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Naukratis: Trade in Archaic Greece. By Astrid Moller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 321 pp. Table, plates, drawings. Cloth, $95.00. ISBN 0-198-15284-1.
Historians of the ancient economy generally fall into two camps according to their attitudes regarding modern economic concepts and theories applied to preindustrial contexts. While those adopting the formalist ("modernist") approach see the economy as separate from society, governed solely by market factors, the substantivist ("primitivist") approach takes into account the influences of social context on economic activities. Such investigations are complex: even the use of the term "economy," implying a sector of human activities distinct from other social forces, is perforce modernist and imbued with preconceptions that can influence, if not distort, analyses of past societies.
In her recent book, Astrid Moller offers a reassessment of such theoretical models with regard to the Archaic Greek trading center of Naukratis, established during the later seventh century B.C. in the western Delta of the Nile and granted to Greek traders by the philhellenic pharaoh Amasis (570-26 B.C.). The port's exclusive status required all non-Greek foreign traders to pass through Naukratis for any exchange dealings with the Egyptian polity. Naukratis thus provides Moller with a unique opportunity to examine the applicability of modem economic models to an Archaic context. Specifically, Moller reanalyzes Karl Polanyi's anthropological theory of economy, which postulates that ancient economies were embedded in society, lacked real markets (in terms of cost-benefit calculations), and maintained a separation between external and internal trade through strictly monitored "ports of trade" intended to protect local systems of reciprocity and redistribution. Polanyi argues that by adopting the inductive, empirical approach of the substantivist school, pre-industrial economies can be shown to have functioned very differently from the modernist marketdriven models envisioned by the formalist school. By applying his "port of trade" theory as a Weberian ideal-concept, Moller wants us to "cease to regard Naukratis unthinkingly as a Greek colony" (p. 26) and thus to examine th esite more fruitfully within its specific Egyptian setting.
Discovered and excavated at the end of the nineteenth century, the site of Naukratis epitomizes the challenges facing students...