An economy does not exist until someone invents the institutions to coordinate surplus. Before agriculture, there was no surplus to coordinate. After agriculture, every society that produced more than it consumed faced the same problem: who stores it, who distributes it, who decides. The answers were not natural categories waiting to be discovered. They were institutional inventions, each specific to its time and place, each carrying consequences that shaped everything built on top of them. This chapter traces those inventions from the first agricultural settlements through the classical empires, ending where the classical world collapsed and handed forward to a post-classical rebuilding on different foundations.
Named literature: Bellwood (2005); Diamond (1997); Postgate (1992); Englund (1990); Polanyi (1944, 1957); Schaps (2004); von Reden (2010); Finley (1973); Hopkins (1980); Temin (2013); Bowman & Wilson (2009); Scheidel ed. (2009); Twitchett & Loewe eds. (1986); Lewis (2007); Harl (1996); Duncan-Jones (1994).
Sometime around 10,000 BCE, in the hills flanking the upper Euphrates and Tigris rivers, communities that had foraged for millennia began cultivating wild emmer wheat and barley. Within a few thousand years, the same transition occurred independently in at least six other regions: rice cultivation in the Yangtze valley by c.8000 BCE, millet in the Yellow River valley by c.7000 BCE, maize and squash in Mesoamerica by c.7000 BCE, potatoes and quinoa in the Andes by c.7000 BCE, taro and yams in the New Guinea highlands by c.7000 BCE, and sorghum and pearl millet in the Sahel belt of sub-Saharan Africa by c.5000 BCE. Agriculture was not a single invention that diffused outward from one center. It was independently invented at least seven times, on different crops, in different ecologies, on different continents.
The pattern matters because it establishes the chapter’s framing claim: an economy comes to exist as a category only when surplus exists and must be coordinated. Before agriculture, human groups consumed what they gathered and hunted. Storage was limited, accumulation temporary, and the coordination problem small enough to solve through kinship and reciprocity. Agriculture changed the terms. A grain harvest that exceeded immediate consumption created a surplus that could be stored, taxed, redistributed, traded, or stolen. Each of those verbs names an institutional choice. None was inevitable.
The first cities emerged where surplus was large enough to sustain people who did not grow food. Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (c.7500 BCE) housed several thousand people in a dense settlement with communal granary architecture, but no visible administrative hierarchy. Uruk in southern Mesopotamia (c.3500 BCE) was different: a city of perhaps 40,000 with temple complexes that collected, stored, and redistributed grain. Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley (c.2500 BCE) had standardized weights and measures across a wide urban network. Erlitou in the Yellow River basin (c.1900 BCE) shows the earliest archaeological signatures of Chinese state formation. Each site represents a different solution to the same coordination problem: how to organize specialized labor when surplus makes specialization possible.
The concept that organizes the pre-modern economic world is the Malthusian regime: the observation that productivity gains in agriculture led to population growth, which consumed the gains, returning per-capita output to the neighborhood of subsistence. A settlement that doubled its grain yield did not double its standard of living; it doubled its population until the original per-capita level reasserted itself. This ratchet mechanism operated for millennia. The formal model lives in economics ch. 13; what matters here is the structural implication. Pre-modern economies could grow extensively—more people, more land under cultivation, more total output—without growing intensively: more output per person. The distinction between extensive and intensive growth is the analytical frame the rest of this chapter depends on.
The surplus-coordination problem and the Malthusian regime together define the institutional landscape of the ancient world. The next section walks the first organized solution: the palace economy, where the state itself stored, allocated, and redistributed the surplus that agriculture produced.
A clay tablet from the Ur III dynasty (c.2050 BCE) records the following: 30 sila of barley to Ur-Shulgi, a leather worker; 20 sila to Nanna-mansum, a reed worker; 40 sila to Lu-dingirra, a smith. The tablet names the granary, the date, the official who authorized the disbursement. Thousands of these tablets survive from the Ur III period alone. They document a system in which the state collected agricultural output as taxation in kind, stored it in centralized granaries, and redistributed it as rations to workers organized by skill and assignment. The unit of account was barley, measured in gur (approximately 300 liters) and sila (approximately 1 liter). No prices appear. No market transactions are recorded. The coordination mechanism was administrative allocation, not exchange.
