I'll read the longer PDF you sent me sometime soon, but I finished reading this article. I'm curious; what did you find interesting or radical about this?
Personally, I'm not really impressed. It's obvious the author isn't a historian, and I didn't see anything groundbreaking in the article. There were a few oversimplifications and generalizations, like when he asserts figures like Lycurgus or Moses were completely invented figures.
I see though on his Wikipedia page he's an economist who supposedly studied Marx, which makes statements like "[Rome] worked by looting and stripping other societies. That can only continue as long as there is some society to loot and destroy. Once there were no more kingdoms for Rome to destroy, it collapsed from within. It was basically a looting economy. And it didn’t do more than the British colonialists did: It only scratched the surface. It didn’t put in place the means of production that would create enough money for them to grow productively. Essentially, Rome was a financial rentier state" unforgivable for how simplistic that is. When aristocrats bought up land and acquired slaves or
coloni, what was this if not a system of production of surplus wealth? And I'll grant that Rome largely destroyed and depopulated the west, but how and why did it destroy the west but not the east? Or how did the cities, roads, and infrastructure the Romans built contribute to their societies' destruction? I'm not saying these questions can't be answered, but I suspect he doesn't do this in his book, and he doesn't in the article.
Then they say:
So, again, most of what he's saying seems to be really basic stuff. So it bothers me that he takes a tone like he's discovered some lost knowledge or come up with a radical new theory or something. Yeah, schools don't teach anything about the ancient economy, but that's because education in the West is, generally, garbage, and schools don't teach much at all, especially wrt history or the humanities. Most people don't even know who Lycurugus
was; that they don't know or care what ideas on debt relief were or weren't attributed to him isn't surprising.
The Ancient Economy by Moses Finley might interest you by the way. Fantastic and accessible to the average reader; presents what's become more or less orthodoxy in academia.
