Pullen et al. (2007) Political Economies of the Aegean Bronze Age
Political Economies of the Aegean Bronze Age is one of three works that dedicated to the study of Aegean Bronze Age economics produced in 2007. It is seeks to continue research on the questions and issues of research, developed and outlined in the 1999 Cambridge conference and publication, Economy and Politics in the Mycenaean Palace States. Political Economy (or economics and politics) is a subject defined for the ancient historian and archaeologist by the work of Karl Polanyi, whose theory of the “palace society” dominates debate nearly a century since its development. The volume is most notably marked by its fundamental lack of theoretical understanding of and engagement with their own subject of study. Thus, Wright in the the concluding chapter laments “Aegeanist indifference to theory and comparative studies” and “lack of aquaintance with the terms of debate defined by social scientists” (p. 249). This, unfortunately, is the endemic to the study of economic history in the Aegean Bronze Age. Two exceptions in this work, however, allow us to piece together the general outline and theory of “political economy” in this work. Before this, however, it is important to state from the outset what is not covered as “political economy” in this volume.
Dimitiri Nakassis’ “Reevaluating Staple and Wealth Finance at Mycenaean Pylos” rightly contextualizes the study of bronze age Greek political economy within the “substantive school” of Polanyi and its use in the work of M.I. Finley in the 1950s and 1960s. The political commitments and meaning of the ideas are left out, but the theory is cited. Under the influence of Polanyi’s theory of reciprocity and redistribution, scholars at Cambridge University in the 1960s and 1970s interpreted the “Myceneaen” Bronze Age as a centralized state, which collected and redistributed central goods under the power of the palace. M.I. Finley contrasted this with “Near Eastern” form of society with the rise of “Western” society in the Homeric and Archaic Age, a period in which the oikos-society was treated as the fundamental atom of the Western, political society which only came to its democratic and republic floruit with the spread of chattle slavery (primarily in agricultural production). This replaced the model of the “feudal” state, introduced at first by Chadwick and Ventris. According to Wright, “serious archaeological consideration of the nature and formation of political economies” began in 1972 with the Colin Renfrew’s Emergence of Civilisation. Renfrew accepted the fundamental model of M.I. Finley and further engaged with the work and ideas developed by Karl Polanyi’s student, Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins re-worked a series of Polanyi’s fundamental theories, adding critical re-articulations of domestic production, reciprocity, and redistribution as well as the theory of the big-man and chief, which were based on his evolutionary and structural interpretation of Melanesian and Polynesian society. According to Renfrew, the state in the bronze age arose endemically from big-men to chiefs, from general reciprocity to controlled redistribution, and from kinship structures to the centralized state. It proposed that the central polis excersized near total control over the collection and redistribution of state resources and production. Nakassis pieces together the next chapter of the story. Sahlins’ student Timothy Earle, in turn, transformed the ideas and concepts of Sahlins, most importantly (for Aegean studies) contributing a theoretical clarification of goods within centralization. He stressed that there are two fundamental forms of state goods: staple goods (i.e. basic food and simple products) and wealth goods (highly produced elite secondary products). Hallstadt critiqued Renfrew’s model on the basis that it failed to account for the limited scope and interest of palace control over goods, arguing that basic staples were collected in order to finance wealth goods and foster production and trade for the elites. This offered a much more limited (and less idealized) interpretation of state centralization. Nakassis argues here (though he has subsequently changed his mind) that the model of staple goods best explains the political economy reflected in the Linear B tablets for Pylos. Contra Galaty and Parkinson, N. argues that there is little to no evidence for internal trade or exchange in wealth goods or fungibility.
For Wright, however, the substantivist and substantivist-structuralist models are highly suspect on the grounds of theoretical, epistemological critique. For Wright, Renfrew’s model (i.e. the peer-polity model he developed later in conjunction with John Cherry (1986)) is part and parcel of the “grand narrative” theories of civilization of the 19th and 20th century. In line with the Cambridge critique of structuralism that arose in the late 1980s and 1990s, Wright critiques this development on the grounds of its “monolithic and antipodal” approach to political economy. The extent to which Wright is seriously engaged in the ideas of German and French critical theory is difficult to gauge. Nonetheless, the argument is sustained and understood in its basic outline. Wright prefers the model of scholars who set out to study “small worlds” (i.e. Broodbank 2004 and Horden & Purcell 2000). “Small worlds” are essential in some form or another for nearly every scholar in the volume. To my count, every contributor claims to eschew monolithic categories of analysis in order to recapture regional of social diversity and / or agency. Curiously, the central monolith is question of “centrality” itself.
Three chapters provide an overview of the development of the palace and trade in Mycenae and Minoa, and offer an extremely useful overview of the evidence for Mycenae and Crete. First, Crete.