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) named this institutional pattern redistribution, distinguishing it from market exchange and reciprocity as the three modes of economic coordination, vocabulary the chapter uses without re-narrating Polanyi’s project, which lives in C. The Ur III state was a palace economy: a system in which the central authority (palace or temple) collected surplus, maintained inventories, and allocated goods and labor through administrative channels. The temple economy variant, where religious institutions performed the same coordinating function, operated alongside or within the palace system across Mesopotamia.
Egypt’s pharaonic state ran a parallel design. Granaries along the Nile stored the harvest collected as taxation; corvee labor mobilized the population for construction, irrigation, and military service. The administrative apparatus was different in form (hieratic script on papyrus rather than cuneiform on clay), but the institutional logic was the same: centralized collection, centralized storage, centralized redistribution. The pyramids were built not by slaves (a persistent misconception) but by corvee laborers fed from state granaries, organized in rotating work gangs documented in surviving administrative records.
The Indus valley civilization (c.2600–1900 BCE) presents a harder case. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa show urban planning, standardized weights and measures, and long-distance trade connections reaching Mesopotamia. But the Indus script remains undeciphered, and no administrative archive comparable to the Ur III tablets has been recovered. The standardized weights suggest coordinated exchange; the urban layout suggests centralized planning. The documentary thinness means that institutional claims about the Indus economy rest on material evidence (archaeology, not text) and carry wider uncertainty than the Mesopotamian or Egyptian cases.
Shang China (c.1600–1046 BCE) adds the East Asian dimension. Oracle bone inscriptions from Anyang record royal divinations about harvests, military campaigns, and ritual obligations. The Shang state controlled bronze production (a strategic resource requiring tin and copper from distant sources), organized agricultural labor, and maintained a court-centered redistributive system. The oracle bones are not administrative tablets in the Ur III sense; they record questions to ancestors rather than ration allocations, but they document a state apparatus that coordinated surplus at scale.
The Linear B inventories from Mycenaean palace centers (~1450–1200 BCE) extend the documentary base to the Aegean Bronze Age. Mycenaean palace economy was institutional-equivalent to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian palace systems, even though its documentary base is Greek-language: the tablets from Pylos and Knossos record grain stores, livestock counts, textile production quotas, and labor assignments in the same administrative-allocation mode the Ur III tablets document.
The strong claim is this: Bronze Age palace economies coordinated surplus through centralized redistribution, and the palace-economy design admitted no modern-sense market layer within its coordination scope. Market-like activity existed at the periphery (long-distance trade in luxury goods, local exchange in items outside the palace system’s interest), but the bulk of surplus coordination was administrative, not price-mediated. The Polanyian vocabulary captures the structural point: redistribution was the dominant mode; market exchange operated at the margins.
The palace-economy design was the ancient world’s first organized solution to the surplus-coordination problem. It worked for millennia. When it collapsed, the institutional space it had occupied opened to designs that looked nothing like it.
When the Bronze Age palace systems collapsed around 1200 BCE, the institutional space they had occupied opened to new designs. The collapse itself, conventionally associated with the Sea Peoples, drought, and cascading systems failure across the eastern Mediterranean, remains debated in its causes. What matters here is the institutional consequence: the centralized redistribution apparatus that had coordinated surplus from Mycenae to Mesopotamia fragmented. The Iron Age that followed was not a dark age in the sense of civilizational regression everywhere, but it was a period in which the palace-economy model ceased to function at its prior scale, and the societies that rebuilt did so on different institutional foundations.
