Seven Features of Ancient Enterprise

BY MICHAEL HUDSON

 MAY 17, 2024
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Photograph Source: Gary Todd – CC0 BY 1.0

There are multiple differences between antiquity’s economic practices and those of the modern world, and these should be borne in mind when considering the changing context for enterprise through the centuries. Whereas modern business largely operates on credit, in archaic and classical times handicraft workshops were located on basically self-sufficient landed estates, including those of the large public institutions. Such industry was self-financed rather than operating on credit, which was extended mainly for long-distance and bulk trade.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs in antiquity either headed wealthy families or sought fortunes by managing other people’s money, which typically was provided subject to a stipulated return. Regardless of the source of their capital, they coordinated a complex set of relationships whose institutional structure evolved throughout the second and first millennia BC.

The Importance of Land

From Babylonian times down through late Republican Rome, commercial income tended to be invested in land. But there was no price speculation on credit until the late first century BC in Rome. Land was the major savings vehicle and sign of status. The largest estate owners shifted subsistence land to growing cash crops, headed by olive oil and wine in the Mediterranean, and dates in the Near East, harvested increasingly by slaves.

Lending Was Mainly for Commercial Trade Ventures

We do not find banking intermediaries lending out people’s savings to entrepreneurial borrowers. Throughout the Near East, what have been called “banking families” such as the Egibi are best thought of as general entrepreneurs. They did hold deposits and make loans, but they paid the same rate of interest to depositors as they charged for their loans (normally 20 percent annually). There was no margin for arbitrage, and no credit superstructure to magnify the supply of monetary metal on hand.¹Promissory notes circulated only among closely knit groups of tamkaru, so a broad superstructure of credit was only incipient, and did not come to fruition until modern times with the development of fractional-reserve banking from the seventeenth century onward.² Most lending was for commercial trade ventures—in which the creditor shared in the risk as well as the gain—or took the form of predatory agrarian loans or claims for arrears on taxes or other fees owed to royal or imperial collectors. Down to modern times, small-scale personal debt was viewed as the first step toward forfeiting one’s property, a danger to be entered into only unwillingly. The dominant ethic was to keep assets free of debt, especially land.

Moneylending in classical Greece was mainly in the hands of outsiders, foreigners such as Pasion in Athens. In Rome the elite left banking to low-status individuals headed by slaves or freedmen, ex-slaves who “confine[d] their activities to bridging loans and the provision of working capital,” operating only “on the margins of trade and industry.”³

Ancient Entrepreneurs Were Not Independent Specialists

Throughout antiquity entrepreneurs pursued a broad range of activities, organizing and managing voyages, fields, workshops, or other productive units. They rarely acted by themselves for just their own account but as part of a system. Traders and “merchants” tended to work via guilds, such as those organized by Assyrian traders early in the second millennium, and in the Syrian and “Phoenician” trade with Aegean and Mediterranean lands from the eighth century BC on. Wealthy “big men” such as Balmunamhe in Old Babylonian times, Assyrian traders in Asia Minor,⁴ the Egibi and Marushu in Neo-Babylonia, Cato and other Romans spread their capital over numerous sectors—long-distance and local trade, provisioning the palace or temples with food and raw materials, leasing fields and workshops, moneylending and (often as an outgrowth) real estate.

As late as the second century BC when we begin to pick up reports of the Roman publicani, they had not yet begun to specialize. Despite the fact that collecting taxes and other public revenue must have required a different set of skills from furnishing supplies to the army and other public agencies, most publicani acted opportunistically on an ad hoc basis. “What the companies provided was capital and top management, based on general business experience,” observes Ernst Badian,⁵ probably with a small permanent staff of assistants and subordinates. An entrepreneur might run a ceramic workshop, a metal workshop, or the like, as well as dealing in slaves or renting them out. Richard Duncan-Jones⁶ concludes: “The term negotiator was widely interpreted, including not only merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen but moneylenders and prostitutes.”

Market Development and Patent Protection Were Alien Concepts

There was no such thing as patent protection or “intellectual property” rights, and little thought of what today would be called market development. Artistic styles and new techniques were copied freely. Moses Finley⁷ cites the story, “repeated by a number of Roman writers, that a man—characteristically unnamed—invented unbreakable glass and demonstrated it to Tiberius in anticipation of a great reward. The emperor asked the inventor whether anyone shared his secret and was assured that there was no one else; whereupon his head was promptly removed, lest, said Tiberius, gold be reduced to the value of mud… neither the elder Pliny nor Petronius nor the historian Dio Cassius was troubled by the point that the inventor turned to the emperor for a reward, instead of turning to an investor for capital with which to put his invention into production.”

