| Book Review | Journal of World History, 14.1

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| Book Review | Journal of World History, 14.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Birth of the Multinational: 2000 Years of Ancient Business History—From Ashur to Augustus. By KARL MOORE and DAVID LEWIS. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 1999. 341pp. $48.00 (cloth).

There is little doubt that globalization is one of the main topics on today's world agenda. After endless discussion in the last years on pros and contras, one almost expected someone to tell us that, in the words of the preacher, "there is nothing new under the sun" (Eccles. I:9) and to explain how the "birth of the multinational" took place some 4,000 years ago and developed since—with variable steps but steadily—toward high standards already reached in Roman Imperial times. Beginning with Old Assyrian multinational trade (chapter 4), the book treats the rise of the Phoenician corporate economy (chapters 5 and 6) and the free-market revolution in classical Greece (chapter 7). State and military capitalism very convincingly are considered hallmarks of the Hellenistic Age (chapter 8). In the unified and globalized Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire business culture becomes "the closest model in antiquity to that of modern Europe and America" (p. 266).

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