This new volume enlarges on the debate that still continues almost thirty years after Richard Hodges' ground-breaking Dark Age Economics was first published. Richard Hodges focuses on the archaeological, anthropological and historical models of gift and commodity exchange, pertinent to Europe during the seventh to ninth centuries, and shows how these debates shed new light on the evolution of the Early Medieval political economies. Special attention is also given to new evidence for managing agrarian economies and how this shaped the evolution of towns. Ranging across western Europe, a new thesis is advanced about the shift from the consumption economies of antiquity to the emphasis upon production in the Middle Ages.