This chapter provides the historical and scholarly context to the book’s main argument, and hence treats the military and economic developments that engulfed the Greek world in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods. arguing that these should be seen as intrinsically connected. Following discussion of scholarly approaches to the economic transformation of the Greek world at this time, paying special attention to the old formalist–substantivist debate, the chapter advocates a closer look at the types of markets available, especially the market for labour. This market, the book contends, first appeared in a full form in the military sphere; accordingly, the chapter questions scholarly approaches and attitudes towards paid military service, debating especially the notion of ‘mercenary’ soldiers, who should better be conceived of as military wage labourers.

All historical applications of formal economic models require justification – not merely within their own closed system of logic, but in a wider historiographical context which includes serious and thoughtful substantivist critiques of the formalist enterprise more generally and especially of applied economic theory. Even if new institutional economics is not the solution, are there other ways Roman economic historians might use economic theories to better understand the economic choices made by the inhabitants of the ancient world as well as the embedding contexts which channeled such choices? History and economics, despite fundamental differences embedded in each discipline, can meaningfully and symbiotically intersect. Economics offers Roman historians valuable and helpful organizing concepts, so long as these concepts are used within an agenda of historical understanding.

Roman monetary history, like all history, is history of mind. Purposeful action, as a product of the human mind, creates history. Economic models, methods and agendas, therefore, which ignore or assume away the mind are of only limited use for historians. Historians, however, can use the tools and concepts in this book to clarify and redeem some economic theories and concepts in order to better understand the societies they study.

is an argument for a ‘substantivist economic psychology’. On the one hand, this position would take seriously cultural-historical artefacts of the kind discussed in , e.g. those related to religious beliefs. Economic psychology to date has not focused very much at all on the role of such artefacts. On the other hand, it would require anthropologists – who already pay attention to culture – to also pay much more attention than they currently do to the findings and theories of psychologists about such things as learning, decision making and planning. As part of this assessment, we need to rethink the idea that human psychology is an intrinsically ‘individual’ phenomenon.