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Towards a new social and economic history of the Hellenistic world

This third (perhaps the final) conference volume from what has come to be known as the “Liverpool School” in studies of the Hellenistic economy appeared in 2011. By that year, the scholarly climate had changed considerably since 2001 when the first volume (HellEc I) appeared.1 In 2001, the group tasked with writing The Cambridge economic history of the GrecoRoman world (edd. W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. Saller) was still in the workshop phase. Where the CUP project adopted a very specific theoretical paradigm and plan for publication, the “Liverpool school” placed little structure on its contributors. HellEc I was dominated by regional or site-specific studies (e.g., A. Kloner on Maresha, G. Oliver on Rhamnous, V. Gabrielsen on Rhodes; M. Aperghis on the Seleukid empire, K. Kitchen on Arabia, B. Lowe on Iberia, J. Paterson on Rome). Other contributors addressed broader matters of research paradigms (J. K. Davies on the ‘post-Finley era’, Z. Archibald on Rostovtzeff) and economic relationships (K. Bringman on kings and civic financial needs, Archibald combining a study of Anatolian regional economies with the concept of proxenia) or classes of artifacts (D. Gibbins on shipwrecks, K. Panagopoulou on Antigonid coinage). Thus, the volume set a tone of a ‘bottom up’, inference-driven approach to studying the Hellenistic economy. HellEc II (2005) moved towards wider questions of practice and scale. Here, A. Chaniotis on the inscribed artifacts of Crete, L. Hannestad on excavations at Panskoe, V. Stolba on Chersonesos, and J. Lund on the distribution of Eastern Sigillata A all continued the regional focus of the first volume. Archibald’s overview of approaches to markets and exchange mechanisms, A. Bresson and F. de Callataÿ both with papers on the money supply, Davies on the costs of building palaces, Gabrielsen’s key work on Hellenistic banking, G. Reger on the production of perfume, P. van Alfen on imitative and counterfeit coinage, and the present reviewer on the use and abuse of amphora evidence all sought to offer more synthetic comments on the structure of Hellenistic economic practices.