Dr. Jeremy Land is an economic historian with a focus on early modern global trade, the informal economy, smuggling, and state capacity. His academic journey began with training to become a high school history teacher, which gave him a broad understanding across historical periods. This led him to pursue a master’s degree at Appalachian State University, followed by a Ph.D. at Georgia State University in the Department of History. Though his primary expertise lies in the Early Modern period, his work in the WORK-IT project marks a shift toward the ancient world. As part of the team, he is adapting Bourdieusian theory to better understand informal taxation in the Ancient Near East and the Persian Southern Levant, with a particular focus on temple construction. Dr. Land’s interdisciplinary background and empirical approach bring a distinctive perspective to the study of ancient economic structures.
Dr. Land’s is currently affiliated with the University of Helsinki.
What initially drew you to this project and how does it connect to your broader research interests? What do you expect to learn from it?
Initially, the main thing that caught my attention was that it would bring me back to Helsinki, where I really enjoyed working at the University of Helsinki before I moved to Gothenburg. What really caught my attention was this idea of informal taxation. I’ve been studying the informal economy, smuggling etc. and there is a lot that happens between the formal and the individual level. There's a lot of interaction between the state and the individual that isn’t necessarily on paper or easily tracked. That was the main entry point for why I became interested in the project. I had also done some minor research into the ancient world during my graduate studies, so I was somewhat familiar with what the project was proposing. This idea of empires having far-reaching tentacles and interacting with the local population was very intriguing.
This project is completely different from what I’ve done in the past. I'm largely an empirical researcher. Most of my work has focused on finding evidence, whether visible in the archive or not. But this project proposes to build theory on top of that, which I see as a challenge This was an opportunity to do something new and different, to get into the theoretical work I’ve only dabbled in so far.
I don’t have a preconceived notion of what I expect to learn from this project. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes bad, but in this case I think it’s good. Jason has put together a group where everyone has their own focus and research, and I’m learning something different from each person. I’m learning everything and nothing at the same time. And that’s what makes a project like this fun: it has a broad swath of research interests, methodologies, and backgrounds. It’s daunting, but exciting.
Your previous research has focused on early modern global trade, smuggling, and state capacity. What first sparked your interest in economic history, and how did that evolve into focusing on early modern global trade and smuggling?
I didn’t think much about economic history until I took a course by Jari Eloranta , who is now Vice Dean and Professor of Economic History at the Faculty of Social Sciences here in Helsinki. At the time, he was teaching at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, where I was doing my master’s. His course introduced the idea of economic history. Previously, I didn’t find economics all that interesting, but he applied it to what I wanted to understand – specifically how empires, economies, and war are all connected. He made it interesting for me. That course basically pulled me away from focusing on Civil War history, which had already been heavily covered and didn’t offer much room for new work. Later, we started working together, and my initial research focused on the military and the cost of war.
When I began my PhD, I planned to study Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and the economic effects of military occupation on those three cities. But then my advisor, Ghulam Nadri, asked a very good question: Why were those cities occupied in the first place? I realized I didn’t have an answer. I started digging deeper and discovered there was a much longer and more complex economic history that made these cities important. That line of inquiry pushed me into studying global trade and smuggling, and that’s how I ended up where I am today.
Given your work on both early modern and ancient economies, do you think informal economic practices are a constant feature of human societies? If so, how does understanding them in the past help us think about them today?
I’m beginning to lean more toward the idea that informal economic practices aren’t just a side feature of economies, they are actually how most things happen. It is only in the last 100 years or so that exchange has become impersonal, where you go to a store and don’t interact with the producer or the merchant themselves. It is very disconnected. That does not mean there was no disconnect between the producer and the consumer previously, but the layers have become more numerous, perhaps even exponentially so.
There is a lot more informal action within economies. If we think about women’s work in the home, we still do not fully understand how important that is for the economy. There has been some interesting research from Jane Humphries and Claudia Goldin in economic history that has started to put numbers to what the impact is. And we still don’t fully understand how important household work is relative to the overall economy. There is so much stuff that is done in the household that adds value to the overall economy, and we just don’t understand this.
If we think about household work alone – it is a huge part of the economy. We are not even putting value to how important grandparents are in helping raise grandchildren; for example, in making sure the parents can go to work and add formal value to things. There’s a lot of different layers that we still haven’t been able to peel back. In the past, it is a much more informal type of economy – if we can understand that, we might be able to better understand how this value and economic action takes place over the longer stream of time and how important it is. But we cannot start putting numbers to them until we understand how they actually worked, both historically and socially.
Given your background in studying the informal economy, do you see parallels between informal economic practices in early modern economies and informal taxation in ancient societies?
As I dive deeper into this research and the historical context, I’m seeing a lot more in common between the ancient and modern worlds than I expected. I’ve always believed it’s more interesting to focus on similarities rather than differences across time periods. Humans tend to act in similar ways – emotionally, socially, economically. Evolutionarily speaking, we’re not that far removed from the ancients. Everyone has needs, everyone has wants, and that hasn’t changed. If you start from the idea that we’re more similar to the past than different, the patterns begin to look familiar. Of course, there are differences such as scale, speed of travel and communication, the nature of recordkeeping, but the underlying interactions feel surprisingly alike.
When you compare informal practices in early modern and ancient contexts, they often appear almost identical on the surface. The methods might differ—what’s exchanged, how it’s exchanged, how fast—but the basic dynamics are the same. The documents we have, while more limited than for later periods, still show that someone gave or did something on behalf of the state, and it was recorded to ensure, for example, they weren’t taxed twice. That expectation of reciprocity from the state and from the individual is consistent across time. It fascinates me how similar these systems look, even across centuries.
If you could sit down with a historical figure from the period you study, who would it be and what would you ask them?
I actually don’t know much about my own genealogical past, because it is not important to me. I don’t particularly care where I came from. I am who I am, and I am an individual. So, when I thought about who I would want to talk to in the past to gain insight, I realized I am not sure how helpful one individual perspective would be. They would only be able to speak from their particular worldview, and my research has largely focused on looking at broader global structures and arrangements. Picking someone who could help me do that felt almost impossible.
The person I have decided to name is John Hancock. Not because he signed the Declaration of Independence, but because of his smuggling operation. That is what I would really want to ask him about. I would start with two questions: Did he think it was wrong? Did he find it ethically concerning? My suspicion is that his answer would be no. Secondly, I’d ask whether his smuggling and the experiences that came with it influenced his worldview. Did it shape how he understood his place in the world—or the colonies’ place within the British Empire? Did it ultimately steer him toward independence, or was he simply trying to make a living and turn a profit? What was the real goal? If I got a third or fourth question, I would ask about the people who worked for him. How did they feel about being involved in smuggling? Did they know they were part of it? Were they aware of the rules and regulations they were breaking? How did they feel about engaging in technically illegal commerce?
Coming up next: Dr. Jeremy Land reflects on the methodological challenges of applying modern theory to ancient sources, and how temple construction offers insight into imperial governance and social organization.