Abstract
By offering out-of-sample observations, pre-modern case studies can provide unique insights into the process of economic development. We focus on the case of ancient Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. During that time, Athens moved beyond the logic of rent-seeking and rent-creation that grips natural states, displaying many features of development present in the modern world. Athenian development rested on a set of institutions different from those prevalent in the modern world: in particular, Athens lacked liberal democratic institutions and strong central governments with high state capacity. The findings yield a twofold conclusion: first, modern theories centered on the recent experience of contemporary nation-states impose too narrow a frame on the phenomenon of development. Second, by analyzing in depth one case study, we reconstruct a different path toward development.
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Notes
All three-numeral year dates and single-numeral century dates are BCE, unless otherwise specified.
We discuss these and other proxies for Athenian development in Sect. 3 below.
A fast-growing literature has developed in recent years that uses the case of ancient Athens to address a number of issues in political economy: see, for example, Fleck and Hanssen (2006, 2012, 2013, 2017), McCannon (2010a, b, 2011, 2012, 2017), Tridimas (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018), Halkos and Kyriazis (2010) and Kyriazis and Economou (2013).
During that period, the polis was defended by ad hoc coordination between powerful elites capable of mustering heavily armed men, or equipping a warship. However, nominal leadership by individuals who held positions and titles of honor may have been in place. In fact, later histories recorded the presence of officials with titles of ‘war leader’ (polemarchos) and ‘ship masters’ (naukraroi).
As we explain more fully below, in the 5th century, a significant fraction of Athenian revenue came from the empire, which the city controlled from the year 478 to the end of the Peloponnesian War in the year 404. The Athenian empire was the product of Athens’ consolidation of power over the group of island and coastal poleis that had been dominated by or threatened by the Persian empire before the Greek victory in the Persian wars of 480–479.
Here, a distinction ought to be drawn between the ‘centralized’ law-making institutions (i.e., the Assembly and the law courts), which elaborated the content of laws and norms and passed judgments on individual cases, and the sphere of enforcement, which was thoroughly decentralized. Another distinction worthy of note concerns the degree of centralization: whereas in most modern countries the elaboration and application of norms and laws are within the purview of a relatively small cadre of ‘experts’, in Athens those tasks were carried out by large swaths of the lay population. For a detailed overview of Athens’ complex judicial system see Carugati (2019).
Carugati et al. (2015) contend that Athenian courts met the incentive-compatibility constraint because their judgments presented the following features: qualified universality (that is, the laws apply to all those on whom enforcement efforts depend); impersonal, neutral and independent reasoning (that is, the law reflected common community expectations and largely was immune to systematic bias and corruption); and openness (that is, court judgments took into account a variety of informal norms and formal laws, which increased the likelihood that individual assessments of wrongdoing would coincide, or substantially overlap, with those of the jury).
We discuss public goods provision in the next section.
The school of the rhetorician Isocrates apparently ended with his death, but the Academy and Lyceum, founded respectively by Plato and Aristotle, had very long histories.
[Xenophon] Athenaion Politeia. 1.10.
On the one hand, the existence of a large population of slaves in Athens suggests that economic activity, particularly in labour-intensive sectors such as mining, relied in part on slave labour. On the other hand, the fact that, as discussed above, some slaves (both privately and publicly owned) enjoyed forms of freedom, economic independence, and the protection of their dignities suggests that we need a more complex view of slavery in ancient Athens, and of the relationship between unfree labor and the polis’s economy. The former increasingly is receiving attention (see esp. Kamen 2013; Ismard 2015). The latter remains understudied.
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Carugati, F., Ober, J. & Weingast, B.R. Is development uniquely modern? Ancient Athens on the doorstep. Public Choice 181, 29–47 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-00632-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-00632-w