The Uncertain Past by Myles Lavan

The Uncertain Past by Myles Lavan

Historians constantly wrestle with uncertainty, never more so than when attempting quantification, yet the field has given little attention to the nature of uncertainty and strategies for managing it. This volume proposes a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, drawing on techniques widely used in the social and natural sciences. It shows how probability-based techniques used to manage uncertainty about the future or the present can be applied to uncertainty about the past. A substantial introduction explains the use of probability to represent uncertainty. The chapters that follow showcase how the technique can offer leverage on a wide range of problems in ancient history, from the incidence of expropriation in the Classical Greek world to the money supply of the Roman empire.

'… the volume as a whole is to be commended, and I recommend it both to historians of the ancient Mediterranean … as well as to economic and social historians from other areas … The editors make a compelling and clear argument (directly and through their contributors) that probabilistic methods deserve further use, and are more accessible than one may initially think: I can't help but find myself agreeing' Thomas Laver

Myles Lavan is Reader in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 2013) and co-editor of Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE (2021) and Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (2016). Daniel Jew is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, and Director of Studies at the College of Alice & Peter Tan, within the National University of Singapore. He is co-editor of M. I. Finley: An Ancient Historian and his Impact (Cambridge, 2016) and author of several papers on agriculture, craft, women and slaves in the ancient Greek economy. He is writing a monograph on carrying capacity in Athens. Bart Danon is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at Groningen University. He works on the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, with a focus on inequality, the political economy, urbanisation and slavery.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781009100656
ISBN 10	1009100653
Title	The Uncertain Past
Author	Myles Lavan
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2022-12-01
Number of pages	348
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable