PREHISTORY AND HISTORY
If Karl Polanyi were still alive he would have encouraged the editor to be as perfunctory as possible in this introduction. He always felt that introductory material was regularly "peripheric," to use one of his favorite adjectives. So let me get right to the papers.
These seven papers grew from the Sixth International Karl Polanyi Conference, which took place at Concordia University, Montreal, in November 1996. In addition to three papers delivered there (Möller, Rupp, Tandy), there are several from the joint meeting, in December 1996, of the American Philological Association and the American Institute of Archaeology (Engen, McInerney, Palmer) and one from the December 1997 meeting (Tartaron). What the papers have most prominently in common is the understanding that Karl Polanyi's approach to historical economies and their managements is still of great value. One specific, remarkable aspect of this volume is that several of the contributors independently took up and explained the formalist/substantivist debate that Polanyi himself inspired, probably especially by his Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944), but also by his Trade and Market (Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957). This is remarkable not so much because it is testimony that the debate is still with us, but rather because it illustrates how differently the debate can be presented by the several practitioners. The debate is new and different each time it arises.
The papers are arranged according to their chronological focus, stretching from the Mycenaean Greeks of the second millennium to the Athenians of the fourth century B.C.E. This was precisely the range of Polanyi's interest in ancient Greece, whether he was writing about accounting in the citadels of the Mycenaeans (Polanyi 1960) or about the movement and pricing of grain in the Aegean in the fourth century (Polanyi 1977, 240-51).
Polanyi's concept of the port of trade takes center stage in three of the papers. Thomas Tartaron's paper focuses on Epirus in northwestern Greece, and the institutions that we can reconstruct for the exploitation of the area by Mycenaean Greeks from the south. David Rupp's paper on Iron Age Cyprus and Astrid Möller's on Naukratis on the Nile Delta also illustrate how richly instructive Polanyi's concept of the port of trade continues to be.
Group identity, whether we treat it terms of status, class, or ethnicity, is the main focus of Jeremy McInerney's paper on the nineteenth-century treatment of early Greek "tribal" developments; it is a secondary focus of at least two other papers (Möller, Tandy).
Allocation of resources was of great interest to Polanyi, as well as to Darel Engen on fourth-century B.C.E. Athens, Rupp, and David Tandy on Hesiod's economic realities and his region's prospects for economic development; agricultural production and allocation are the focus of Ruth Palmer's paper on the continuity of agriculture from the Mycenaean period to the time of Hesiod.
All these contributors are concerned, as Polanyi was, on how communities generated and managed their resources; how they acquired and how they allocated; and, in the cases of the chronologically later papers, how they talked about these activities and thereby integrated these activities into their everyday lives. This is nowhere more clear than in Darel Engen's paper, one of the clearest demonstrations of the embeddedness of the economy that the editor has ever read. Karl Polanyi would have been very satisfied and grateful that his ideas have endured so long and so persistently. How is this not pertinent to the very questions that are being asked today in many quarters about where we are going as the new millennium engages us. It is an additional, optimistic sign that the seven contributors to this volume include only two senior scholars; the remaining five have earned their doctorates in the last dozen years. This demographic fact is a terrific sign of the vitality of Polanyi's approach to pre-industrial economies and societies, especially in the Mediterranean. This is important for the past and also for the future.