The Roots of Western Finance

Power, Ethics, and Social Capital in the Ancient World

By (author) Thomas K. Park, James B. Greenberg

Not available to order

Publication date:

24 May 2017

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498545822

In The Roots of Western Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital in the Ancient World, Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg take an anthropological approach to credit. They suggest that financial activities occur in a complex milieu, in which specific parties, with particular motives, achieve their goals using a form of social, cultural, or economic agency. They examine the imbrication of finance and hidden interests in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, classical Greece and Rome, the early Judeo-Christian traditions, and the Islamic world to illuminate the ties between social, ethical, and financial institutions. This unique breadth of research provides new perspectives on Mesopotamian ways of incentivizing production through financial arrangements, the source of Egyptian surpluses, linguistics and usury, metrological influences on finance, and the enduring importance of honor and social capital. This book not only illustrates the particular cultural logics that drove these ancient economies, it also depicts how modern society’s financial techniques, ethics, and concerns with justice are attributable to a rich multicultural history.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Mesopotamian Roots of the Modern Financial System
Chapter 2: Mesopotamian Financial Innovations
Chapter 3: Financing Ancient Egypt’s Organizational Economy
Chapter 4: Finance and Social Capital in Classical Greece and Rome
Chapter 5: Justice to Altruism: Early Judeo-Christian Finance
Chapter 6: Islamic Finances and the Eastern Mediterranean
Conclusion: Hidden Interests and the Anthropology of Credit
Appendix: Technologies of Power and the Metrology of Grain Storage in the Ancient Near East

This first work is part of an ambitious two volume enterprise in which Park and Greenberg lay out an intensive and extensive narrative of the ancient economic worlds of credit from ancient Mesopotamia through Ancient Egypt to Classical Athens and the Early Republic of Rome though the social networking and finance that was followed by the Christian and Islamic worlds. Focusing on the “Hidden Interests” embedded within social and economic relationships of these ancient enterprises and their institutional forms and practices, Park and Greenberg have provided an astonishingly well-crafted treatise using an array of documentation from legal agreements to personal negotiations between parties and from the use of labor to long-distance trade contracts. As the authors’ state unequivocally: “Norms of commercial and financial behavior in the ancient world were increasingly constrained by a judicial structure that followed predictable and well formulated rules and procedures that required explicit specifications in formal contracts. Yet, as in earlier and later societies, they were also constrained by customary expectations about honorable, not just legal, behavior.” From these ancient sources, the narrative explicitly supports the main contention that social beings did not behave in exclusively self-centered ways but instead such a credo was a mythic construction of the twentieth century. I look forward to their second volume in which these “hidden interests” are examined in both Europe and North Africa by focusing on the role of social capital and ethical thought in financial systems.