Entrepreneurs Worked in a War-Oriented Environment

Even when entrepreneurs played a nominally productive role, they worked in a war-oriented environment. A major source of fortunes was provisioning of the army, mainly with food but also with manufactured goods. Frank⁸ notes that during 150-80 BC “we hear of only one man… who gained wealth by manufacturing, and that was in public contracts for weapons during the Social War (Cicero, in Pis. 87-89).” On the retail level, Polanyi’s paradigmatic example of free price-making markets was the small-scale food sellers who followed Greek armies. Provisioning armies with food was indeed the main commercial activity, with the most economically aggressive being the public contractors who supplied Roman armies on the wholesale level. Contracts were set at auctions that became notoriously “fixed” by the first century BC.

Enterprise Was Considered Déclassé

There was a basic conflict between social ambition for high status and the aristocratic antipathy to engaging directly in business ventures. “Although Aristotle asserted that ‘unnatural’ chrematistike (money-making) knew no bounds,” Humphreys concludes, “the general impression given by our sources is that the majority of Athenians were quite ready to give up the effort to make money as soon as they could afford a comfortable rentier existence, and that even the few who continued to expand their operations could not pass on the same spirit to their sons. The result was small-scale, disconnected business ventures, assessed by the security of their returns rather than their potentiality for expansion.”

The same was true in Ancient Rome. Reflecting the disdain in which active participation in money-seeking commerce was held by their aristocratic ethic, most of the shippers engaged in Rome’s maritime trade were foreigners or ex-slaves owning one or two small sailing vessels.

Enterprise Was Tied to Long-Distance Trade

The most typical form of enterprise was long-distance trade. Its organizational pattern changed little from the epoch when Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces provided merchants with commodities or money.

Opportunities for making money evolved as a by-product of this mercantile role. In Old-Sumerian documents, Leemans⁹ notes, “damkara are only found as traders. But when private business began to flourish after the beginning of the Third Dynasty of Ur [2112-2004 BC], the tamkarum was the obvious person to assume the function of giver of credit.” By the time of Hammurabi’s Babylonian laws, in many cases “tamkarum cannot denote a traveling trader, but must be a money-lender.” Leemans concludes¹⁰: “The development from merchant into banker [that is, a moneylender or investor backing voyages and similar partnerships] is a natural one, and there is no essential difference between these two professions—surely not in Babylonia where in principle no distinction was made between silver (money in modern terms) and other marketable stuffs. In a society whose commerce is little developed, trade is only carried on by merchants, who buy and sell. But when commerce increases, the business of a merchant assumes larger proportions.”

^Notes.

^1. Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East by Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop (eds.), 2002, pp. 345-347.
^2. Randall Wray, ed., 2004. Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes by Randall Wray, 1995. See especially the articles by Ingham and Gardiner.
^3. David Jones. 2006. The Bankers of Puteoli: Finance, Trade, and Industry in the Roman World by David Jones, 2006, p. 245.
^4. Trade and Finance in Ancient Mesopotamia: Proceedings of the First MOS Symposium J. G. Dercksen, ed., 1999, p. 86.
^5. Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman Republic by Ernst Badian, 1972, p. 37.
^6. The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies by Richard Duncan-Jones, 1974.
^7. The Ancient Economy by Moses Finlay, 1973, pp. 147: 871.
^8. An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome. Vol. 1, Rome and Italy of the Republic by Tenney Frank, ed., 1933, p. 291.
^9. The Old-Babylonian Merchant: His Business and His Social Position by W.F. Leemans, 1950, p. 11.
^10. The Old-Babylonian Merchant: His Business and His Social Position by W.F. Leemans, 1950, p. 22.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Michael Hudson’s new book, The Destiny of Civilization, will be published by CounterPunch Books next month.

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The Wilderness Act at 60: A Brief Overview

BY HOWIE WOLKE

 MAY 17, 2024
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Gros Ventre Wilderness, Wyoming. Photo: Howie Wolke.

On September 3, 1964, humanity’s unrelenting quest to tame, civilize, industrialize, and obliterate wild nature crashed into the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Johnson on that momentous day. This visionary legislation—written primarily by the late Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society—created a federal policy to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness.” Under this law, wilderness areas must remain “unimpaired” and be administered “for the preservation of their wilderness character.” Considering humanity’s history, this was a revolutionary moment.

Sixty years have now passed since the birth of the National Wilderness Preservation System. During this time, our perception of wilderness has expanded from a focus on primitive recreation and spectacular geology (“monumentalism”) to a broader view of wilderness in maintaining biodiversity, evolutionary processes and wildlife habitat. In other words, ecosystem conservation is now recognized as fundamental to wilderness. This does not negate the importance of recreation or solitude, but it illustrates the evolution of the wilderness idea from anthropocentrism to a more biocentric emphasis.

There’ve been other positive trends, too. Since 1964, the National Wilderness Preservation System has grown from 9.1 million to nearly 112 million acres (about half that acreage is in Alaska), a formidable accomplishment. In addition, large carnivore populations have resurged in many western wilderness areas. Ecologists consider large carnivores to be “keystone species,” essential for ecosystem health.

