• About
  • Armour in Texts
    • English Wills and Inventories
    • French and Burgundian Military Ordinances
    • Greek and Roman Inscriptions and Papyri
    • Lydgate’s Troy Book
    • Murḍa al-Tarṣuṣi
    • Nineteenth-Century Travellers and Researchers
    • Pedro de Aguado on Armour in New Spain
    • Records of the Armourers’ Company of London
    • Rule of the Pourpointiers of Amiens
    • Rules of the Paris Guilds
    • Rules of the Troyes Guilds
    • Rules of the Venetian Guilds
    • Statutes and Privileges of the Armourers and Scabbardmakers of the City of Angers
    • The Book of the Hirelings of the Republic of Florence
    • The Norwegian King’s Mirror
  • My Articles
  • Resources
    • Active Open-Access Venues in Ancient World Studies
    • Building a Website to Last
    • COVID-19
    • Fashion in the Age of Datini
      • Bocksten Cloaks
      • Crossbows
      • Extant Quilted Garments
      • How Heavy Were Doublets and Pourpoints?
      • Sheaths and Sword-Belts
      • The Baggage of a Student in 1347
    • Project TUPPU
    • Reenacting the Archaic and the Long Sixth Century
      • Cooking, Eating, and Drinking
      • Edgetools
      • Firestarting
      • Recipes
      • Replica Edgetools
      • Shoes and Sandals
    • Suppliers for Historical Crafts
  • Support
  • Why no Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn/Tumblr/… buttons?
    • My Social Media Policy

Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Tag Archives: economic history

Where Did Ancient Slaves Come From?

30 Saturday May 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

ancient, apologists for slavery, economic history, Greece, Italy, Mesopotamia, slavery

a phoot of a cat walking determinedly across an asphalt street

This Tirolean cat has a place to get to and does not care what tries to get in its way, like me when I get a research burr in my blanket! Photo by Sean Manning, May 2020

A retired economist in another country wants to know how we know that many ancient slaves were prisoners of war, kidnap victims, or the children of slaves. Ok! Readers who don’t want to hear about slavery and child abandonment might want to skip this one.

So in the Ur III period around 2000 BCE we see massive numbers of people being rounded up and deported into labour camps near Ur. Some were starved to death so their supervisors could sell their rations, and others seem to have been blinded to stop them running away (they could still haul water and do other simple tasks). A bit later we have contracts where parents sell their children to someone willing to feed them during sieges or famines. Moving on to the 8th and 7th century BCE, the archive from Nippur (Oriental Institute Publication 114) and the Iliad describe people being captured by raiders and bandits and either ransomed or enslaved. A little later we see massive numbers of captives being dedicated to the gods in Babylonia, where they would work for the rest of their lives for the temple (although it is worth noting that these širāku had what we would call human rights other than the right to move freely and choose their employer- there were even worse statuses to be placed in). We also see that people with unfree status were tattooed or branded so they could be identified if they ran away. Later stories about Solon around 600 BCE describe how farmers in Attica fell into debt and were forced to sell themselves and their lands, possibly share-cropping for one sixth of the produce (the ἑκτημόριοι “sixth-parters”).
Continue reading →

Agricultural Surplus is a Dangerous Idea

07 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval, Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agriculture, ancient, economic history, modern

A muddy, freshly plowed field with bare trees and a fence with billboards along one side

Its a rainy September, so how about the field across from the Atrium in a rainy September? The field is now a construction site.

A lot of historians throw around the term ‘agricultural surplus.’ By this they mean food which the farmers and their livestock don’t eat, and which can be used to feed stonemastons and metalworkers and scribes and priests and gentlemen farmers. In this theory, societies have to find a way to produce a larger surplus before they can produce things historians like such as books. I think this term is one of the terms which historians borrowed from economists in the early 20th century.

