Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean

Reviewed by: Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions by Taco Terpstra Gary Reger Taco Terpstra. Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. viii, 274. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-691-17208-8. The New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been taken up avidly by historians of the Greco-Roman world. With its emphasis on the role of transaction costs as lubricating or stymying economic activity, it has proven to be a powerful tool for thinking about economic change and performance for data-poor past economies. Many chapters of The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco- RomanWorld(Cambridge 2007) are built on the foundation of the NIE. The pace of publications deploying NIE in various ways has only increased subsequently. Much work has focused on the role of the state as the crucial actor in determining transaction costs. There is no question that state actors were extremely important. But in his new book, Taco Terpstra argues that another important set of actors has been overlooked: those in the private sphere. He explores the ways in which various private trade-related activities created ties of trust outside or in parallel with the role of the state to reduce transaction costs and so facilitate economic activity. Terpstra examines trade through a series of case studies. A trade diaspora is a network of people interconnected by some important ties embedded in various ports and towns on whom visiting traders can rely for local information and support. His chief example is Phoenician trade. The key, he suggests, was shared ethnicity and ties between the diasporic communities and their hometowns in the Levant. His most striking text is the inscription of 174 ce recording the appeal of the Tyrians in Puteoli, Italy, to their hometown for relief in the face of financial troubles. This document reflects the continuing close ties between the Tyrians abroad and their hometown—ties that Terpstra reasonably argues would have provided advice and support to Tyrian traders abroad. His chapter on Zenon, agent of the Ptolemaic finance official Apollonios, in Palestine introduces the concept of “stationary bandits.” Borrowed from Mancur Olson, these are resident exploiting authorities whose interest in ongoing resource extraction compels them to care, to some degree, for the welfare of their subjects. Terpstra uses a rich body of evidence to tease out the ways in which Zenon acted in Apollonios’ interests both as a state official and as a private person in Palestine. This relation comes out nicely in Terpstra’s discussions of agency, oversight, and punishment and Zenon’s activities connected with his employer’s private estate at Baitanata, which produced wine. Two bodies of documentary evidence, the Sulpicii archive from Pompeii (but dealing with business in Puteoli) and the Dacian tablets recovered from the mines there (both of Roman imperial date), undergird Terpstra’s argument [End Page 492] about the role of status in assuring honest dealing. His examination of the lists of witnesses at the ends of these texts shows that they were recorded in descending order of status. For Terpstra this ordering reflects both the witnesses’ insistence on respect for and display of their status and the security contracting parties could feel in employing high-status guarantors to validate the contracts. Unfortunately, especially for the Dacian material, because the signatories cannot be confidently identified, this evidence is a bit thin; but the argument, especially where it rests on the Sulpicii archive, strikes me as reasonable. Much the least satisfactory component of Terpstra’s book, to my mind at least, is the chapter on religion and religious violence. In a nutshell, he claims that the switch from a multiplicity of gods to Christianity undermined the role religion had played in creating trust, due particularly to the violence attendant on Christian religious controversy and the destruction of pagan sanctuaries. For example, he treats the destruction of the sanctuary of Marnas in Gaza—a striking case of Christian violence—but cannot show that Marnas’s worship actually facilitated trade. This chapter reviews a number of other instances, but none links tightly to trade. The epilogue turns to a review of the “fall” of the

Diaspora · Economics · Economy · Order (exchange) · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Transaction cost · Classical Antiquity Studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Finance · Law