This chapter locates the emergence of the Greco-Roman city state within a process that saw the expansion of sedentary peasant populations across the Afro-Eurasian world. This was a process accompanied by a wider range of epidemic diseases, the spread of militaristic ‘warring’ states and intensification of slavery. Too often, the rise of the Greeco-Roman city-state has been studies in isolation. This chapter presents the city-state and its ability to mobilize the peasantry for war as one response to the dynamics and constraints of sedentary peasant society and urbanization that increasingly manifested as the dominant form of social organization in a band stretching from East to West across the Afro-Eurasian world from the beginnings of the Iron Age. The chapter starts with demographic growth and the ecological constraints of peasant agriculture, including discussion of Ester Boserup, James C. Scott and the recent work of Graeber & Wengrow. It then moves on to state formation, war-making and military mobilization before analyzing ancient slavery within a continuum of varieties from the early-modern Caribbean to the Islamic world.

With state formation, however, came competition and conquest by rivals. The culmination of antiquity was not the small city-states of the classical Greek period but their amalgamation into a vast universal empire, first pioneered in history by the Assyrians and Achaemenids, but kicked into an even higher gear by the Romans and the Qin-Han dynasty. At the beginning of the common era, this type of polity dominated Afro-Eurasia in a band stretching from its Eastern to its Western extremes. Sometimes historians have looked to the nomads of the Central Asian steppe as a connecting element of pre-colonial history. But for most of the time, they were too feeble and ephemeral a presence to determine the shape of world history. Looking for immediate long-distance connections, the inspiration of modern globalization, has made ancient historians overlook the major parallel development across Eurasia: universal empires. This chapter situates the formation of the Roman empire and its driving dynamics within this wider arena of universal imperial monarchies, ruled by ‘divine’ kings of kings, governed by aristocratic and gentrified elites and based on a fiscal logic of low protection costs.

At the end of the book, the conclusion revisits the current debate among world historians whether to favour comparative approaches or search for cultural connections. Based on the themes analyzed in the current volume, this chapter argues in conclusion that ancient world history will have to combine both. Macro- and micro-perspectives should be seen as complementary; the former makes it possible to identify broader patterns while the latter enables the study of cultural exchanges. The latter, however, has often been preoccupied with marginal phenomena while the former sometimes has been too teleological, subsuming everything to a developmental logic ending in Europe. The view of ancient world history developed here seeks to identify a set of global patterns that combine both the population majority and the most central social, political and cultural developments of the period into a unified whole while exploring how these phenomena interacted across ancient Afro-Eurasia. Roman historians can gain a lot from intensifying the dialogue with students of other premodern Afro-Eurasian societies.

The analysis now comes to the question of world trade and current discussions about globalization in the Greco-Roman world. However, globalization is a modern phenomenon, tracing its roots back to the sixteenth century, but only really coming into its own during the long nineteenth century. So, if modern globalization is unsatisfying as a model, the chapter turns to C. A. Bayly’s concept of ‘Archaic Globalization’. Instead of the modern capitalist world system, it focuses on the demand of aristocratic and priestly elites for numinous goods and rare collectors’ objects, brought from afar to enhance their lifestyles. Roman urban and imperial society fostered such a culture celebrating the consumption of exotic diversity. Building on a recent surge of work on Greco-Roman trade from the Red Sea to Arabia and India, bringing pepper, frankincense, silk and other exotic substances into the Mediterranean, the chapter locates the Roman Mediterranean as one end of an interconnected chain of regional trading worlds extending from the Indian Ocean that serviced the need for numinous and spicy goods to enhance the rituals and conspicuous lifestyles of complex agrarian societies across Afro-Eurasia.

This chapter introduces the growing field of world history and its intellectual predecessors to make the argument why Greco-Roman society needs to find its place within this fast evolving discourse. Recontextualizing the classical experience within a wider world history will allow Greco-Roman history to be aligned more closely with the global norm, rather than remain an anomaly in European history. But ancient history does not simply have to be at the receiving end of the putative dialogue. The field has a long prior record of engaging in a creative dialogue both with anthropology and historical sociology. The former favoured the study of culture; the latter promoted societal comparison. Currently, world history is torn between a focus on cultural connection and on historical comparison. Building on the past experience of classics, this chapter will equally show how a glance at Greco-Roman society may help the field of world history both to overcome this division. An Afro-Eurasian arena is identified as the context for parallel and interconnected developments of peasantries and slavery, universal empires, literary cultures, world trade in charismatic goods and rebellions.

The courts of universal emperors presided over the spread of cosmopolitan elite cultures, literary, artistic and conspicuous. The Indologist Sheldon Pollock has studied this phenomenon for classical Sanskrit, but his vision of cosmopolitan and classical language cultures can easily be extended across Afro-Eurasia to comprise Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and Classical Chinese, among others. Starting from the Alexander Romance and the image of Orpheus, the chapter explores how Greco-Roman literary culture created an elite language cosmopolis, much as the other examples mentioned here. Rather than studying Greek and Latin, as is often done, as the precursor of the modern Romance and national languages, it is rather in this context of imperial civilizational cosmopoleis that they should be analyzed. Themes include the formation of classical canons and elite distinction, the size of literary cultures based on manuscript rather than the printing press, and the development of transcendental and monotheist forms of religious belief such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam.

This chapter sets the stage for the work to come, posing the central question about how to understand ancient Assyrian identity in the second millennium bce and how it changed over time. It critiques the concept of ethnicity and explains why grappling with Assyrianness requires a new approach to identity.

This chapter offers an overview of the Middle Assyrian social world and the construction of Assyrian identity within it. The chapter finds that in the Middle Assyrian period, Assyrianness was an incidental identity with permeable boundaries.