Karl Kautsky on Capitalism in the Ancient World DANIEL GAIDO This translation of the 1912 preface by Karl Kautsky to Salvioli’s book about capitalism in the ancient world confirms the centrality to his interest of the way in which economic history informs the present and maps out the future. It reveals a concern not only with pre-capitalist and capitalist systemic transition but also. how economic development in turn prefigures socialism. Accordingly, Kautsky’s focus is on the connections between yet the distinctiveness of historically specific modes of production, their forms of property and propertylessness, and the links between production for consumption and for exchange, plus the resulting patterns both of the social relations and the forces of production and of surplus appropriation licensed thereby. For Kautsky, therefore, the value of understanding the economic conditions preceding capitalism is that it highlights both the historical specificity of capitalism itself, and thus also the reasons for its transcendence. INTRODUCTION The following study by Kautsky was originally published in March 1912 as a preface to the German edition of Giuseppe Salvioli’s Capitalism in the Ancient World: Studies on the Economic History of Rome.’ Bight months carlicr Kautsky had published in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social-Democratic Party, a review of the German translation of Eutore Ciecotti’s The Decline of Slavery in the Ancient World? Kautsky was critical of Ciccotti’s interpretation of the economic development tendencies of slavery. Ciccotti belicved that slavery developed the productive forces in antiquity to the extent that, had it not been for the disruptions caused by the The text by Karl Kautsky is translated and edited by Daniel Gaido, who lectures in American History at Haifa University, Israel The Jcumol of Peasant Studies, Vol.30, No.2, January 2003, pp.146-158 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDONKAUTSKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 147 barbarian invasions and other extrancous factors, it would have led directly to the appearance of capitalist relations of production based on wage labour. Kautsky disagreed with this analysis. He argued that ancient slavery failed to give birth to capitalism in the caster regions of the Roman empire, where no barbarian invasions took place; that the hiring out of a slave by his owner docs not constitute wage labour; that the wage workers of the ancient world were mostly employed in marginal economic activities such as services and the production of luxury articles; and that the brutality of slavery made it less productive than other ancient forms of exploitation, such as tribute servitude (Zinsknechtschafi). In the West, Kautsky continued, the slavery of the ancient world was not followed by capitalism but by the feudalism of the Middle ‘Ages based on serfdom. But that does not imply that slavery and feudalism are two mutually exclusive modes of production, one of which stems from the other like feudalism and capitalism. Kautsky believed that slavery is a parasitic growth on the modes of production it happens to develop upon (in the Roman case, by enslaving prisoners of war), and that wherever it succeeds in becoming the dominant social relation it leads to a cul-de-sac and finally to economic and cultural retrogression. But he praised Ciccotti’s book as a major historical work, both because of the insights he had gained from his reading of Marx’s economic works and for his command of the sources: ‘It constitutes an excellent supplement to the book of Ciccotti’s compatriot Salvioli on capitalism in antiquity, which originally appeared in French, but is now being translated to German. The works of both Italian Marxists together provide a splendid economic history of antiquity.” To this list should be added Kautsky’s own book on the origins of Christianity, now available online at the Marxists Internet Archive website (www.marxists.org).* The following paragraphs were taken from the excellent article of Maria Olga Cuomo on Salvioli’s contribution to Italian cconomic historiography." Giuseppe Salvioli was born in 1857 in Modena and died in 1928 in Naples. He studied jurisprudence at Italian and German universities, where he personally mot Theodor Mommsen. He taught at the University of Palermo from 1884 to 1903, and then until his death at the University of Naples. We know that he was a politically committed Marxist and served as a socialist candidate for the Chamber, but it is not clear from the data at our disposal what his position was on the disputes between Revisionists and ‘Orthodox’, and later between Communists and Social Democrats. Most probably Salvioli was a typical parliamentarian socialist of the Second International period, but he remained a honest and committed man to the very end: shortly before his death, in 1925, he signed, together with Benedetto Croce (who later secured the publication of his book in Italian), the Manifesto of the anti-fascist intellectuals, which made him the object of the hatred and violence of the Mussolini thugs.148, THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES Whatever the details of his political career, it is as a materialist historian that he made his greatest contribution to Marxism.