The most consequential of those new foundations was coinage. Between the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, three civilizations independently invented coined money: standardized pieces of metal bearing a state-warranted mark of weight and purity. The convergence is the chapter’s strongest historical-economic argument: coinage was not a single invention that spread along trade routes, but an institutional solution that emerged independently in response to similar coordination problems in societies with no documented contact on this specific innovation.
| Region | Date | Material | Form | What it replaced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lydia | ~7th c. BCE | Electrum | Dump with state mark | Weighed-electrum trade |
| India | ~6th c. BCE | Silver | Punch-marked | Weighed-silver and barter |
| China | 7th–6th c. BCE | Bronze | Spade-and-knife | Cowries and weighed-bronze |
In Lydia (western Anatolia), electrum dumps bearing the royal lion stamp replaced the practice of weighing electrum at each transaction. In the Ganges plain, silver punch-marked coins replaced weighed-silver and barter arrangements. In the Zhou-dynasty states of northern China, bronze cast into spade and knife shapes replaced cowrie shells and weighed-bronze. The materials differed, the forms differed, the political contexts differed. The functional innovation was the same: coinage added portability, divisibility, and state-warranted value to what had previously been a weighing-and-assaying problem at every exchange. Pre-coinage economies already had units of account (barley in Mesopotamia, silver by weight in the Levant). Coinage added the medium of exchange function, a physical object that could circulate without re-verification, and, where the state’s guarantee held, a store of value that retained purchasing power across time and distance. The modern debate about money’s nature (commodity, credit instrument, state creation) begins with these three independent inventions; the BQ10 walkthrough carries that debate forward.
Classical Greece built the first economy in which market coordination—not palace redistribution—organized the bulk of surplus. Athens is the best-documented case. The Athenian economy of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE integrated agricultural production, craft manufacturing, long-distance trade, and a monetary system based on the silver tetradrachm into a commercial system that fiscally underwrote the polis.
The institutional package at Laurion makes the structure concrete. The silver mines at Laurion, southeast of Athens, were state-owned but leased to private operators who worked them with slave labor, an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 slaves at peak production. The silver flowed to the Athenian mint, which struck the tetradrachms that circulated across the eastern Mediterranean. The revenue funded the Athenian navy, the triremes that secured Athenian commercial dominance after the Persian Wars, and underwrote the citizen leisure economy that made Athenian democracy, philosophy, and theater possible. State-owned resource, private operation, slave labor, monetary output, naval power, citizen welfare: the components formed an integrated institutional design in which each element depended on the others.
Classical slavery was structurally different from the Atlantic slavery that ch. 9 examines. Greek and Roman slavery was not racially defined, not organized around plantation monoculture, and not embedded in a transatlantic commodity chain. Slaves in Athens included war captives, debt bondsmen, and purchased foreigners; they worked in mines, households, workshops, and agriculture. The structural distinction matters because the economic functions of classical and Atlantic slavery were different, and conflating them obscures both.
Aristotle named the tension between household management (oikonomia) and wealth-acquisition-for-its-own-sake (chrematistics), the earliest surviving attempt to draw a boundary around what economic activity is for. The intellectual-history side of that distinction lives in C; what matters here is that by the 4th century BCE, the market-coordinated economy had become visible enough to provoke philosophical reflection on its nature.
The redistribution-to-market transition was not a replacement but an addition. Palace redistribution continued in Persia, in Ptolemaic Egypt, in the Maurya empire. Market coordination emerged alongside it. By the classical period, multiple institutional designs operated in parallel across Eurasia, a pattern the next two sections trace to its fullest expression in the Roman and Han empires.
By the mid-2nd century CE, the Roman empire had reached its institutional and demographic peak: an estimated 60–65 million people (Scheidel’s range; other reconstructions run higher), the city of Rome at perhaps 1 million inhabitants, a Mediterranean trade system integrated by silver coinage that circulated empire-wide, and Roman law providing the contractual substrate that medieval and early modern European commerce would later inherit.
Roman law’s contribution to economic life was specific and durable. The societas (partnership) gave merchants a legal form for pooling capital and sharing risk. Contract enforcement through the praetor’s court made long-distance commercial commitments credible. Inheritance law and property classification (the distinction between res mancipi and res nec mancipi) created a framework for transferring productive assets across generations. These were not abstract legal principles; they were the institutional infrastructure that made Mediterranean-scale commerce operational.
The rural economy rested on the latifundium (the large slave-worked estate that dominated Italian and provincial agriculture from the 2nd century BCE onward). Latifundia produced grain, wine, and olive oil for urban and military markets. The labor force was enslaved, drawn from conquest and the slave trade that followed Rome’s military expansion. The structural parallel with ch. 9’s Atlantic plantation system is real but limited: Roman slavery was not racially organized, not monocultural in the Caribbean sense, and not embedded in a transatlantic commodity chain. The economic function was shared (coerced labor producing surplus for distant markets); the institutional form was different.
