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Sto caricando le informazioni... Pliny's Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 113) (edizione 2023)di Richard Saller (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaPliny's Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth di Richard Saller
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In Pliny’s Roman Economy. Natural History, Innovation and Growth, Saller addresses the debated question of the degree of economic rationality of ancient worlds by examining the economic elements present in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Through a comparison with the modern political economists of the 17th and 18th centuries and the early British encyclopedists, Saller shows that Pliny’s work contains the lineaments of an economic reflection which, if it anticipates at times certain developments of modern economic thought, does not however go beyond the stage of a “limited rationality” and does not form any systematic theory. The purpose of this comparison is not to disqualify Pliny’s thought, but to understand the causes of a long-term economic development such as the one observed from the 17th century onwards in Europe, which is contemporary with a scientific theorization of economic phenomena. Conversely, while historians often see an economic boom from the first century BCE until the Antonine plague in 165, none of the many empirically based methods allows us to conclude, according to Saller, that this 1st-2nd century economic boom was actually sustainable (Chapter 1). By choosing a literary source such as Pliny’s Natural History, Saller proposes to corroborate this idea by showing that the economic thinking of this period does not contain any of the elements conducive to long-term economic growth: no culture of technical innovation and growth, no organization and dissemination of knowledge to promote the spirit of discovery and invention, no scientific foundation of knowledge. Appartiene alle Serie
The first comprehensive study of Pliny the Elder's economic thought--and its implications for understanding the Roman Empire's constrained innovation and economic growth The elder Pliny's Natural History (77 CE), an astonishing compilation of 20,000 "things worth knowing," was avowedly intended to be a repository of ancient Mediterranean knowledge for the use of craftsmen and farmers, but this 37-book, 400,000-word work was too expensive, unwieldy, and impractically organized to be of utilitarian value. Yet, as Richard Saller shows, the Natural History offers more insights into Roman ideas about economic growth than any other ancient source. Pliny's Roman Economy is the first comprehensive study of Pliny's economic thought and its implications for understanding the economy of the Roman Empire. As Saller reveals, Pliny sometimes anticipates modern economic theory, while at other times his ideas suggest why Rome produced very few major inventions that resulted in sustained economic growth. On one hand, Pliny believed that new knowledge came by accident or divine intervention, not by human initiative; research and development was a foreign concept. When he lists 136 great inventions, they are mostly prehistoric and don't include a single one from Rome--offering a commentary on Roman innovation and displaying a reverence for the past that contrasts with the attitudes of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists credited with contributing to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Pliny shrewdly recognized that Rome's lack of competition from other states suppressed incentives for innovation. Pliny's understanding should be noted because, as Saller shows, recent efforts to use scientific evidence about the ancient climate to measure the Roman economy are flawed. By exploring Pliny's ideas about discovery, innovation, and growth, Pliny's Roman Economy makes an important new contribution to the ongoing debate about economic growth in ancient Rome. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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