I. CRETE
Jan Driessen’s “Spirit of Place. Minoan Houses as Major Actors” provides a synoptic overview of the development of palatial settlement and archaeology in Crete. Driessen rightly points out that “little progress has been made since Evan’s day” in “identifying the elementary unity of production, distribution, transmission and reproduction” in Bronze Age Crete (p. 35). To understand “how Mycenaen society was actually composed,” we must have some idea of the basic unity of social organization (p. 35). Driessen proposes the concept of “the house” (Gillepsie 2000), which serves to reintroduce the anthropological concept of kinship. It is a vague concept and one which serves to reintroduce ideas that have long been part and parcel of economic anthropology. The following table synthesizes Driessen’s discussion (Table I).
In the end, the model provided is fundamentally conservative. Three stages of Minoan history chart the transition from the “house mode of production” (which he claims is a dialectical inversion of “the domestic mode of production”) in which kinship and communal resource use is transformed into the unit of the woikos – the “house” in which families and extended kin create archaeological bases of power and display. He eschews the theory of the “nuclear family,” instead seeking to develop the central palace economy in the LM period from the rise and dominance of particular houses. He is right in the end to admit that his model is contingent on the nascent develeopment of DNA studies, which will ultimately provide a serious, material method of incorporating the study of kinship and social organization back into the study of the Aegean political economy.
II. MYCENAE
Sofia Voutsaki’s “From the Kinship Economy to the Palatial Economy: The Argolid in the Second Millenium B.C.” provides much the same for Argolid what Driessan did for Crete. Voutsaki provides a contrastive analysis of two forms of economy: the kinship economy (MH I-II) and the palatial economy (LH IIIB).
TABLE II
III. TRADE
Cheryl Ward’s chapter on trade is the most helpful chapter in the volume. It provides an overview of the basic evidence we have for trade in the Aegean Bronze Age. It has been summarized in Table III.
TABLE III
In Conclusion, the work unfortunately offers little hope for the future of political economy studies in the Aegean bronze age. Wright’s concluding chapter captures the general state of aporia in the field. Economic history is a serious subject of intense theoretical debate. Wright is correct to state that the scholars in this volume possess neither a serious understanding or interest in “theory and comparative studies” or a general “acquaintance with the terms of debate as defined by social scientists” (p. 249). In the end, the volume leaves us with a general rehashing of the debate between substantivist anthropological economic history of the 1960s and 1970s. Progress in the field is measured by the extent to which young scholars have been able to introduce methods are theories that succesfully critique Polanyi’s and M.I. Finley’s theory of the palace society, redistribution, and centralization. Despite a fundamental ignorance of the socialist politics at the heart of the model (as well as at the heart of the modern well-fare state), critique of the model is performed as a political and ethical act. At its roots, this critique is a continuation of the politics and ethics of German critical theory and French post-modern philosophy. The authors, including Wright, do not cite, understand, or debate the critique they have inherited. The extent to which the critique of historical categories and paradigms of knowledge is in itself political or ethical is ultimately a question for philosophy and/or faith. Whether or not alterity, the subaltern, agency, or any other theoretical abstractions are capable of capturing the effaced voice of history “better” than the emic, substantivist economic anthropology of Polanyi’s theory is a serious question that demands reading, citation, and debate. The scholars in this volume do not provide citations or demonstrate a basic understanding of the theoretical perspective they themselves put forward. In the end, we are a left with a illustrative documentation of how the field of ‘Classics’ interprets bronze age history. In its general outlines, it is a simple story. The people of the neolithic are not formative, the populations of the Early Helladic pre-date the rise of the palatial period, which arises in the Middle Helladic and is largely ‘Minoan.’ The Late Helladic marks the height of the palatial period and is largely ‘Mycenaean.’ Little effort is made to differentiate these populations ethnically, all being treated as part and parcel of the domain of ‘Classical’ departments which continue to fund their study. Where ethical and political interpretation is made strongly, it ironically pushes back at the few inclusions and open studies of ‘Near Eastern’ influence in the Classical Aegean (most of which were made in the 20th century). Thus, the process is largely treated as endemic and emic to ‘Greece,’ despite the overwhelming amount of empirical data that remains to be understood or explained within this model (i.e. the Neolithic population came from Anatolia and the Levant, the material record from Crete to Pylos is replete with Near Eastern materials, iconography, et cet.). Many open questions (i.e. the Anatolian connection to Gray and Kamares ware, the Syrio-Palestinian origin of the Uluburun shipwreck, the myth narratives of Near Eastern origin and / or relation) are either barely discussed or ignored.
Finally, it is important to mention the basic questions of political economy that are not considered or discussed in this volume. Does the political economy of the Aegeans or any of the political economies of the Aegean (from the kinship, domestic, household, to the palace) produce in order to create wealth by means of exchange? Who does the majority of this production? Slaves? Free agricultural farmers? Dependent agricultural farmers? What type of property exists? What is a commodity? For Adam Smith or Karl Marx, a commodity was an object of exchange. Was there barter exchange, local market exchange, extra-polity market exchange? What type of currency was used? Did standardized (or generalized) currency exist in the Aegean? If one looks to find an explanation or discussion of the most basic questions of political economy, one will ultimately be extremely disappointed. Thus, it one wished to study the political economy (or economies) of the Aegean Bronze Age, they will find only the most basic outline of archaeological information to help them in this book.