Urban Rome at its peak was the largest pre-modern logistical operation. The annona (the state grain supply) fed roughly 200,000 recipients with Egyptian and North African grain shipped across the Mediterranean, stored in the warehouses at Ostia, and distributed through a bureaucratic apparatus that managed procurement, transport, and allocation at a scale no prior state had attempted. The Pax Romana, the period of relative internal peace from Augustus through the Antonines (27 BCE to 180 CE), was the political precondition for this commercial integration. Amphora archaeology documents the pattern concretely: standardized shipping containers for wine, olive oil, and fish sauce circulated across the Mediterranean in volumes that imply organized, market-coordinated trade rather than ad hoc exchange.
The Roman economy at peak was extensive-growth: more people, more land under cultivation, more total output, more trade volume. It was not intensive-growth: per-capita productivity did not rise on a sustained basis. The Malthusian ceiling that §1.1 introduced operated here. Roman population grew until it pressed against the agricultural productivity frontier; the surplus that funded urban life, military expansion, and Mediterranean commerce was extracted from a rural economy that did not experience sustained per-capita improvement. The silver-content series in §1.6 documents the peak as well as the collapse. The formal growth-theory machinery that formalizes this observation lives in economics ch. 13.
The question of how to characterize the Roman economy has generated one of economic history’s most productive disagreements. Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) made the primitivist case at its strongest form. For Finley, the Roman economy was status-bound and embedded in social relations that prevented market coordination from operating as an autonomous system. Economic activity was shaped by honor, obligation, and political power, not by price signals and profit maximization. Markets existed, but they did not coordinate the economy in the way that modern markets do. The Roman elite disdained commerce; wealth derived from land, not trade; and the absence of sustained technological innovation reflected a social structure that did not reward capital-using productivity improvement. Finley’s Rome was large, impressive, and pre-modern in a structural sense that no amount of amphora evidence could overturn.
The modernist response, developed over three decades by Keith Hopkins, Peter Temin, and Alan Bowman among others, assembled the empirical case that Finley’s structural portrait understated. Hopkins (1980) argued that Roman taxation created a monetized economy in which provinces paid taxes in coin, generating trade flows that integrated the Mediterranean commercially. Temin (2013) pushed further: Roman grain prices across the Mediterranean showed the kind of co-movement that implies market integration, not isolated local markets. Bowman and Wilson (2009) quantified Roman economic performance using archaeological proxies (shipwreck counts, lead pollution in Greenland ice cores, animal bone assemblages) and found growth patterns consistent with a market-integrated economy operating at Iron Age scale. The modernist case does not claim Rome was capitalist. It claims Rome was market-coordinated, monetized, and commercially integrated to a degree that Finley’s embedded-economy framework does not capture.
The chapter’s position is closer to the modernists on the empirical claims. The evidence for Mediterranean commercial integration (amphora distributions, coin circulation patterns, price co-movement across provinces) is strong enough to sustain the market-coordination reading. Roman law provided institutional infrastructure for commerce that Finley’s status-bound framework underweights. But Finley’s structural point about the ceiling holds: the Roman economy was extensive-growth, bounded by the Malthusian frontier, and capital-using innovation did not happen at scale. The modernists document what the economy did within that ceiling; Finley identifies the ceiling itself. Both contributions are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient.
The Roman peak, then, was a market-integrated, monetized, commercially active economy operating within the structural constraints of pre-modern extensive growth. The comparison that tests this characterization and anchors the chapter’s central claim about institutional diversity requires a second empire.
Han China at its peak was the era’s other great extensive-growth empire, comparable to Rome on five margins despite a fundamentally different institutional design. The comparison is not an exercise in ranking; it is the chapter’s central test of the claim that the ancient world sustained multiple institutional solutions to the same coordination problem.
