Suchergebnisse

"This volume reconsiders the economic history of the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean and Near East from the perspective of David Graeber's anthropological theory. It pursues two purposes. On the one hand, it tests the accuracy of the grand narrative put forward in his 2011 monograph Debt: The First 5000 Years. Does the concept of a 'currency-slavery-warfare complex', in which monetization, state formation and the subjection of new fields of life to the logic of the market go hand in hand, shed new light on the political economies of the Near East and Mediterranean from around 700 BCE to 700 CE? On the other hand, this volume offers a history of ancient and late ancient credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both a quantifiable economic reality and an immeasurable social obligation. By examining the multiplicity of ways in which social relationships were quantified in different societies, it tries out a method of writing the history of pre-modern systems of exchange that departs from the currently dominant paradigm of neo-institutional economics."

"The empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean invented cosmopolitan politics. In the first millennia BCE and CE, a succession of territorially extensive states incorporated populations of unprecedented cultural diversity. Cosmopolitanism and Empire traces the development of cultural techniques through which empires managed difference in order to establish effective, enduring regimes of domination. It focuses on the relations of imperial elites with culturally distinct local elites, offering a comparative perspective on the varying depth and modalities of elite integration in five empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. If cosmopolitanism has normally been studied apart from the imperial context, the essays gathered here show that theories and practices that enabled ruling elites to transcend cultural particularities were indispensable for the establishment and maintenance of trans-regional and trans-cultural political orders. As the first cosmopolitans, imperial elites regarded ruling over culturally disparate populations as their vocation, and their capacity to establish normative frameworks across cultural boundaries played a vital role in the consolidation of their power. Together with an introductory chapter which offers a theory and history of the relationship between empire and cosmopolitanism, the volume includes case studies of Assyrian, Seleukid, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Iranian empires that analyze encounters between ruling classes and their subordinates in the domains of language and literature, religion, and the social imaginary. The contributions combine to illustrate the dilemmas of difference that imperial elites confronted as well as their strategies for resolving the cultural contradictions that their regimes precipitated. "--