Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Early Empires) Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel - The Dynamics of Ancient Empires_ State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution)-Oxford University Press 2009.
400 Pages
Preface
The world’s first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 B.c.z. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers—the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires—ruled perhaps two-thirds all the people on Earth. Yet, despite empires’ prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively.
Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then only had Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, appeared in large amounts only in the late nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons.
As a result, Greek and Roman empires have been studied largely in isolation from those of the Near East. Our book is designed to address these deficits and to encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining the fundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia B.c.£. and c.g.: the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires.
This volume has grown out of a series of conferences sponsored by Stanford University’s Social Science History Institute (SSHI). Founded as an interdepartmental program involving faculty and graduate students from the Departments of Anthropological Sciences, Classics, Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology, SSHI aimed to combine the analytical tools and techniques of the social sciences with the appreciation for institutions and evidence associated with the discipline of history. From the start, ancient history occupied a prominent position in SSHI’s research agenda.
Following a conference on the ancient economy in 1998 that resulted in a collection of essays edited by Joe Manning and Jan Morris,’ SSHI sponsored a conference titled “Empires and Exploitation in the Ancient Mediterranean” at Stanford in May 2000, organized by the editors of this book. Follow-up meetings at Stanford in May 2001 and a final gathering at the University of Western Australia at Perth in August 2002 allowed the contributors to present and discuss revised papers and strengthen the thematic and methodological coherence of their studies.
At these meetings, internationally recognized experts in the history of the principal empires of ancient western Eurasia addressed a set of key issues such as the nature of the evidence, geographical context, the main historical developments, the role of material resources and modes of exploitation and redistribution, economic development, institutional frameworks, administrative and political practices, ideology, center-periphery relations, and the demise of imperial states. We did not impose a rigid template but left it to each contributor to emphasize some of these features in accordance with the potential of the source material and the preoccupations of pertinent scholarship. As a result, the individual chapters differ in terms of focus and scope, yet they also address the same crucial problems: how empires were run, how they extracted resources, and what their long-term consequences were.
A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. Coauthored by a sociologist with strong historical interests (Jack Goldstone) and a historian with strong sociological interests (John Haldon), this introductory chapter situates the study of ancient empires within the broader context of related work in historical sociology and political science. The final chapter, on the sexual dimension of empire, adopts an explicitly comparative and multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe.
We hope that, taken together, these seven contributions will encourage more systematic and comparative thinking about the nature and development of imperial states in early history, and serve as building blocks for cross-cultural studies. This project has inspired all the participants to engage in more explicitly comparative and multidisciplinary work on early empires, and we will measure this book’s success by its capacity to motivate our present and future colleagues to do the same.’
We particularly want to thank our longtime colleague Steve Haber, SSHI’s founder and director, for his invaluable intellectual and financial support. This volume would never have been conceived without his generosity and example. We are also grateful to the University of Western Australia at Perth for hosting the group’s third meeting. We especially thank our host on that occasion, Brian Bosworth, who also delivered a paper at the first conference at Stanford, as did William Harris. Lance Davis, Erich Gruen, Steve Haber, David Laitin, and Gavin Wright kindly offered valuable comments on the papers presented at our first event.
The meetings that led to this volume were greatly enriched by the formidable presence of Keith Hopkins, who did more than anyone else to hold ancient historians to the standards of social scientific research.* He died in March 2004, before he was able to complete the final revision of his contribution. With the kind permission of his literary executor, Christopher Kelly, it is published here for the first time with editorial additions by Walter Scheidel. This book is dedicated to his memory.
NOTES
1. Manning and Morris, eds. 2005.
2. The cross-cultural study of ancient empires need not be confined to historically related entities: for comparative perspectives on the ancient Mediterranean and ancient China, see Scheidel, ed., forthcoming, complemented by an investigation organized by Morris and Scheidel of divergent processes of state formation in Europe and China after the Roman period. Cf. also Scheidel, in preparation, on models of causality in the study of ancient empires and now especially the international research project “Tributary Empires Compared,” directed by Peter Bang and focusing on the Roman, Mughal, and Ottoman empires.
3. Osborne 2004; Harris 2005.
Contributors
Peter R. BEpForD is John and Jane Wold Professor of Religious Studies in the Departments of Classics and History at Union College (N.Y.). The author of Temple Restoration in Early Achaemenid Judah (2001), he focuses his research on ancient Jewish history and the social and economic history of the Near East in the first millennium B.c.z. He is currently preparing a study on Judean nationalism in the context of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and editing a volume to be titled The Idea of History in the Ancient Near East.
Jack A. GoLDsTONE is Hazel Professor and director of the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University and a Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1981) and editor of The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (1998). He has received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship award of the American Sociological Association, the Arnoldo Momigliano Prize of the Historical Society, and fellowships from the ACLS and the MacArthur Foundation. He is currently working on two books: Why Europe?: The Rise of the West in World History and A Peculiar Path: The Rise of the West in Global Context 1500-1850.
JoHn F. Hatpon is professor of Byzantine history at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of the early and middle Byzantine Empire, especially from the sixth to twelfth centuries c.z., on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds, and on the production, distribution and consumption of resources in the late Roman and medieval world. He is director of the international project “Medieval Logistics: Movement, Demography and Warfare.” He has published many books and articles, including The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (1993), Byzantium in the Seventh Century (1997), Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World (1999), Byzantium: A History (2006), and The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History (2005).
KeitH Hopkins was professor of ancient history in the University of Cambridge, a Fellow and vice-provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is best known for his research on Roman social and economic history and on the history of early Christianity. He is the author of Conquerors and Slaves (1978), Death and Renewal (1983), A World Full of Gods (1999), and The Colosseum (2005, with Mary Beard) and the editor of Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony (1971). A collection of his articles will be edited by Christopher Kelly. He died in 2004.
IAN Morais is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and professor of history at Stanford University. He works on ancient Greek and Mediterranean history and archaeology and directs an excavation at Monte Polizzo in Sicily. He has authored or (co-)edited ten other books, including Burial and Ancient Society (1987), Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (1992), Archaeology as Cultural History (2000), The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society (2005, with Barry Powell), The Ancient Cconomy: Evidence and Models (2005, co-edited with Joe Manning), and The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007, co-edited with Walter Scheidel and Richard Saller). He is currently working on two studies of world history.
WALTER SCHEIDEL is professor of classics and, by courtesy, history at Stanford University. His research focuses on ancient social and economic history, historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary world history. He has authored or (co-)edited eight other books, including Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire (1996), Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001), Debating Roman Demography (2001), and The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007, with Ian Morris and Richard Saller). He is currently editing Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires and The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies and The Oxford Handbook of the Ancient State, and working on monographs on ancient empires and ancient demography.
JosEF WIESEHOFER is professor of ancient history at the University of Kiel (Germany) and director of its Institute for Classical Studies. He is a member of the Center for Asian and African Studies at Kiel University, editor of the series Oriens et Occidens, and co-editor of the series Asien und Afrika, Achaemenid History, and Oikumene. His main interests are the history of the ancient Near East and its relations with the Mediterranean world, social history, the history of early modern travelogues, and the history of scholarship. He has written and edited numerous books, including Der Aufstand Gaumatas und die Anfiinge Dareios I. (1978), Die ‘dunklen Jahrhunderte’ der Persis (1994), The Arsacid Empire: Sources and Documentation (1998), Ancient Persia: From 550 B.c. to 650 A.D. (2001), and Das friihe Persien (2006).
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