‘ He wrote three magna opera on his main fields of research: Italian legal history,’ the economic history of Italy under the Roman Empire," and the economic history of Italy in the Middle Ages.’ Salvioli’s major study on ancient history before the publication of Le capitalisme dans le monde antique was an article on the distribution of landed property in Italy at the time of the Roman Empire." After the appearance of the book, he published three other papers on particular aspects of the subject,"' and, a few months before his death, a response to some criticisms that had been raised against it.’ In a letter sent from the Turi prison at Bari on 10 February 1930, one year after the publication of the Italian edition of Salvioli’s book, Antonio Gramsci praised it as ‘a patrimony of European culture’, describing it as ‘a revolt against the tendency created by Mommsen of finding every “monetary” economy “capitalist” [a reproach made by Marx to Mommsen which Salvioli developed and demonstrated critically}, a tendency which today has assumed morbid proportions in the works of Prof. Rostovzev, a Russian historian teaching in England, and in Italy in the works of Prof. Barbagallo, a disciple of Guglielmo Ferrcro.”® As for Kautsky’s introduction to the German edition, it is interesting to note that Salvioli praised it as an ‘exact interpretation of my thinking’ in a letter to Kautsky dated 21 April 1912, and preserved at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiednis, Amsterdam (K. D XX 68). Hopefully the present version will stimulate materialist scholars to undertake the long overdue task of translating Salvioli’s work into English. KAUTSKY’S PREFACE TO SALVIOLI Among the modern sciences, economic history is onc of those whose ficld of research has expanded most rapidly, especially because of the rapidly growing wealth of primary materials. In spite of that, the picture we have of the economy of antiquity is still very vague and quite controversial. The blame for that should be placed less.upon the lack of information about the past than upon the deficient knowledge of the present. Only by researching the environment closest and most accessible to us can we acquire the knowledge and methods to enable us to find our way in ficlds lying beyond it, We couldn’t have the faintest idea about the chentical composition of the stars if we were to shrink from acquainting ourselves with the component elements of our terrestrial globe. Only through a thorough investigation of the earth can we reach the preconditions for researching the star world. It would be equally impossible to reconstruct the physical appearance of extinct species from the meagre amounts of bone remains discovered if weKAUTSKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 149 were to have misgivings, in order to research their anatomy and physiology, about studying with the greatest zeal the contemporary animal species. That is also true of economic history. It is impossible to comprehend the economic relations of the past and understand all their connections clearly as long as people have scruples about understanding the present mode of production in all its peculiarities and ruthlessly laying bare its laws of movement and development. Those scruples characterize bourgeois cconomy in contradistinction from scientific socialism. They need not be conscious, intentional considerations. But no matter how unconscious they might be, their obstructive effects arc no less powerful. ‘Those generalizations hold true naturally only for the practical problems of the present, but that is enough to make more difficult the research of problems of the past, far removed from the field of modern oppositions of interests. Indeed they make it more difficult, the more remote that past and the more sparse and ambiguous its remnants Only to those prejudices can be ascribed the fact that Karl Biicher’s conception of economic development, rather than Marx’s, can dominate completely the field of economic history, although the former is but a bad reproduction of the latter. Economic history is for Marx a history of the development of the modes of production. That development assumes stable forms, which are relatively casy to determine, as far as the production technique is concerned. However, the situation is entirely different regarding the forms of production, in so far as they do not represent the relation of men to nature, but the relations into which people enter with one another in order to remain masters of nature ~ that is to say, the economic relations. These last relations are of course very strongly determined by the technique. For instance, they naturally can be completely different in a place where a large railway network cxists, than in a place where the only means of locomotion of the people are their own legs. But the economic relations are not identical with the technical. If the latter are determined and easily recognizable, the former are fluid. and all the more difficult to recognize the more production develops, the larger the producing societies, the more diverse their technique, and the older their history, because in the course of their development they increasingly mix up and combine old, antiquated forms with new ones. It is not casy to find an Ariadne’s thread allowing us to find our way in that labyrinth, That is most nearly feasible with the help of