At first the idea seems harmless enough: if a family needs 20 bushels of barley to feed itself and its animals and have seed for next year, and they harvest 30, they will probably trade 10 for something else or use it to fatten stock. But in the real world there is rent and taxation. And when you look at the science of nutrition, you find that there is a range in the amount of food that farm workers eat. At the low end, they can’t work very well, lose most of their children, and die young of chronic diseases or infections which their weakened body can’t fight off; at the high end, they have a varied diet, grow taller and stronger, and can be pretty sure of having surviving children. Its not actually the case that people need a certain number of calories of Generic Food ™ a day, above which they just get fat and below which they die. Taxes and rents often come out of this margin in between. And it is usually taxes and rents which pay for the stone buildings, the scholars writing treatises on ethics, and the beautiful silver cups.
Continue reading →

Two Dresses a Year

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ancient, economic history, George Bernard Shaw, modern, source

Three women in dressnding on bicycles with straight handlebars

Vivie Warren was more of a hiker and target shooter than a cyclist but this photo will do! Female cyclists from the end of the 19th century c/o the Victoria and Albert Museum http://media.vam.ac.uk/feature/lightbox/v1/album_images/59473-large.jpg

For 10,000 years or so, clothing was so expensive that most people could only afford a few outfits. Then over the past lifetime they suddenly became so cheap that for people in a rich country, storage space is the main concern. We see traces of this in inventories of family property during divorces outside the Valley of the Kings, in Babylonian invoices for one suit of clothing per soldier per year, and then in medieval post-mortem inventories and sumptuary laws, but it continued later than we like to remember. A snatch of old verse was stuck in Robert Heinlein’s head:

There’s a pawn shop on the corner
Where I usually keep my overcoat.

Now, today a synthetic winter coat would hardly be worth pawning (a day’s minimum wage?), but a woollen one of 2-5 yards of fulled cloth could last decades and cost accordingly. A passage by George Bernard Shaw touches on this from another angle.
Continue reading →

The Key Question in the Fall of the Roman Empire

24 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

ancient, economic history, Late Antique, Roman, slavery, Steve Muhlberger

A conversation with Nathan Ross inspired me to track down two essays by Steve Muhlberger on what I think is the key issue in the fall of the western Roman empire. (The debate “were foreign invasions or civil wars more destructive?” is a bit of a semantic issue, since soldiers tried to be as Germanic as possible and wealthy Germans in the Imperium tried to become as Roman as possible: its never going to be easy to define figures like Stilicho as either Roman or barbarian). It has long been obvious that the fifth century saw light beautiful pottery, stone houses, roofs with leak-proof terracotta tiles, and philosophers who could do original work vanish from Europe north of the Alps, but recently archaeologists have noticed that people buried in Post-Roman Europe seem to be living longer and eating better than their ancestors who bore the Roman yoke.

My second reflection is on the current debate about the fall of the Roman Empire (the fifth-century fall) between people who equate it with “the End of Civilization” (Bryan Ward-Perkins) and people who don’t think it was an ending of unprecedented significance (say, Peter Brown and Walter Goffart). I really think that the unresolved and maybe unresolvable debate is about what civilization is. Is it a situation where a leisured minority sit around in the palace library, enjoying bread made from Egyptian wheat and dipping it in Syrian olive oil or Spanish fish sauce, and debating the great ideas of the ages, while other people dig minerals from the earth in dirty, dangerous mines, or harvest cotton in the hot sun, and die young? If that’s it, then there was probably a lot less “civilization” in large parts of the formerly Roman world after AD 400 than there had been for some centuries, in that it was far more difficult to assemble a large variety of enviable luxuries in one spot through the routine operations of centralized imperial power. And there is more civilization now, because here I sit, not even close to being rich by Canadian standards, but able to read, think and then speak to a privileged minority around the world while hundreds of millions sweat profusely (and all too often, die young).

But it might be worth considering whether the height of luxury — whatever luxury you prefer — is the only measure of civilization.

I say, bring on those resilient decentralized networks and extend them as far as we can. The only alternative is slavery for somebody.

– Steve Muhlberger, “Brave New War, The Upside of Down, and the fall of the Roman Empire,” 22 April 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/04/brave-new-war-upside-of-down-and-fall.htm
Continue reading →

How Much Did a Shirt Really Cost in the Middle Ages?

