Prehistoric Origins Of European Economic Integration

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Prehistoric Origins Of European Economic Integration

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George Grantham ()

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George Grantham

Abstract

Recent archaeological findings indicate that the Hellenistic and Roman economy was a specialized market economy that obtained levels of factor productivity that appear to be on a par with levels current on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This raises the question when that economy began to form. The present paper shows that the most likely dating for the ‘birth of the European economy was the middle third of the first millennium BC. It attributes the knitting of trans-European connections to advances in marine technology in the Middle Bronze Age, the discovery and exploitation of the Iberian silver deposits as specie for the Middle Eastern economies, the advent of iron, and the development of the wine trade between the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. The final factor was the spread of alphabetic writing. Each of these developments has an independent history, suggesting that early European integration was in many respects the product of a random concatenation of quite distinct causes, rather than the joint outcome of a general cause like population growth or changing property rights institutions.

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Paper provided by McGill University, Department of Economics in its series Departmental Working Papers with number 2006-28.

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Length: 60 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2006
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:mcl:mclwop:2006-28

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913
N53 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - Europe: Pre-1913
N70 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - General, International, or Comparative
N73 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: Pre-1913
N90 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - General, International, or Comparative
N94 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: 1913-
O31 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
O33 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
R11 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Analysis of Growth, Development, and Changes

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2006-09-30 (All new papers)
NEP-GTH-2006-09-30 (Game Theory)
NEP-POL-2006-09-30 (Positive Political Economics)

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