the guiding lines provided to us by Marx. As the carlicst mode of production Marx recognized primitive communism. People lived together in little groups, in which everybody worked and owned in common the land, the most important means of production, in so far as it is permissible to speak about clear property150) THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES {elations in such primeval conditions. Work was carried out according to social customs, projects and agreements. The products belonged to society, and were likewise distributed according to social rules and agreements among its members; they remained within the society that produced them, and were consumed by it. The development of technique leads the separate societies to produce surpluses above what they need for their own consumption. Simultaneously develops also the process of exchange: each group comes into closer and more frequent contact with other ones, living in other places, under different conditions, and producing different products. Thereby the conditions arise for the exchange of surpluses and the widening of the sphere of products consumed by each group. Production for self-consumption begins to shrink and production for exchange acquires an ever greater importance. But thus begins also the displacement of social production by private production. Private property in the products of consumption expands continually, and with it develops also private property in the means of production, finally reaching also the most important of them, the land. The free labourer generally possesses at that stage his own means of production and disposes of his produce, which he exchanges for someone else’s. Everybody produces an ever greater quantity of products that he docsn’t need himself, and consumes others that he doesn’t produce, but has to exchange for his own products. But with private property in the means of production arises also the possibility of individual workers losing their means of production and becoming propertyless proletarians, or even private property themselves, icc. slaves in a private undertaking. Finally arises also the possibility for some individuals to appropriate and accumulate the means of production of many others in order to exploit them, cither directly, by buying bound workers, or indirectly, by forcing free propertyless workers to hand over to them part of their production, for instance through shared tenancies. This accumulation of wealth can become a mass phenomenon even before the appearance of the capitalist mode of production; a sort of ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, as Marx called it, through different forms of violence, especially war. Already at the beginning of historical times, with the Babylonians and the Egyptians, we find from time to time such mass accumulations. The Roman army offered the most gigantic example of this phenomenon in antiquity, as Salvioli’s book clearly shows. Each one of these accumulations always ended up, sooner or later, with the decline of the state in which they took place. The separation of the mass of the workers from their means of production finally led to the paralysis of economic and political life, to the downfall of the state that plundered its more barbarous neighbouring peoples, living under more primitiveKAUTSKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 151 conditions. That was the end of every higher culture of antiquity about which some historical records have been preserved, in the basins of the Euphrates and the Nile as well as on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A new clement appeared for the first time in the economy of northern Europe, as also there an epoch of primitive accumulation opened up since the fificenth century. True, those states that led the way in that process, Spain and Portugal, finally rcached a condition of paralysis like the states of antiquity. But the northem states lying on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean were able, through a favourable combination of circumstances, to combine the prolctarianization of the majority of their population and the concentration of great wealth in few hands with the simultaneous growth of world trade, and in that way developed a new mode of production. Capitalism gathered the numerous propertyless workers available in the service of mass production, for which the great wealth’ accumulated, thanks to the simultaneous development of the natural sciences, placed at its disposal powerful means of production, while at the same time the new means of international commerce provided the necessary expanded market for the mass products What in ancient Rome and even in modern Spain was a cause of social decadence (the simultancous formation of a mass proletariat and. the concentration of huge riches in few hands) became since the seventeenth century, above all in England, the starting point for a new, higher mode of production, capitalism, which cnormously strengthened the forces of state and society, and conquered the world in a swift triumphant procession. At the same time however it also developed in its midst a new and powerful opponent, the proletariat, that from a parasite [in antiquity] became the ever more powerful basis of [modern] society. The end, which in the society of ancient Rome was brought about by the