The demographic scale was comparable. Han census records from 2 CE report approximately 57.7 million people, though modern reconstructions by Twitchett and Loewe suggest the actual population may have been higher, with estimates running 50–60 million depending on assumptions about census coverage. Chang’an, the Western Han capital, housed several hundred thousand residents and served as the administrative center of a multi-tier urban hierarchy that included Luoyang, Chengdu, and dozens of regional centers. The urban system was smaller than Rome’s in its largest single city but comparable in its hierarchical depth.
Han monetization followed a different path. The Wushu bronze coin, standardized in 118 BCE under Emperor Wu, became the empire’s standard currency and remained in circulation for centuries, making it one of the longest-lived monetary standards in pre-modern history. Where Rome monetized on silver (the denarius), Han China monetized on bronze. The difference in metal reflected different resource endowments and different monetary-institutional choices, but the functional outcome was similar: a state-warranted medium of exchange that circulated empire-wide and facilitated taxation, trade, and administrative payment.
The fiscal design was where the institutional divergence ran deepest. Han China was a bureaucratic-agrarian state: a system in which a salaried bureaucracy, recruited through examination and recommendation (the embryonic form of the examination system that later dynasties would formalize), administered taxation, maintained granaries, and enforced state monopolies on strategic commodities. The state monopolies on salt and iron, established under Emperor Wu and debated in the famous Yantie Lun (Discourses on Salt and Iron, 81 BCE), were fiscal instruments without Roman parallel. Rome taxed provinces through tribute and farmed tax collection to private publicani; Han China taxed through a bureaucratic apparatus that collected, recorded, and remitted revenue through administrative channels. The well-field ideal (jingtian), a system of communal land allocation attributed to the Zhou dynasty, was more aspiration than practice by the Han period, but the equal-fields principle it expressed shaped fiscal policy: the state’s legitimacy rested partly on its role as guarantor of peasant land access against aristocratic accumulation.
The Silk Road as a Han-era institution was state diplomacy, not private commerce. Zhang Qian’s missions to Central Asia (138–126 BCE) opened diplomatic and trade connections reaching Parthia by the 1st century BCE. Silk, lacquerware, and bronze moved westward; horses, jade, and glass moved eastward. The trade map’s Silk Road tab traces the full era-by-era evolution of these routes. The Han state did not operate the Silk Road as a commercial enterprise; it maintained the diplomatic and military infrastructure (garrison towns, relay stations, tributary relationships with Central Asian polities) that made long-distance exchange possible. Private merchants operated within the framework the state provided.
| Margin | Roman Empire | Han China |
|---|---|---|
| Population | ~60–65M (Scheidel; estimates vary widely) | ~50–60M (Hanshu census; modern reconstructions vary) |
| Urbanization | Rome ~1M; multi-tier urban hierarchy | Chang’an several hundred thousand; multi-tier hierarchy |
| Monetization | Silver denarius, stable ~1st c. BCE–2nd c. CE | Bronze Wushu coin, standardized 118 BCE, stable for centuries |
| Trade reach | Mediterranean integration; amphora archaeology documents empire-wide commerce | Early Silk Road as state diplomacy reaching Parthia by 1st c. BCE |
| Fiscal design | Tribute + slave-estate economy (latifundia); provincial taxation | Bureaucratic taxation + state monopolies on salt, iron; examination system embryonic |
The table closes the comparison. Neither empire was “more advanced” than the other. Both were extensive-growth economies operating within the Malthusian ceiling: large populations, substantial urban centers, monetized exchange, long-distance trade, and sophisticated fiscal systems, none of it translating into sustained per-capita productivity growth. The institutional differences (slave-estate vs. bureaucratic-agrarian, tribute vs. administered taxation, silver vs. bronze monetization, Mediterranean maritime integration vs. overland Silk Road diplomacy) shaped how each empire operated within the ceiling but did not lift it. Neither Rome nor Han broke through to intensive growth. The comparable-cores baseline that the Great Divergence chapter traces forward has its deepest roots here: Eurasian institutional sophistication at the Malthusian frontier, running on different designs, reaching comparable outcomes. The formal Malthusian machinery that formalizes this observation lives in economics ch. 13.
