In 1973 Moses Finley published a book, The Ancient Economy, based on a series of lectures he had given the previous year. Though the radical challenge he presented was not new he was to become the most prominent advocate among ancient historians of what is known as the substantivist or primitivist position.
In the wake of Marxism economics was to be first substantial expansion of the historical field, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. But historians like Rostovzeff or the Annales group in France broadly assumed economics represented universal truths and could popular understandings of it were easily transferable to historical evidence. Finley would argue forcefully (and not alone, Marshall Sahlins and Karl Polanyi were very much part of the same movement) that in fact the ancient world was so different such applications were completely unsound.