invasions of the German barbarians, threatens capitalist society from its own workers. The latter, however, will not, like the former, destroy socicty in order to set up on its ruins a primitive mode of production and start the entire course of evolution anew, but, on the contrary, they possess the will and the capacity to perfect to the highest degree the mode of production whose pillars they are, by putting an end to private property on the rapidly growing means of production and turning them, from means of exploitation and degradation of the masses, into means of wealth, culture and leisure for all. That is Marx's conception of economic development. It has nowhere been set forth so expressly and comprehensively. But when one puts together his scattered remarks and applies the method he bequeathed us to the known facts of economic history, one reaches the synthetic view described above. Against it Biicher sets forth the following three stages of economic development:152 TIE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1. The stage of the closed household economy (pure production for self- consumption, economy without exchange), in which goods are consumed in the same economic unit in which they were produced. 2. The stage of city economy (production for customers [Kundenproduktion] or stage of direct exchange), in which the goods flow directly from the producing economy to the consuming one, without intermediaries. 3. The stage of political economy [Volkswirtschafi] (commodity production, stage of circulation of goods), in which the goods as a rule must pass through a series of economic agents before reaching the point of consumption." The order of succession of this tripartite division corresponds approximately to the guiding lines which economic development assumes according to Marx: social production, simple commodity production, capitalist production [i.c. commodity production based on wage labour ed], But Biicher not only differed from Marx by the fact that his stages represent much more rigid and fixed forms than the fluid Marxist phases of development. The spheres that cach one took into consideration were also different. Marx’s domain was the entire ficld of economic history. His conception enabled him to follow the previous economic development from its carlicst beginnings in its full complexity and divers and to discover in it the embryo of the future. Biicher’s classification also claims to comprehend the entire economic development, but in fact it gives at cach stage only an isolated phenomenon, a part for the whole. Thus, for instance, Biicher places as the first stage, instead of social production, the closed houschold economy, one among the many forms of cach production, and morcover one which appears at the period of dissolution of primitive communism and is to be observed alongside simple commodity production throughout its whole history, until the rise of the capitalist mode of production. In the same manner the production for customers constitutes only one of the forms of simple commodity production. Even if we want to limit it to city economy (although commodity exchange appears long before the formation of citics, at the stadium of nomadic cconomy), urban commodity production is impossible without simultancous commodity production in the countryside. However, the peasant bringing cattle, corn, wool, flax and similar products for exchange to the city, often docs not exchange them directly with the consumers. He exchanges his cattle with the butcher, who then sells the meat to the consumer, his corn with the baker, or perhaps first with the miller, from whom the baker buys the flour, with which he then produces bread for the consumers. And it is surely not those who wish to wear a coat that buy the wool, but the wool-traders or cloth-makers. In theKAU SKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 153 city itself there are numerous manual labourers who also produce for the traders or for other producers, and not directly for the consumers. But if we find already under simple commodity production a whole series of wares, which ‘must pass through a scrics of economic factors, before reaching consumption’, then it is plainly erroneous to make this property the distinguishing feature of the next stage, the ‘political economy", which Biicher himself once called ‘capitalist economy’. But indeed which other distinguishing feature can one devise in order to distinguish it from simple commodity production if, like Biicher, onc refers for the characterization of the different modes of production, not to the totality of the process of production, but only to a small aspect of it, namely the circulation of the finished products? The social role of the worker in the production process, his social claim to the means of production and products, appear unimportant in Biicher’s characterization of the different modes of production. He is only interested in this question: how do the finished products reach the hands of the consumers? It is characteristic that the contemporary bourgeois theory of economic development, like the bourgeois theory of value, the marginal utility theory [Grenznutzentheorie], avoids dealing with the process of production and by “economy” understands only the circulation of finished goods In his detailed investigation about the formation