Alain BressonThe Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-Stat

A splendid work that presents a mass of knowledge and research lightly and with remarkable clarity. What is particularly attractive about this work is its appeal and relevance to Mediterraneanists, and its comparative focus. I am not so sure that the NIE (New Institutional Economics) approach(which one could argue is the harnessing of post-Marxism to neo-classical ends) that the author and other scholars (such as Josiah Ober) subscribe to fully resolves the debate over the Greek economy (although for ex Bresson is surely correct in his observation that the Industrial Revolution was as much due to the cheap availability of energy sources such as coal as to any 'cultural' propensities), etc. The NIE emphasis of 'constraints of rarity' for example suggests a transcendental ontology rather than a perspective which might consider 'rarity' not as given but as culturally made, as Sahlins argues). Nevertheless this approach frees us from the rather sterile parameters of the debate set up by Finley, and it is written in a comely attractive style that actually reads like a book originally written in English (it was not; written in French originally), and quite different from many other French authors translated into English (e.g. Loraux, etc) (which have their own aethestic attractions, nonetheless). A splendid book and excellent for teaching not just the Classical World but also Mediterranean Studies as well as Anthropology.

Very skillful lecture on the Greek Economy split by agriculture, money, credit, international trade by also linking to the Deutsche School of Political Economy such as Finley, Polanyi and Weber.

Outstanding.