One of your key tasks in WORK-IT is adapting Bourdieusian theory to study informal taxation. What challenges or opportunities do you see in applying this framework to ancient economies, and what do you think it helps reveal that other approaches might miss?
I think the challenge and opportunity for Bourdieu and his theories is that it is quite imprecise, and it is almost built that way on purpose. The challenge is identifying what the various fields are in relation to the historical context we want to apply it to. With limited sources available, we don’t fully understand all the fields, and we don’t have empirical evidence for every part of an individual’s life and every part of society. So, we’re not going to be entirely exact.
The opportunity is that it is not exact, and it is not precise. We have the opportunity to shape it to fit the situation that we see on the ground. We don’t precisely know what Bourdieu meant all the time, and it is not entirely certain that these will work. But because it is imprecise, it gives us the ability to mold it to fit the evidence that we have.
In economic literature, both modern and in its rare application to the ancient world, there is a tendency to make things very black and white. Whereas Bourdieu’s theory allows for people to have multiple areas in which they operate. We have different identities depending on the context. We compartmentalize our life in certain ways, but we don’t do it formally. We move between different fields and contexts very smoothly. That is the real opportunity here: that not everybody is acting within one context all the time. And so, it is really hard to define society based on that. We need to be talking about how they overlap with one another.
How does studying informal taxation in temple construction help us understand larger economic structures in the Persian Empire?
One of the things that's quite different between the modern and the ancient world is the overwhelming presence of religion within the society, and how important it was. There were entire economic sectors of the economy devoted to religious iconography and practices. Even the simple things like having to buy an animal to sacrifice created an economy that is circling the temple. To build the temple you have to pay for the materials, get the labor, and feed the workers. There’s an economy that is engaged in this.
Many different types of industries interact with the religious structure. The religious structure itself employs people, and they have roles in society. There is a lot happening in this regard, and temple construction is an extremely important part of the economic structures of the Persian Empire. It was a way for the state to engage and interact with the local population – not just with their own religious ideas, but in accepting other religions and other types of beliefs. They were helping to support the larger economy in allowing all these temples to be built. If you think about all the infrastructure projects that we see in the modern world, they are extremely important, often state-led and state-funded. If you think about the benefit that comes from this, usually in almost all cases, a dollar spent by the government on infrastructure comes back two or three times because of all the tax revenue it generates.
What are some of the main challenges in identifying informal taxation in ancient temple contexts, and how do you work around them?
The lack of sources is the fundamental flaw. We have some sources available to us, but we don’t fully understand the context in which they were created. However, this can also be an opportunity. We can make well-guided assumptions, and it forces us to use a variety of sources and methodologies. Historians alone aren’t going to be able to solve the problem. That is why we need archaeologists, biblical experts, people who understand all these different languages. If you try to use just one source to build a huge theory explaining all of society, it does not work. What we can do is draw comparisons to the early modern and later periods where we do have more sources. If a practice works in a certain way in those contexts and appears somewhat similar in the ancient world, the likelihood that it functioned very differently is probably quite low. We can think about how societies structure themselves after that period and use that to reflect, they might be thinking in similar ways. It is unlikely that things changed drastically between then and now. But we do have to be able to defend that in a proper historical way.
The project also challenges some modern socio-economic assumptions. Are there particular assumptions you think need the most rethinking when studying ancient economies?
I think the biggest one is that ancient societies are quite different from modern societies. Rather, they probably have a lot more in common with us than we think. But there is another assumption about ancient economies that is particularly frustrating: just because the scale at which they operated is not the same does not mean their societies and economies were not complex. Ancient economies are often described as primitive or early, and I don’t know if that is true. Every time I dig deeper, or a new archaeological discovery comes up, it raises new questions: What was this for? How did they do this? Doesn’t this contradict what we thought? There is clearly a lot of complexity and social stratification in past societies that we don’t fully appreciate.
Part of the problem is that we don’t have enough sources to explain everything, but we do have enough to be confident in saying that a smaller scale doesn’t mean less complexity. That is the main assumption I am pushing back against, also in my research on the early modern period. When we take the informal economy into account, the economy often appears much larger than modern economists estimate. And if that’s the case, are we really growing that much? It is a big question. The informal economy is still active today, but was it even bigger in the past? Have we just gotten better or worse at tracking it? These are all open questions. I also think this assumption affects how willing modern economists and economic historians are to engage with the ancient past. They often feel like they need solid time series and strong data to make arguments. But if we have some data—just enough—maybe we should start looking anyway. Maybe we should use sources outside the normal purview of economics and economic history to fill in the gaps. I think it’s okay to do that, especially if we start from the assumption that people in the past weren’t all that different from people today.
In our next post, Dr. Mitchka Shariyari shares how a trove of ancient ceramic sherds known as the Idumean Corpus can shed light on systems of taxation, labor, and administration. Join us as we explore how small texts reveal big questions about power, economy, and daily life.