of ‘political economy’ Biicher mentions wage labour only in two short sentences. First on page 161: There appears mass production based on the division of labour in manufactures and factories, and with it the class of wage labourers. Biicher does not expand on this subject. Then on page 167 he adds: Where outside labour [/remde Arbeit] is required, it consists during the first stage of permanent bound labourers (slaves, bondsmen), in the second stage of producers reduced to a state of long servitude, and in the third stage of workers entering into short contract relations. That is all we learn from the social conditions of the workers. One can sec that the subject is handled as a purely subsidiary, totally indifferent question, and moreover incorrectly. This is because slavery is by no means a peculiarity of production for sclf-consumption. Slaves and bondmen have long and often cnough worked in commodity production. But it is downright absurd to see in the shortness of the contract relation the economic peculiarity of wage labour in the capitalist mode of production. ‘That, according to Biicher, is what distinguishes capitalism from all other modes of production. Apart from the fact that the difference in the duration of the work contract between manufacture and large-scale industry is not a154 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES pervading and fundamental one, the real outstanding peculiarity of modern wage labour is not only not emphasized, but directly disavowed in the above-quoted sentenee from Biicher: Where outside labour is required, it consists ... in the third stage of workers entering into short contract relations, The ‘outside labourers’ appear thus as occasionally necessary. But what characterizes the third stage, the capitalist mode of production, is precisely the fact that in it ‘outside labour’ is not something incidental, which can often be dispensed with without any injury to the production process, but something necessarily determined by the character of the mode of production. At the ‘third stage’, ‘outside labour’ is the general form of labour, and its existence constitutes the precondition for the entire production proc We can sce that Biicher's three stages, to the extent that they differ from Marx's description of the development of the different modes of production, represent anything but a progress. Far from making the characterization of the separate modes of production sharper and more precise, his categories blur the differences between them, leaving their distinguishing traits completely out of the picture. Not in spite of that, but precisely because of that, Biicher’s conception has come to prevail among bourgeois economists. For them the classical school was anathema, as it became unmistakably evident, especially under the influence of Marx's Capital, that the laws of capitalist commodity production are not ctemal natural laws, but only characteristic of a passing historical stage. Therewith the perishableness of capitalism was demonstrated — a quite scrious matter, considering the growing proletarian militancy that threatened to apply in practice the results of theoretical knowledge. Then came the very convenient discovery of Biicher. He recognized that capitalist cconomy was a purcly transitory historical phenomenon. But what was its distinguishing trait according to Biicher? The fact that goods must, as a rule, pass through a series of economic agents before they reach the consumers’ hands. Not a word about the private property on the means of production, about the propertyless character of the wage workers. If these are the distinguishing traits of the capitalist mode of production, then they will and must disappear with it as soon as the proletariat is strong cnough to abolish it. How much more harmless the further development of contemporary ‘political economy’ appears when its distinguishing trait becomes the passage of goods through different *cconomic agents’, and wage labour represents just a subsidiary accompanying phenomenon! Thanks to this misinterpretation of the modern mode of production Biicher’s conception has become dominant in bourgeois economic history.KAUISKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, 155 However it also obscures the most important points of view for the understanding of the economy of antiquity. No wonder that the historians and classical scholars declare that Biicher’s conception is incompatible with the facts discovered by them." But not being trained in economics, the historians are not always sufficiently able to recognize the differences between the economic phenomena of antiquity and those of our time. They tend to make them too much alike. As a consequence they are bound to limit themselves to the discovery of isolated economic phenomena, a highly important and laudable task, whose further progress however clearly requires a theoretical reworking and elaboration of the numerous new materials. Salvioli’s book constitutes in my opinion a remarkable beginning in that direction. Its author has a thorough knowledge of the cconomic relations, not only of antiquity, but also of the Middle Ages. Since 1884 he has worked as a professor in Italian universities. At first he belonged to the University of Palermo; since 1903 he has taught history and philosophy of right at Naples. But his