14 Comments

“ it seems prudent to divide Commercial societies into two broad categories”

This seems very reasonable.

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One notable point is that during the Peloponnesian war, Pericles' plan was to pull all the Athenians inside the city walls and reply on imports for food. Unfortunately the overcrowding lead to plague, but economically the plan worked.

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The always most important issue for me is how a society can remain commercial? The natural thing is that a close knit oligarchy of professional warriors steal everything. Here the most interesting thing is why and how the militia system was sustained and how it become so dominant between -5 and 1 centuries AD. The social consequences of military technology in my view are more important that even economic productivity. I used to be an economic infrastructure/ political superstructure guy, and I remain committed to technological determinism, but each day more centered in the social control and military side.

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A big point of difference would be that Greek states were made up of elite clans whereas European autonomous cities were individualistic societies. I, personally, wouldn't take GINI coefficient from 2500 years seriously. GINI data in countries today isn't that trustworthy. Greek states were probably more comparable to clan confederations in Middle East or central Asia.

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Yes, you are absolutely correct about the limitations of the data. However, Ober does give pretty strong evidence that vast majority of houses were roughly the same size, so that is fairly convincing evidence on egalitarianism in that area.

I have never heard of these "elite clans" in Ancient Greece. Do you have a source for that where I can followup?

As for the Middle East and Central Asia, you are absolutely correct. Family ties among elites were also very important in the Roman Republic and Empire.

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Perhaps elite clans is not the right word. I just meant to say they are an endogenous clan based society. As joseph Heinrich's research points out individualism was a unique phenomenon brought on the Catholic Church's marriage program.

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As for the egalitarian housing thing the same thing is said for the indus Valley civilisation in India. I'm pretty skeptical of this claim. I just find it hard to believe that a commercial city can be an egalitarian city.

A common counter argument against this theory is pointing to the Soviet Union. They also had a lot of samey looking houses. Perhaps Greeks were a bunch of control freaks like Stalin or NIMBYs.

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Good point.

I don't think that egalitarianism is important to determining whether a society is a Commercial society or not. And you may be correct that Commercial societies are less egalitarian.

I just thought that it was an interesting point, and it is very relevant to determining whether the economic growth benefited the masses or just a small elite.

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You mean a commercial society will be less egalitarian?

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Oops. Yes.

Corrected.

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Great article! There's a typo: you write that food imports came from the "Baltic", I assume it should be the "Black Sea coast".

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Good catch!

Fixed

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BTW, have you seen Ben Landau-Taylor's description of the four (or five) *instruments of expansion* (https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/the-four-instruments-of-expansion), based on the book *The Evolution of Civilizations* by Carroll Quigley? They seem to map nicely onto your society types.

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No, I don't remember hearing anything about it. Thanks. I will check it out.

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