Reseña del libro "What is Ancient History? (en Inglés)"
From one of today's most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters--and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way It's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history--obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history--a global history that captures antiquity's pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today. For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today's ways of life were created and spread--from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it's rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common. The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together--by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman "classics," by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.
Walter Scheidel es profesor de Humanidades y de Clásicas e Historia en la Universidad de Stanford. Su investigación abarca desde la historia social y económica antigua hasta la demografía histórica premoderna, centrándose en la desigualdad y la formación de estados. Ha escrito o coeditado 21 libros y publicado más de 260 artículos y reseñas.
Entre sus obras más destacadas se encuentra El gran nivelador: Violencia e historia de la desigualdad desde la Edad de Piedra hasta el siglo XXI (2017), que analiza la evolución de la desigualdad a lo largo de la historia. Otra obra notable es Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019), donde explora la caída del Imperio Romano y sus implicaciones para el desarrollo económico posterior. Estas publicaciones se enmarcan en el género de historia económica y social.
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