Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

The chapter surveys the economy of Asia Minor from the late archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic era. Asia Minor forms the largest land mass in the northern Mediterranean and is characterized by a diverse geography with different levels of integration into the Greek world and its economy. Throughout time, urbanization significantly intensified; nevertheless, many regions preserved a rural character. Agriculture was most important, in both the land of the poleis and land controlled by the Achaemenid and Hellenistic kings. Production was directed to local needs, but some agrarian products also served as exports; non-agrarian production was less significant. Asia Minor was rich in natural resources, and fishing was important in a few coastal cities. The birthplace of coinage in the late seventh century, Asia Minor saw the circulation of many coinages over time and was highly monetarized at least by the end of the Hellenistic period. These coinages mirror the frequent changes in a political landscape that was characterized by different strata of authority, from the royal administration down to the city-states and villages. Through taxation, public expenditures, and by securing an institutional framework, these authorities shaped the complex conglomerate of Asia Minor’s economy.

The second chapter investigates changes in land tenure and the organization of labor in the Early Roman period. It shows that land tenancy was not an imperial imposition, but had instead existed in some form in the Levant since at least the Iron Age. In the Early Roman period, however, elites attained greater protections for private property and were thus able to accumulate and convey large estates consisting of a number of geographically discontinuous plots. Tenants and laborers were no more exploited working for their elite patrons on private estates than they had been working on royal estates in earlier eras, but they did enter into new socioeconomic relations with elites. Tenants and wage laborers could occupy a range of socioeconomic positions and managed to secure a modicum of bargaining power in making contracts with landowners. As in earlier eras, drought and crop failure sometimes impeded the success of agricultural laborers. As a result, these laborers often became indebted to their landowners or other elite patrons.