the Christianization of the empire—degraded both the ability of trade diasporas to signal their trustworthiness to others and their ability to enforce internal norms, thus contributing to widespread economic decline. As the polytheism of earlier centuries surrendered to an aggressive monotheism, diasporas could no longer use devotion to the traditional cults of their home communities to foster internal cohesion or rely on dedications to the cult of the emperors as tools for demonstrating commitment to a common Roman order. As a result, members lost the ability to commit credibly to agreements both with one another and with others, to the detriment of economic activity in the Mediterranean more broadly.

Economics · Economy · Enforcement · Ideology · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · Law