The Open Sea: Ancient Economic History during the Iron Age

Hercynian Forest
3 min readAug 3, 2021

When I was looking for some up-to-date works on ancient and medieval economic history, I came across this gem on a random economics website before I went ahead and ordered it on Amazon.

It’s a useful survey of ancient economic life around the Mediterranean written by J.G. Manning, a Yale scholar and former Stanford professor. Notably, he’s a credited colleague of Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and their ilk of economic historians of antiquity.

I found it to be highly fascinating and epiphanic, especially due to its multitude of facts and statistical data, the specificity of which intrigue me.

Yet, it didn’t give off the vibe of being a true pageturner.

The book is densely written and filled to the brim with a cogent and extremely thorough explanatory account, thought-provoking details, and expert analytic insights into the development of Ancient Mediterranean economic life.

I felt that I learnt quite a few things, e.g. that Rhodes was the commercial and maritime hegemon of the eastern Mediterranean at the time when Rome prevailed over Carthage around 2nd century B.C.E. This was due to the island’s strategic location and its vital trade links with Ptolemaic Egypt. Additionally, Rhodes was apparently infamous for fighting pirates, being the strongest counter-force against piracy in the period.

The Open Sea also took care to include the largely unexplored, or at least underappreciated, field of Near Eastern political economies, such as Babylonia, Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, and Egypt. Manning stresses their undervalued potential as points of historical comparison with other times and places.

The work thus manages to escape the grasp of Eurocentrism by continously reaffirming the importance of cross-cultural exchange in fostering innovation and novel ideas.

It deserves praise for being a highly accessible work to the general readership, without sacrificing too much in the way of scholarly accuracy.

Whilst there are some wonky statistical tables which non-mathematically inclined people might find a bit arcane in some of their particular granularity, it’s not fatally incomprehensible.

The reader may also find his/herself to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of facts and tidbits of information. It has a somewhat tedious academic focus, as it continally emphasizes current developments and trends in the scholarly field(s) with respect to other researchers and their manifold works.

The major drawback from this otherwise highly valuable publication is its often dry writing style and mundane literary character. However, even thought the book didn’t shine through and instead came off as monotonous and bland at times, the very insights which it offered made it wortwhile.

Perhaps the ‘worst’ aspect of the book is its repetitive nature at times, but I tried to tell myself that some things are worth going through and getting reminded of multiple times, as the incredibly ‘packed’ feel of the book makes it more than probable that you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read, at least if you absorb the work from cover to cover.

To sum up, it’s an excellent overview of the economic history of antiquity which I highly recommend to beginners to acquire a grasp of the issues and some neat facts, even though the writing style came off as partly lacklustre.

Rating: 8.0/10

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Hercynian Forest

Communitarian progressive and history buff. Socioeconomic and intellectual history, general history, philosophy, politics, art, culture, ideology, social issues