09 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval, Modern

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

economic history, Henry VIII, historical clothing, medieval, modern

A painting of peasants eating and napping under a tree while others harvest grain

Peter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565: now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession number 19.164). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Some people on the Internet are curious about how much a shirt cost in the middle ages. Now you could try to answer that question by trying to calculate how long it would take to spin and weave the linen and sew the shirt, combining your guesses in an elaborate chain of assumptions using your modern education. A certain Eve Fisher imagined and calculated and came up with the figures $3500 or $4200 for a shirt like those depicted by painters like Peter Brueghel the Elder. This has been re-posted by a number of popular websites, and several weavers and spinners have dropped by her website to comment that they are not so sure about some of her assumptions. But did you know that we can skip all of these guesses and calculations, and the questions which they pose about whether we spin and weave as fast as people in the past, and just ask medieval people how much they paid for a shirt?

Continue reading →

Historical Prices for Gamers and Writers

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ancient, economic history, GURPS, medieval, Silk Road, source

Photo of cloth dealers in the old bazaar of Isfahan

Isfahan’s glory days are young, within the last thousand years, but a nice shaded place to set up shop is a luxury in any period! Photo of the Old Bazaar in Isfahan by Sean Manning, May 2017.

One of the big problems facing anyone studying ancient economies is that it’s very difficult to tell how much things cost at any given time. Records of market prices are sparse at the best of times and often nonexistent, and even where such records exist, they’re usually exceptional or represent only a single transaction. But sometimes historians get lucky …

– Matthew Riggsby, GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road p. 34 http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-hot-spots-the-silk-road

Gamers and novelists often want to know something which historians are not eager to answer: how much did practical things cost in the past? Historians of older periods tend to be very aware of the limits of a source which just says “five pounds of iron nails worth thus-and-such,” and admire the work of specialists in recent times who construct methodical serieses and statistics and turn them into charts with lines and inflection points. But characters in a short story or an adventure game are much more likely to buy a drink or a sword than ten bushels of barley. The writers of roleplaying games almost never have time to do the research, unless the game is set in very recent times and they can mine their collection of old Sears Catalogues and Baedekers. (Also, their customers tend to become just as attached to “a longsword costs 15 gold pieces” as they are to “magic missile always hits,” and in our decadent and decimalized age they sometimes revolt against something as simple as pounds/shillings/pence). So this week, I thought I would honour the release of Matthew Riggsby’s GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road with a list of some resources which I have found.

Continue reading →

Economists vs Historians on Economic History

05 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ancient, Brad DeLong smackdown, economic history, historical datasets, modern, population history, Someone is Wrong in the Library

A man with stag`s horns growing out of his head and a spear in his hand is bitten by a pack of small dogs with long snouts

Aktaion is devoured by his hounds. Imagine me as a particularly yippy one just out of scene. Photo of an Apulian red-figure vase in the Badisches Landensmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany courtesy of the Theoi Project http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K6.8.html; they have copyright

Economists such as Gregory Clark and Brad DeLong like to tell people that between the dawn of time and 1800 or 1900 there was no growth in GDP per capita and very slow population growth. As an ancient historian this leaves me scratching my head. I decided to write this post after reading the 1998 version of DeLong’s ideas but similar ones appear to be common.

Continue reading →

The Copper Gutter

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ancient, economic history, Hittite, Hittite Instructions for the Commander of the Border Guards, Late Bronze Age, Southwest Asia

A photo of a stone bell tower with a corroded copper roof and rain-gutters shaped like fish

In later millennia, architectural copper could still impress

Last week I mentioned that one Hittite document tells the commander of a frontier post how they are to guard, build, and maintain their post. While the section on the curtain wall is badly damaged, the section on the watchtower is mostly intact:

Let the ?[watc]h? tower be 4 cubits around the top, but around the bottom let it be 6 cubits, and let it be encircled with a copper rain-gutter and a ?gallery?. Let the gallery be 6 cubits in circumference, and let it protrude 5 spans.

The word URUDḫeyawallit is not known elsewhere, but because it is proceeded with the determinative for copper and begins with the word for rain it fairly clearly means “copper rain-gutter”. The measurements of length and the word translated as “gallery” are not as well understood (the later could be more like “battlements” or “palisade”). I am not sure that the scholar who excerpted this text noticed what I did, because he didn’t translate the determinative.

