LAUSR

This collective work of 13 chapters is an important one: treating very diverse issues from different theoretical points of view, and using a wide range of evidence (archaeology, epigraphy, literary sources, some papyri), it shows clearly the new trends in the history of labour. Yet those trends do not follow a uniform path, and the editors, C. Laes and K. Verboven, do not minimize the differences in how scholars represent questions of labour in the Roman economy, exposing them honestly in their introduction: they show that the subjects of labour history differ greatly depending on the evidence adduced and on the theoretical models employed when studying ancient documents. Along these lines, archaeologists or historians working with archaeological finds (e.g., M. Flohr; E. A. Murphy; S. Bernard) offer convincing microhistories of trade by examining closely the workplace, its scale and location, and the organization of work.1 Comparing ancient workshops (which nowadays tend to be carefully excavated and analysed) is indeed a very fruitful method to approach human labour in its concrete forms, to draw up typologies of the working environment, and to illustrate the diversity of the organization and hierarchy of labour. Such archaeological reflections enable us to draw a good picture of occupational identities that have long been the domain of epigraphers and historians and which are considered afresh here by N. Tran, C. Lis and H. Soly. Conversely, C. Hawkins and A. Zuiderhoek follow the theoretical guidelines of M. I. Finley’s Ancient economy by interrogating the evidence from the point of view of a modern theory, the Finleyian substantivist theory being replaced by the now-fashionable New Institutional Economics (NIE) that sees labour only as “human capital”.2 Finally, other contributors prefer to use sociological theories of networks and of social capital to analyze the different possibilities open to workers to find a job and a professional identity: C. Holleran, K. Verboven and J. Liu propose different keys to the understanding of ancient networks through a careful reading of ancient literature and epigraphy.