This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

Over the last twenty years, New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been a highly influential model in the study of the Greek and Roman economy. Although both its assumptions and methods are controversial, NIE approaches have changed the agenda of ancient economic history. The overall goal of neo-institutional economic history is to explain economic development, and notably growth, in line with a much-quoted phrase by the Nobel-prize winning economist Douglass North, that it is the task of economic history to explain the structure and performance of economies through time. NIE approaches and methods have therefore stimulated quite specific research directions in ancient economic history. This chapter suggests that NIE offers a fruitful conceptual matrix for asking new questions – with or without the answers necessarily staying within the NIE model. By contrast, the aim of the NIE method to predict and quantify outcomes, and the broader implications of the approach, are far more difficult to accept and defend. Particularly problematic is its commitment to certain kinds of growth as the desirable outcome of economic development, together with the assumption of the universal benefits of that growth, with its end point and golden standard explicitly or implicitly based on successful economies of the modern West.

The extent of material inequality and its relationship to economic development are central questions for historians of all periods. In recent decades, historians of ancient Greece have sought to provide the basis for answering those questions by attempting to estimate the distribution of wealth and income in Athens (and to a lesser degree in other Greek poleis) by reference to statements in ancient texts, proxy data, and simple models. While there remains much room for debate on specifics, we suggest that, for certain periods of Athenian history, very rough, but nonetheless suggestive, estimates can be offered of the distribution of wealth across the citizen population and the distribution of income across the entire population. The chapter briefly sketches ancient Greek economic performance before discussing material inequality in Greece, with special reference to Athens, and in comparison with other premodern economies. It explains how Greek political institutions and competition among individuals and states drove comparatively high levels of growth, while inequality remained comparatively low. Finally, it tests this hypothesis against some more and less familiar facts about Greek history.

This chapter analyses the concept of technological progress in Greek antiquity. It briefly surveys the historiography of technological progress, in particular Moses Finley’s view and its links with his view of the ancient economy, and more recent reactions to Finley. The chapter charts the idea that technology has helped humankind develop from a semi-brutish state to a more civilised condition in some classical Greek sources, including Greek tragedy, and focusses on the case-study of ancient accounts of catapults, which include a history of discovery and of cumulative improvement. The last section is devoted to the ambiguous morality of technological progress.

The market in ancient Greece should be understood as a specific institutional construct, that of the city-state, which allowed its citizens to exercise private property rights guaranteed by law. By extension, free foreigners were also acknowledged these rights, which however extended to the private ownership of human beings (slavery). The city-state also created the conditions for an unusually high division of labour. Each city was a market space of its own, with its own rules and logic, which could include the control over sales margins and even sometimes the establishment of maximum prices for some perishable fresh goods. The network of hundreds of Greek city-states also created the conditions for the development of an original form of international market.

The centuries after the so-called collapse of the Mycenaean palace administration from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BCE saw several transformations of social and economic structures. These had an impact on the economic performance in the period. It is also significant that during this period there was no attempt to restore palatial administration, but instead Early Iron Age communities built new social and economic relationships on household units that could be understood as adaptable social-political organisations with fluid boundaries. Moreover, the Early Iron Age should not be seen as a period of stagnation but one characterised by adaptive and resilient features. These led to the well-documented visibility of the archaeological record of the eighth century BCE.

Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

The chapter surveys the economy of Asia Minor from the late archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic era. Asia Minor forms the largest land mass in the northern Mediterranean and is characterized by a diverse geography with different levels of integration into the Greek world and its economy. Throughout time, urbanization significantly intensified; nevertheless, many regions preserved a rural character. Agriculture was most important, in both the land of the poleis and land controlled by the Achaemenid and Hellenistic kings. Production was directed to local needs, but some agrarian products also served as exports; non-agrarian production was less significant. Asia Minor was rich in natural resources, and fishing was important in a few coastal cities. The birthplace of coinage in the late seventh century, Asia Minor saw the circulation of many coinages over time and was highly monetarized at least by the end of the Hellenistic period. These coinages mirror the frequent changes in a political landscape that was characterized by different strata of authority, from the royal administration down to the city-states and villages. Through taxation, public expenditures, and by securing an institutional framework, these authorities shaped the complex conglomerate of Asia Minor’s economy.

This chapter examines the networks within which ancient Greek coins were produced and circulated from the perspective of formal network analysis, a methodological tool that is becoming increasingly widespread within ancient studies. In particular this chapter considers the problems of the object biographies as they pertain to networks, the agents involved in various networks, the process of network evolution and devolution, and network scale.

Although significant progress has been made in dealing with ancient economies through the establishing of new methodological approaches (like the New Institutional Economics), old-school Political Economy still plays an important role. It endeavours among other things to describe and evaluate the causes which lead to economic growth, thereby including factors which cannot be subsumed under the category of ‘institutions’ (exclusively focused on by the NIE) like demography or climate. Recently, this traditional approach has been intensively adopted to explain and measure the growth of ancient Greek economies between the ninth and fourth centuries, today viewed as an established fact in contrast to the older consensus, which was characterised by scepticism regarding the capability of ancient societies to generate sustainable growth. This chapter presents the most important factors that were (supposedly) conducive to growth and describes and their mutual interplay and interferences. In a further section, some methodological and empirical problems of the way 'ancient growth' is quantified in contemporary research are discussed. In a final section, some thoughts are offered on geo-economic factors, assumed by the author to have had a decisive impact in bringing about 'growth' or concentrations of wealth in some areas and milieus.

In this chapter, I emphasise and try to explain the importance of historical demography for economic history, but also its relative neglect by ancient historians until very recently. Demography involves a range of quantitative measures that are useful both as proxies for economic performance and in comparison. Population sizes and trends also have explanatory power for past economic changes. Some general points about the relationship between population and economy, and what changed and what stayed the same over the last millennium BCE are followed by some more specific observations about the major periods of Greek history. The importance of environmental factors is particularly emphasised, and urbanization is a persistent theme.

This chapter discusses the economic developments occurring within the Ptolemaic empire (323–30 BCE), of which Egypt was the core province. It explores how state formation affected economic development and how Ptolemaic imperialism, demography, and the interaction between Egyptian and Greek social networks were factors of economic change and economic exploitation. After an overview of past and current approaches to the economy of the Ptolemaic empire and of the geography of the empire, it assesses the cost and benefits of military conquests and the management of migrations patterns and new settlements by the Ptolemies, who increased their revenues and reduced the cost of their army through land allotments to cleruchs. The political economy of the Ptolemies relied on a complex tax system, with some documents pointing to a centralized taxation of the provinces, and innovative but also unusual monetary policies, such as closed-currency system based on a lower weight standard than the Attic standard in Egypt, Cyprus, and Syria-Phoenicia. The chapter concludes with examples of the synergistic relationship between empire, warfare, and trade and between the public and private spheres of the economy, and sketches the purchasing power of different economic groups in Egypt.