Continue reading →

Recent Posts

  • Essentialism, Identities, and History
  • Shameless Plug: The Chronicle of the Good Duke
  • And the Morning Road Leads to Stalingrad
  • The Battle for the Future of the Study of the Ancient World is Bigger than Classics
  • Identities Are Hard to Get At

Recent Comments

Sean Manning on Essentialism, Identities, and…
Sean Manning on Essentialism, Identities, and…
Sean Manning on Essentialism, Identities, and…
russell1200 on Essentialism, Identities, and…
Andrew Hobley on Essentialism, Identities, and…

Archives

  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013

Categories

  • Ancient
  • Medieval
  • Modern
  • Not an expert
  • Uncategorized

Blogroll

  • .. clericus .. making art technological sources accessible
  • A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  • A Durham Weaver
  • A Fencer's Ramblings
  • A Hot Cup of Joe
  • Aardvarchaeology
  • Active History
  • Ad Astra per Mundum
  • Albrechts Bösser
  • Alec Nevala-Lee
  • An Elegant Weapon
  • Ancient World Magazine
  • Andrew Holt: History, Religion, and Foreign Affairs
  • ANE: Just the Facts
  • Angry Staff Officer
  • Anthropologist in the Attic ~2017
  • Archäotechnik- textile Fläche
  • Archeothoughts
  • Artistic License or Why I Trust No One
  • Aryballos: Cdn Research Grp for Ancient Sport
  • Ask the Past
  • Backreaction
  • Bad Science † 2017
  • Balkan Celts
  • Bibliographia Iranica
  • Boke of the Wardrobe
  • Bow vs. Musket
  • Bread & Circuses ~2016
  • Carolyn Willikes
  • Celsus
  • Classics at the Intersections
  • Constantinus Africanus
  • Dan Cohen
  • Dr. Caitlyn R. Green
  • Dr. Conor Whately: Byzantine (OED) "Intricate, Complicate; Inflexible, Rigid, Unyielding"
  • Dr. Ellie Bennett
  • elamit.net
  • Encyclopaedia Iranica
  • Erik D. Schmidt
  • Erik Kwakkel
  • Ex Urbe
  • Executed Today
  • Forensic Fashion
  • Found in Antiquity ~2015
  • Gates of Nineveh
  • Geocurrents † 2016
  • Great Ming Military
  • Hammered Out Bits
  • Handling the Humanities
  • History From Below
  • Hollow Lakedaimon
  • Hook and Eye
  • Ian Milligan
  • Institute for the Study of War
  • International Armizare Society
  • Janice Liedl
  • jfleck at Inkstain
  • Karen Selk Textile Artist
  • Katafalk
  • Ken Mondschein
  • Kiwi Hellenist
  • Kristina Killgrove, PhD
  • Kung Fu Tea
  • La Cotte Simple
  • Language Hat
  • Languages of the World † 2016
  • Linguistrix
  • Loose Threads: Yet Another Costuming Blog
  • Macro-Typography
  • Magistra et Mater
  • Matthew Amt's Greek Hoplite Page
  • Medieval Manuscripts Blog
  • Milesian Tales
  • Mons Graupius
  • Moonspeaker
  • Muhlberger's World History
  • Neues aus der Gothik
  • Neurodojo
  • New At LacusCurtius and Livius † 2014
  • Paleopix
  • pallia: Katrin Kania
  • Paola Fabbri
  • Papyrus Stories
  • Pen, Book, Sword
  • Persian Things
  • Professeur … Ou Pas
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • Reportret
  • Robin Writes
  • Rogue Classicism
  • Royal Oak Armoury
  • Saewulf (Tumblr)
  • Sardinian Warrior
  • School of the Renaissance Soldier
  • Scott Manning: Historian on the Warpath
  • Shtetl-Optimized
  • Silk Road Gourmet ~2018
  • Sparta Reconsidered
  • Sphinx
  • Sprang Lady
  • St. Thomas Guild
  • Tales of Times Forgotten
  • Tetsuji No Llama
  • The Melammu Project
  • The Royal Road
  • Theoretical Structural Archaeology
  • Tracy's Middle East
  • Traditions of Conflict
  • Violent Metaphors
  • Vortigern Studies
  • Website of a Historical Polymath
  • West's Meditations † 2018
  • Wide Urban World
  • Zenobia: Empress of the East ~2017

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×