On the other hand, wilderness in the 21st century faces many challenges. For example, early wilderness visionaries could not have foreseen the impacts of climate change, nor would they likely have anticipated the extent of the spread of invasive exotic species. Also, with continued human population growth, many wilderness areas, parks, and wildlife refuges have become isolated habitat islands in a sea of development, with corresponding biodiversity losses. Conservation biologists have taught us that wilderness areas and other nature reserves should be big, interconnected, and include all representative habitats of a given area.

“Special Provisions” added to wilderness bills are a long-standing problem. Special provisions weaken the Wilderness Act, diminish the meaning of “wilderness,” and complicate management by allowing uses in wilderness otherwise prohibited by law. Expanded grazing rights, allowances for mechanized travel, and the construction of artificial water developments are just three examples. Some conservation groups endorse such provisions in a misguided attempt to mollify wilderness opponents and expedite wilderness legislation.

Agency wilderness stewardship has also faltered. Many agency bureaucrats today fail to understand the Wilderness Act; or, they simply initiate inappropriate activities in wilderness, perhaps hoping that no one will notice. That’s why Wilderness Watch frequently finds itself litigating illegal construction projects, water diversions, expansion of aircraft landings and motorboat use, so-called fuel reduction projects, predator control, violations by packstock operators, the use of motorized equipment for trail and other maintenance projects, plus many other insults to the wilderness idea.

Another disturbing trend: conservation groups de-emphasizing wilderness. Some have even removed the word “wilderness” from their name. In de-emphasizing wilderness, “collaboration” has become a huge problem. These groups make deals with anti-wilderness organizations to minimize proposed wilderness acreages— leading to truncated, edge-dominated “wilderness” that fails to protect habitat. For example, near my home, three prominent so-called “conservation” groups have joined mountain bikers and snowmobilers to oppose wilderness designation for a large portion of the Gallatin Range, instead promoting alternatives that would allow mechanized travel and even logging and road construction under some circumstances.

To add insult, there’s a relatively new narrative out there that denies the very existence of wilderness, allegedly because as the “Anthropocene” era unfolds, humans have impacted the entire planet; so “pristine” nature no longer exists. Think climate change and air pollution. But these people fail to understand that wilderness isn’t about “pristine.” It’s about wild. The Wilderness Act defines wilderness as “untrammeled,” meaning “uncontrolled” or “unregulated.” In other words, wild. I would love to drop those who perpetuate this myth into the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to see if they’d still deny the existence of wilderness!

Others proclaim that the very idea of wilderness is somehow racist and inequitable. While the inequities in our society can play out in a million different ways, including access to wilderness, wilderness itself is entirely egalitarian. And wilderness designation—more than any other land classification—casts its net of equity to wild nature itself, protecting the autonomy of “earth and its community of life” (from the Wilderness Act, Section 2-c).

Unfortunately, the future of wilderness is tenuous, at best. I have no crystal ball, but it’s obvious to me that it will become increasingly important for society to understand that new wilderness designations and the fight to keep wilderness wild are fundamental to efforts aimed at counteracting the biodiversity crisis. Also, wilderness will become increasingly essential for allowing wild species to migrate in response to climate change (and wilderness habitats generally store rather than release carbon). We will also face an increasing number of ill-considered heavy-handed plans to manipulate wilderness vegetation in response to climate change.

In addition, humanity’s footprint will continue to expand across the planet; thus, protecting wild nature will become increasingly urgent. Wilderness isn’t the only way to protect nature; national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges also play an important role. But in the United States, wilderness is our ultimate land protection designation, the top dog, ultimately the yardstick by which we measure the health of all other landscapes—but only if we keep wilderness truly wild. Furthermore, attacks on the wilderness concept will continue, so it will become increasingly crucial for conservationists to forcibly counter these ill-conceived notions. Also, future conservation efforts must be bold, not meek, and promote big, wild, interconnected wilderness. And we must be vigilant in squelching opposition to and compromise of our quest to keep designated wilderness wild.

To be effective, an advocacy organization must focus upon its primary mission. Please support groups that really focus on protecting the wilds—in deed, not just in name. Wilderness and all of its dependent life need our help, now, more than ever. As I see it, wilderness may be the greatest American idea since democracy, which nowadays is also threatened. Let’s not lose either! As the National Wilderness Preservation System turns 60, I can think of no better gift to future generations than the gift of big, wild, natural, uncompromised, untrammeled, wildlife-rich wilderness. Our nation made that commitment 60 years ago, and as an uncertain future unfolds, it is more important than ever that we continue to defend that commitment.

Howie Wolke is a retired wilderness guide/outfitter and a past President of Wilderness Watch, a national conservation group based in Missoula, Montana. He lives in the foothills of the Gallatin Range in southern Montana. The views expressed in this essay are his own.