Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions by Taco Terpstra

Abstract

410 PHOENIX Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions. By Taco Terpstra. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World). 2019. Pp. x, 274, 15 figs. Taco Terpstra's recent book considering trade in the ancient Mediterranean is a broad synthesis of the sort that we tend not to see much of anymore. Harkening back to the important studies of Moses Finley and A. H. M. Jones,1 he believes that the economies of the region shared particular commonalities created through their relationship to ancient states, in this case the institutions and the enforcement of private order. Terpstra’s focus is the role of states in the economic development of the ancient Mediterranean between ca 700 b.c.e. and ca 700 c.e. (3–4). This is a daring undertaking by any stretch, let alone in ancient economic studies, given the discipline’s ever-increasing emphasis on microeconomic analyses, which Terpstra himself comments on (226). The book is made up of seven chapters: the first acts as an introduction, while the penultimate chapter serves as an epilogue and the final chapter provides an overall conclusion. Chapter One sets the scene for Terpstra’s arguments, namely that “state formation and consolidation had an aggregate positive effect on the economy of the ancient Mediterranean ,” and that “we should not ascribe that effect to ancient states acting as third-party enforcers of private property rights” (23). On the basis of recent studies and evidence from Mediterranean shipwrecks and lead pollution, he provides a foundation for the themes that reoccur throughout the chapters that follow: commercial connectivity, economic migration, social trust, and state ideology. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship concerning definitions of the state, he adopts the social-order theory introduced by Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast in order to elucidate how ancient states controlled trade (17–19, 29).2 Chapter Two considers ancient Mediterranean diaspora trade, and focuses on the Phoenicians. In Terpstra’s view (built on “trust networks” [34] and “natural states” [35–36]), the absence of third-party enforcement meant that a diaspora could act to deter misbehaviour by its own members not only against one another, but also against outsiders. Phoenician city-states, such as Sidon and Tyre, retained a degree of public involvement in their diasporas, but public-private interaction, epitomised by proxenia (“public friendship”) between the host communities and the diasporas themselves was integral; it allowed proxenoi to operate in defined and mutually beneficial positions within these communities that, in turn, established and facilitated the principles of private order. By the Roman period, Terpstra argues, the situation had changed significantly. Based on the epigraphy of Phoenician groups from Puteoli in the first two centuries c.e. (71–74), he states that these groups used Roman imperial ideology to enhance their relationship with Rome. In effect, it allowed those working in the economy the agency to shape the institutional environment of the state. While a consequence of this was the strengthening of private order, this relationship also reveals a shared, fluid dynamic in which the Phoenician traders and the Roman state were both agents and stakeholders. In Chapter Three, Terpstra leans on one of his central tenets, namely that state formation and consolidation had an aggregate positive effect on the ancient economy. 1 M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (updated ed.; Berkeley and London 1999); A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford 1986). 2 D. C. North, J. J. Wallis, and B. R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 411 He argues that Hellenistic state formation led to the increased economic integration of the Eastern Mediterranean, through the use of ancient Greek, the unification of monetary standards, and the concentration of significant resources in the hands of the Hellenistic monarchs (85). Using both Mancur Olson’s “stationary-bandit model,”3 and the evidence from the Zenon archive (compiled by an employee of Apollonios, the dioiketes under Ptolemy ii Philadelphus), Terpstra suggests that the Ptolemies’ fiscal policies were neither short-term nor predatory...