finley

[ailuros]

are the works of moses finley still useful or have they been superseded? i was going to get his book on slavery, and maybe some of his books on ancient economies, but thought i should ask if more recent works on these topics are a better bet. thanks in advance if anyone has an opinion.

[mwh]

I'm no expert but I don’t think Finley’s work will ever be superseded. But Keith Hopkins brilliantly took his work further and in (and from) different directions, and for slavery you should read his Conquerors and Slaves. I could tell some tales about him.
—If you want to see Hopkins in action and interacting with Momigliano and other luminaries, there’s video of a 1977 seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI4hB_DEX6o (starting around 35.40). There's also video of him interviewing and engaging with Finley somewhere.

[ailuros]

thanks, mwh. i didn't know of hopkins' work and will definitely check out the book and the video. i won't ask you to divulge your tales!

[mwh]

Perhaps I was imagining video of the Hopkins-Finley interview. But there’s a transcript of it at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548942. It’s very illuminating, and very well worth reading.

[ailuros]

thank you for the follow-up, sir. i read hopkins' obituary from the daily telegraph. quite an interesting academic career. i look forward to reading the transcript.

[daivid]

I'm no expert but I don’t think Finley’s work will ever be superseded. But Keith Hopkins brilliantly took his work further and in (and from) different directions, and for slavery you should read his Conquerors and Slaves. I could tell some tales about him.
—If you want to see Hopkins in action and interacting with Momigliano and other luminaries, there’s video of a 1977 seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI4hB_DEX6o (starting around 35.40). There's also video of him interviewing and engaging with Finley somewhere.

I have just be reading Dandamaev on Babylonian slavery in which he describes Babylonia as a society with slavery rather than a slave society suggesting that slave were not used in agriculture because it was not economic. I have also be watching Eric Foner's videos in which he suggests one of the causes of the American Civil War was that slavery was proving very economically dynamic so I wondered if Ancient slavery was economically so unproductive. Eric then quoted a colleague saying that the Roman Empire was a society with slaves rather than a slave society. Again that didn't sound right.

Your link to a great extent answered my question. Italy of the Roman Empire was a slave society even if the north was merely a society with slaves. A bit like the US in the 1780s.

[mwh]

I thought that in these old Near Eastern civilizations conquered peoples were sometimes moved en bloc and then left to get on with their agricultural practices just as before, the difference being that they had to surrender some of what they produced—effectively a form of taxation. That’s a different kind of “slavery” from what we mostly find in Greece and Rome and in the US, where the enslaved were state or personal property and were worked for their owners’ economic benefit.

[jeidsath]

The video of the Finley-Hopkins interview that mwh refers to is available as a DVD from the University of London online store.

It's part of the IHR's "Interviews with Historians" series. It may also be present in various libraries, especially as a VHS tape. I was able to get a copy sent to the U.S. for $5 shipping. I don't have access to more than a preview of the transcript linked above, but that was enough (along with mwh's recommendation, of course) to pique my interest. In general it is far too hard to find interviews and lectures with Greek scholars online. I don't know if there is a single video recording of M. L. West anywhere, for example.

EDIT: I cancelled my order. The original hour long video is available through University of London website. The DVD version is an edited version of this.