Before the Economy? Growth, Institutions, and the Late Bronze Age

The robust interest in documenting and explaining the institutional basis for economic growth in the Greek and Roman worlds has not engaged meaningfully with the evidence from the Bronze Age Aegean. This lack of analytical attention is surprising, for the Bronze Age constitutes a valuable comparative study. The southern Aegean experienced economic growth ca. 2000–1180 BCE, as it did in the first millennium BCE, but in the Bronze Age it does so amidst the development of distinctive institutional forms, notably palaces. This paper substantiates the general impression of aggregate economic growth in the Bronze Age through analysis of demographic and house size data and argues that the archaeological and textual evidence is inconsistent with the idea that the palaces themselves were the cause of this long-term and widespread growth. Indeed, the evidence is also incompatible with the traditional and pervasive idea that the palaces controlled oppressive centralized economies on a supposed Near Eastern model. The paper concludes that the lack of attention to Bronze Age economies as analytically valuable to the study of institutions and growth derives primarily from the fact that the Bronze Age continues to serve primarily as an Oriental (sensu Said) foil to classical Greece, whose institutional uniqueness is thus confirmed.