interest in research into the past did not lead him to an indifference towards the present. He applied himself to the study of the problems of our time with zeal, and, choosing a completely different path from that of the great majority of his colleagues, did not take the side of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, he despises adopting the apparently magnificent but in fact despicable pose of Possessing an objectivity that is above the parties, that evades any clear-cut position, and answers the most pressing problems of the time with a question mark. Salvioli belongs to that tiny but select circle of professors. who resolutely admit being on the side of the proletariat, professors that constitute a glorious peculiarity of Italian university life." He is a member of the Socialist Party, contributes to the party press, gives lectures on its behalf, and in 1894 was a candidate for Camera, though without success. Much more momentous than for practical politics is however his socialist interest in science. He seriously applied himself to the study of Marxism, became familiar with historical materialism and the train of thought of Capital. and applied them very appreciatively and intelligently to his studies on economic history. One cannot call him an orthodox Marxist. For instance, he does not follow compleicly the Marxist terminology, sometimes using the term ‘capital’ in a context where Marx would have used.the words ‘money’ or ‘means of production’ or ‘stock of products’ [Produktenvorrat]. He also understands historical materialism in a different way from that of the orthodox Marxists, when he assumes that this materialism traces back every social fact to economic motives, whereas we attribute every social peculiarity to specific economic conditions.156 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES But these deviations are no reason for us to fail to recognize that Marx richly fructified Salvioli's thought and researches. Especially the historical parts in the third volume of Capital offered him numerous new insights and provided him plenty of stimuli, which his command of the ancient sources turned to good account. His work on capitalism in the ancient world, which first appeared in 1906 in French, is the result of a decade of work. It fascinated me so much, that I induced my son Karl to render it into German, and advised my friend Dietz (the owner of the SPD publishing house Dietz Verlag] to publish the translation, a project to which Salvioli gave his consent in writing. True, it isa scholarly work, but it was written in a style so clear and casy to understand, that one needs to have no factual knowledge at all in order to comprehend it. For this cdition all foreign quotations and expressions have been translated, so that the work is fully understandable even for readers unacquainted with ancient languages and unfamiliar with the history of antiquity. But of course even a superficial knowledge of Roman history will facilitate its comprehension. A good introduction to the subject is the booklet of Leo Bloch Social Struggles in Ancient Rome.” If, after having read Salvioli’s book. one wishes to continue the study of ancient economic history, { would recommend Ciccotti’s book The Decline of Slavery in the Ancient World, which constitutes an excellent supplement to the present work, especially for the Greck period. Naturally that doesn’t mean that I agree with every single statement in those books. For instance my conception of the Patriciate or Cacsarism are very different from Bloch’s. But in the history of ‘ent society so much is still unclear and debatable, that there cannot be two authors whose opinions coincide completely, Someone might wonder whether it is appropriate to ask the workers to sacrifice a fraction of the little spare time they dispose of by occupying themselves with antiquity, instead of concentrating their entire interest in the present. To which should be replied that the present surely requires their entire interest, but that a full understanding of the present presupposes knowledge of the past. If, as we said at the beginning, spatially and temporally remote phenomena cannot be understood as long as we are not able to find our way in the present, one can also conversely say that a deep understanding of the phenomena nearest to us requires an acquaintance with distant events. The only way to know things or phenomena is through their differences, What we call propertics of a thing are in truth the characteristics that distinguish it from other things. Indced a thing in itself can never be known: we can only know each thing or phenomenon by comparing it with other phenomena. So, in order to understand the capitalist mode of production we must also compare it with other modes of production. That comparison wasKAUTSKY ON CAPITALISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 157 already done at its dawn, through the contradiction into which it ran with declining feudalism, But we will understand capitalism, its problems and tendencies the better, the greater the number of modes of production we compare it with. Hence the great interest prevalent in our party for prehistory.” Neciless to say that is also true of classical antiquity, and especially of the end of that period, which is precisely the main subject of Salvioli’s book. The end of the ancient world is of special significance for us, because its problems came into much closer contact with thosc of our times than those of any other pre-capitalist era ‘The most significant product of that period has remained down to the present a powerful factor of practical politics: Christianity. True, a factor of 4 purely conservative nature since the rise of modern capitalism, but onc that capitalism cannot dispense with. The products of ancient capitalism can only be fully overcome by the products of modern, industrial capitalism — through socialism. The subject of Salvioli’s book is therefore connected by many threads with the struggles of our times. Berlin, March 1912. NOTES. 