The scholars invited to contribute the primary essays for this collection were given three mandates. The first was to survey the contemporary research in their assigned fields and to provide a bibliography that would give any interested scholar an entree into the literature. The second was to develop their own interpretive perspective on the economic literature of their assigned period. The third, and perhaps the most difficult, was to be very brief and concise. In a project of this type it would be difficult to extrapolate themes or evolutionary sequences that run through the literature over the two thousand years spanned by this survey. To some degree, the invited commentators provide a fund of suggestions that will stimulate interested readers to pursue this line of synthesis for themselves. The editor of this collection did not even entertain the idea of trying to coordinate the presentations and commentaries of this intellectually erudite and diverse group of scholars into agreed upon lines of interpretation. There is enough material, however, to provide a reference base for the interested scholar who desires to follow particular ideas from period to period.