Vortrag von Walter Scheidel: Building for the State: A World-Historical Perspective

Mittwoch, 27. November, 17.00-18.00

Aula am Campus, Hof 1.11, Spitalgasse 9, 1090 Wien

Der Forschungsschwerpunkt Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft aus historisch-kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive lädt ein zum Vortrag der Reihe Staat und Arbeit

Walter Scheidel
Building for the State:
A World-Historical Perspective

Keynote Lecture on the occasion of 4th International Conference of the National Research Network “Imperium & Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom” (Vienna, 27–29 November 2013)

Large-scale public building in Antiquity is frequently assessed from a point of view that reflects Moses I. Finley’s influential distinction (as expressed in his Ancient Economy) between the Ancient Near East’s coerced mass labour regime on the one hand and the coexistence of slave and free wage labour in the Greek and Roman societies of the Mediterranean World on the other. Our conference proposes to nuance this model by examining case studies that shed light on official, liturgical, entrepreneurial and other duties in the realm of public construction activities in imperial contexts, with a view towards evaluating the bearing of these issues on the overall assessment of the nature of political, ideological and economic power in the states under discussion.

Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History at the Department of Classics, Stanford University, Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology, focus of research: ancient social and economic history, with particular emphasis on historical demography, labor, and state formation, interest in comparative and transdisciplinary approaches of the study of the pre-modern world