1. Joseph Salvioli, 1912, Der Kapitalismus im Altertum: Studien iiber die rémische Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Nach dem Franzbsischen tibersetzt_ von Katl Kautsky jun., Internationalen Bibliothek 52. Stuttgart: ILH.W. Dietz Nachfolger (a second edition was issued 1en years later), This is the German version of Giuseppe Salvioli, 1906, Le capitalise dans le monde antique: Etudes sur Uhistoire de l'économie romaine, Traduit sur le manuscrit italien par Alfred Bonnet, Paris: V. Giard & E, Briére; reprint: 1979, New York, Arno Pres Revised and entarged Malian version: 1929, If capitalismo antico: storia dell economia romanu., cura ¢ con prefszione di Giuseppe Brindisi, Bari: F. Laterza & Fight. Efforts have been made to eontaet the copyright-holder. wisky, 1911, *Sklaverei und Kapitalismus (Ettore Cieeott, Der Umergang der Sklaverei im Altertum, Deutsch von Oda Olberg, Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwirts, 1910)", Die Neue Zeit, Nol29, No.2. pp.713-25. This was a review of the German version of Ciceotti. 1899. 1/iramonto della schiaviticnel mondo anticn. Vorine: F. Bocea. The book was also published in French in 1910 as Le déctin de I'esclavage antique. Ud, frangaise revue et augmentée avee preface de Mauteur, Paris: M. Riviére et Cie, and in Spanish in 1946 as E/ dacase de fa esclavitud en ef mundo antiguo, Buenos Aires: Editorial Intermundo. 3. Ibid: 724 § Karl Kautsky, 1953. Foundations of Christianity, New York: S.A. Russell. An earlier and more complete English translation of this book was published in London during 1925 by George Allen & Unwin. . . 5. Maria Olga Cuomo, 1975, ‘Il contributo di Giuseppe Salvioli alla storiografia economica italiana’, Economia ¢ Storia, Vol.22. No.3, pp.366-419 6. His main methodological articles are “La. teoria storiea di Marx’, Rivista italiana di Sociologia, Anno ll, pp.61-182, and *Sullo studio della storia economica medievale’, Scienza Sociale, Anno Il, VoL, Palermo 1900. 7. Storia del divito italiano, ‘The last edition revised by the in 1921. ‘The 9th edition was posthumously issued by Edizioni UTI z author was the &th one, published Torino, in 1930.158 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 8. Le capitalisme dans le monde antique, 1906 (see note | above) 9. Giuseppe Salvioli, 1913, Le nostre origini: Storta cconomica dhtalia nell'Alto Medioevo, Napoli: Alvano. According to Cuomo, this is “the natural complement? to Capitalism in the Ancient World. 10. Giuseppe Salvioli, 1899, ‘Sulla distriburione della proprieti fondiaria in Htalia al tempo dell'Impero Romano’, Archivo xiuridico, Vol LXI, Modena, 1. Giuseppe Salvioli, 1911, *Sull'esponazione di grano e ui oli dall’Africa nell"epoca romana’, Aiti del’Acc. Pontaniana, VolXLl, Naples: id.. 1921, “Il commercio del denaro a Roma nelle lettere di Cicerone ad Attico’, Atti R. ec. Di Napoli, VolXLVIL, Naples; id.. 1921, *Banchi ¢ banchieri nelle lettere di Cicerone ad Attico’, in the Festchrifi for Alberto Marghicri, Naples. 12. Giuseppe Salvioli, 1929, *Produzione Congreso Nazionale di Studi romani, Rome. 13, Antonio Gramsci, 1947, Lettere dal curcen list the works of the so-called Cliometrici Southern plantation slavery with capitalism 14. Karl Bicher, 1904, Die Enistehung der Volkswirtschaft: Vortriige und Versuche, 4, Auflage, Tiibingen: 11. Laupp’sehe Buchhandlung, p.108. English edition: 1912, Industrial Evolution, New York: I. Holt 15. For a materialist criticism of the application of Biicher’s theory to the study of Russian history by Peter Struve and Mikhail Pokrovskii sce Leon Trotsky, 1974, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. Appendix 1, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 16. A reference to the lalian socialist pioneer and history professor Arturo Labriola (1843-1904), author of two major works: Essays on the Materialist Conception of History and Socialism and Philosophy. both available at the MIA site. 17. Leo Bloch, 1913. Soziale Kémpfe im alten Rom, 3. Auflage, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. In Foundations of Christianity Kauisky also recommended a major bourgeois work on ancient economic history: Eduard Meyer, Die Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Alvertums, reproduced in Moses Finley (ed.), The Biicher-Meyer Controversy, New York: Amo Press, 1979. 18. A reference to Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, as well as to the works of Heinrich Cunow (1862-1936), the foremost SPD anthropologist. wericola in Italia nell'epoca romana’, Aui del i Vol. pp. 180-88. Einaudi, p.87. Americanists should add to this ns, bourpcois economic historians that identify