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EMPIRES AND EXPLOITATION IN THE ANCIENT
MEDITERRANEAN
May 26-27, 2000
SIEPR Conference Room A, Landau Economics Building
Twenty to thirty years ago, social scientific approaches had a considerable impact on the study of of ancient imperialism. This led to important edited books like Peter Garnsey and Dick Whittaker's Imperialism in the Ancient World (Cambridge 1978) and Mogens Larsen's Power and Propaganda (Copenhagen 1979). These works then fed back into broader social-scientific treatments of empires and power like Michael Doyle's Empires (Princeton 1986) or Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power I (Cambridge 1986). But in the 1980s the study of ancient empires lost ground. When it revived in the 1990s, the main stimulus came not from social-scientific approaches but from cultural treatments like Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993). This led to valuable recent works, such as David Mattingly's Dialogues in Roman Imperialism (Ann Arbor 1997) and Greg Woolf's Becoming Roman (Cambridge 1998). But our goal in this conference is to integrate explicitly social-scientific, comparative approaches to ancient empires into the new cultural framework, and to show the importance of such approaches for larger-scale studies of imperialism and social/economic structures.
Each paper in the conference will summarize the main issues in its particular field, giving an overview for non-specialists, and then go on to contribute to this larger question. The paper presenters are specialists in their fields, but the respondents are experts in other social scientific traditions, and focus on methodology and broader comparative questions. The papers will be posted on the web in advance of the conference, and will also be available in hard copy at the conference itself. At the conference each speaker will give just a 10-minute summary, to allow maximum time for discussion.
The speakers come from Australia, Germany, and Britain, and the US, and include some of the world's leading authorities on ancient empires.
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9:00-9:30 Coffee, breakfast
STEPHEN HABER (Stanford, History/Political Science; Director, SSHI): OPENING REMARKS
IAN MORRIS and WALTER SCHEIDEL (Stanford, Classics/History/SSHI): INTRODUCTION
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10:00-12:00 Session 1: The Iron Age Near East
Chair, JOE MANNING (Stanford, Classics/SSHI)
PETER BEDFORD (Edith Cowan University, Australia): ASSYRIA (PDF)
J. WIESEHOEFER (University of Kiel, Germany): PERSIA (PDF)
STEPHEN HABER (Stanford, History/Political Science; Director, SSHI): RESPONSE
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12:00-1:30 Lunch
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1:30-3:30 Session 2: The Greek Empires
Chair, MICHAEL JAMESON (Stanford, Classics)
IAN MORRIS (Stanford, Classics/History): ATHENS (PDF)
BRIAN BOSWORTH (U. of Western Australia): MACEDONIA (PDF)
DAVID LAITIN (Stanford, Political Science): RESPONSE
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7:00 Dinner
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Saturday May 27
Chair, SUSAN TREGGIARI (Stanford, Classics)
WILLIAM HARRIS (Columbia): ROME (PDF)
KEITH HOPKINS (Cambridge, UK): ROME (PDF)
GAVIN WRIGHT (Stanford, Economics): RESPONSE
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12:00-1:00 Lunch
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1:00-3:00 Session 4: The Ends of Ancient Imperialism
Chair, JENNIFER TRIMBLE (Stanford, Classics/Mellon)
JOHN HALDON (Birmingham, UK): BYZANTIUM (PDF)
WALTER SCHEIDEL (Stanford/SSHI): DARWINIAN EVOLUTION AND ANCIENT EMPIRES (PDF)
LANCE DAVIS (Cal Tech): Response
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3:00-3:30 Coffee break
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3:30-5:30 Session 5: Responses
Chair, KATHRYN MILLER (Stanford, History)
JACK GOLDSTONE (UC-Davis): RESPONSE: SOCIOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM
ERICH GRUEN (UC-Berkeley): RESPONSE: ANCIENT EMPIRES
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5:30-7:00 Discussion of further plans
7:00 Dinner
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