John Daukas

Profile

Research Interests

• Empire and Imperial Ideology
• The Ancient Economy
• Identity
• Numismatics
• Settler and Colonial Studies
• Ancient Finance and Interstate Relations
• Ancient Political Theory
• Labor History and Slavery

Education

• PhD, The University of California, Berkeley (USA)
• MPhil, The University of Oxford (UK)
• BA, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA)

Biography

John Daukas is an ancient historian whose work broadly centers on imperialism, the ancient economy, and questions of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. His current research focuses on ancient Greek imperialism through the lenses of the ancient economy, especially trade, wealth distribution, and access to resources, and the construction and maintenance of ethnic, political, and interstate communities. His book project, Plotting Empire: The Klerouchy and the Development of Imperialism in the Greek World, traces the development of the klerouchy, an Athenian colonial institution by which the state parceled out plots of new territory to its citizens, and the klerouchy’s role in the development of the notion of imperialism in the Greek world from the Archaic period (early 6^th century BCE) into the Hellenistic period (ca. 3^rd century BCE). Building on his interests in Numismatics, the study of money and currency, his second project will examine the long history of the war indemnity, or the act of imposing war-related debt on defeated states, in the development of imperialism and its place within the larger histories of finance, debt, and diplomatic relations between Mediterranean states.

As a postdoctoral research fellow at the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU, he will be working on his book project while finalizing an article on the development of the war indemnity as a means of financing war and interstate relations for Athenians’ fifth-century empire. He will also be teaching a course in ancient Athenian democracy in the Global Humanities Department in the Spring.