Origins
Despite the vast evidence on the relevance of the state's institutional capacity, we lack an organic theory of its origins.
To fill this gap, we will combine the scholarships of archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, Assyriologists, economists, jurists and political scientists.
Through this unique mix, we will construct the first comprehensive data set of the first stable state institutions recorded in 44 major Mesopotamian polities between 3050 and 1750 BCE, minimize the errors of this exercise and maximize the credibility of the analysis of these data.
The foundational idea of our approach is that adverse climatic shocks push time-inconsistent elites to share their decision-making power with the non-elites to convince them a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments will be redistributed via public good provision and thus, to cooperate.
Three are the consequences of these institutional dynamics:
1) Severe droughts should have also determined-via political reforms-the state's fiscal capacity, i.e., the elites' ability to entice the non-elites via public good production.
2) The dominated polities with the most inclusive political process had an incentive to safeguard their autonomy by obstructing the market integration of the Mesopotamian empires, who reacted by always imposing administrative centralization and dictating extractive policies on the less militarily relevant areas.
3) More inclusive political institutions and/or homogeneous preferences should have favored centralized legal orders.
Our project provides the first structural empirical model of state-building and the overall impact of climate change and opens a research program informing climate policies in developing countries. To elaborate, we are evaluating the external validity of our framework by applying it to the analysis of the institutional evolution of Europe during the little Ice Age (see 1, 2, 3) and that of the most agricultural countries during the post-War global warming (see 4 and 5).
PI: Carmine Guerriero (University of Bologna).
Co-PIs and Co-Authors: Mark Altaweel (UCL), Giacomo Benati (University of Barcelona, co-PI of AlmaIdea), Serra Boranbay (Cornell University), Amin Gholami (University of Bologna), Andy Hanssen (Clemson University), Barbara Luppi (Unimore, co-PI of PRIN), Alessio Palmisano (University of Torino), Francesca Pancotto (Unimore), Francesco Parisi (University of Bologna), David Stasavage (NYU), Magnus Widell (University of Liverpool) and Federico Zaina (Museo Egizio di Torino, co-PI of AlmaIdea).
(Present and Previous) Research Assistants and PostDocs: Amin Gholami (University of Bologna), Giancarlo Lago (University of Bologna), Jacopo Monastero (University of Bologna), Laura Righi (Unimore).
Funding: 2017 AlmaIdea junior grant, 2015 "Rita Levi-Montalcini" program, 2022 PRIN grant.
Published Papers:
1) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2021. ``Climate Change and State Evolution." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118 (2021): e2020893118.
2) Benati, Giacomo, Carmine Guerriero, and Federico Zaina. 2021. ``The Economic and Institutional Determinants of Trade Expansion in Bronze Age Mesopotamia." Journal of Archaeological Science, 131: 105398.
3) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2022. ``The Origins of the State: Technology, Cooperation and Institutions." Journal of Institutional Economics, 18: 29-43.
4) Benati, Giacomo, Carmine Guerriero. and Federico Zaina. 2022. ``The Origins of Political Institutions and Property Rights." Journal of Comparative Economics, 50: 946-968.
5) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2023. ``Combining Social Sciences, Geoscience and Archaeology to Understand Societal Collapse." Quaternary Science Reviews, 314: 108217.
Unpublished Papers:
1) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2024. ``Against Historical Determinism: Embracing a Multidisciplinary Approach to Study State-Building."
2) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2024. ``The Origins of (a Culture of) Cooperation."
3) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2024. ``Climate Shocks and State-Building."
4) Benati, Giacomo, and Carmine Guerriero. 2024. ``The Cimate Shocks, Democratizaion and (a Culture of) Cooperation."