Ancient History and Economics

Ancient history and economics is a combination that might seem unexpected at first but rewards close examination. Ancient history is the study of the Greek and Roman worlds, reconstructed from literary, documentary, and material sources, and it encompasses the political, social, cultural, and economic life of civilisations that shaped the modern world. Economics provides the analytical tools to understand resource allocation, market behaviour, and the structural forces that determine how societies create and distribute wealth.

Applied to the ancient world, those tools illuminate the dynamics of ancient trade, agricultural production, slavery, monetisation, and the economic foundations of empire in ways that purely narrative history cannot.

The four-year full-time Ancient History and Economics programme at the University of St Andrews develops expertise in both disciplines simultaneously. Your ancient history studies will explore the history of Greece and Rome and of neighbouring peoples including the Persians and Carthaginians, spanning the period from the beginning of Greek writing and urbanism in the eighth century BCE to the collapse of the western Roman empire in the fifth century CE. Geographically, the subject is centred on the Mediterranean world, which at various points extended from the Persian Gulf to the Clyde and from the Crimea to the Sahara.

Your economics studies develop the theoretical and quantitative skills that allow you to engage with economic questions rigorously, and to bring those skills to bear on both historical and contemporary problems. A year abroad gives you the opportunity to study both subjects in a different academic environment.

With a typical entry tariff of 232 points, the programme is demanding and attracts students with genuine intellectual breadth. Graduates pursue careers in finance, public policy, academia, consulting, the civil service, heritage, and journalism, as well as postgraduate study in economics, ancient history, or classics.