Abstract
There is a general consensus among scholars (e.g. Janssens et al., 2004; Peltokorpi, 2007; López-Duarte and Vidal-Suárez, 2010, p. 578; Holden and Michailova, 2014) that the issues of language as a central component of business communication are under-represented in the contemporary literature on international business. So to write a chapter on this theme with respect to the Ancient World is accordingly a novel enterprise and perhaps all the more so seeing that its businessmen have received ‘scant attention’ from ‘lifelong classical scholars’ (McNeill, 2011, p. xii), whilst business historians seldom venture beyond the 18th century (Vink, 2002, p. 220). This chapter is therefore breaking new ground at least from the general standpoint of management scholarship. Niall Ferguson, in his book The Ascent of Money (2008), writes: ‘only understand the origins of an institution or instrument and you will find its present day role much easier to understand’. This chapter is written in complete agreement with that conviction.
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© 2016 Nigel Holden
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Holden, N. (2016). Economic Exchange and Business Language in the Ancient World: An Exploratory Review. In: Ginsburgh, V., Weber, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-32505-1_11
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