The structural symmetry has a name. The Pax Romana, Augustus's restoration of internal peace from 27 BCE through the Antonines and the political precondition for Mediterranean commercial integration that §1.4 narrated, has a Han-side counterpart: the Pax Sinica of the early Han, the long internal stability under the Western Han and the early Eastern Han that sustained continental commercial integration, the Silk Road as state-diplomatic infrastructure, and the bureaucratic-agrarian fiscal apparatus at imperial scale. Neither term implies the absence of conflict (frontier wars, succession crises, and provincial revolts feature in both records); both name the period of sustained internal political stability that made each empire's economic peak possible. The parallel is structural, not metaphorical: in both cases, the political settlement was the precondition for the commercial integration that the chapter has measured.
Both empires, having reached their peaks, faced the same structural vulnerability: the fiscal and monetary systems that sustained them could fail, and when they did, the consequences were measurable.
The most legible record of Roman fiscal collapse runs through the silver content of the denarius. Augustus issued a denarius that was roughly 95 to 98 percent silver. By the reign of Septimius Severus (193–211 CE) the silver content had drifted down to the mid-50s. Across the 3rd century the decline accelerated: the coin held about 85 percent silver around 200 CE, fell below 50 percent within two generations, and by the reign of Aurelian in the early 270s contained less than 5 percent silver beneath a thin silver wash. The chart below tracks the series.
The debasement was not an accident. The Roman state faced rising fiscal pressure across the 3rd century: military expenditure on frontier defense grew as pressure on the limes intensified, civil wars over the imperial succession consumed revenue at a rate the tax base could not match, and provincial economies disrupted by warfare delivered less to the treasury. Reducing the silver content of the coinage allowed the state to mint more coins from the same stock of bullion, a fiscal expedient that funded immediate obligations at the cost of monetary stability. The price level rose. Soldiers and officials paid in debased coin demanded compensating increases in nominal wages. Long-distance commerce, which had depended on the silver denarius as a stable store of value, contracted. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 CE attempted to cap prices across the empire under threat of capital punishment; the edict failed within a generation, an early demonstration that monetary disorder cannot be reversed by decree once confidence in the currency has eroded.
The economic consequences were measurable. Urban populations contracted across the western provinces. Archaeological evidence from sites in Gaul, Britain, and Hispania shows reduced ceramic distributions, smaller occupied areas, and declining building activity through the late 3rd and 4th centuries. The annona survived but at reduced scale; the empire-wide commercial integration that the Pax Romana had supported gave way to more localized exchange networks. The Mediterranean did not cease to function as a trade space, but the integrated commercial system documented by amphora archaeology in the 1st and 2nd centuries fragmented into regional zones with thinner cross-basin flows. Diocletian’s tetrarchy split administrative and fiscal authority across the empire’s eastern and western halves; Constantine’s relocation of the capital to Constantinople in 330 CE consolidated the eastern shift. By the 5th century, Latin western fragmentation and Greek eastern continuity had become the empire’s structural shape. The Byzantine state preserved a recognizably Roman fiscal-monetary apparatus for another millennium while the western provinces reorganized around post-imperial successor kingdoms.
Han China collapsed earlier and along a different trajectory. The Eastern Han dynasty fragmented in 220 CE under the combined pressure of court factionalism, regional warlordism, and a peasant rebellion (the Yellow Turbans, 184 CE) that the central government could not suppress. The Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE) split the Han imperial space into competing successor states. The Jin dynasty’s brief reunification gave way to the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, more than three centuries during which northern China was ruled by successive non-Han dynasties of steppe origin while a Chinese-cultural state persisted in the south. The Sui reunification in 589 CE re-established a single Chinese empire, but the gap between the Han collapse and Sui restoration ran roughly 370 years. The asymmetry with the Roman case is structural: Western Roman collapse came two and a half centuries after the Han fragmentation, and Eastern Roman continuity through Byzantium has no Chinese parallel; the post-Han cycle of fragmentation-and-reunification is its own pattern, not a mirror of the Roman trajectory.
The structural reset across both ends of Eurasia produced shared symptoms: monetary contraction as state-warranted coinage became scarcer and less reliable, urban depopulation as cities lost the fiscal and commercial flows that had sustained them, agrarian-economy reassertion against urban-commercial complexity as estates and villages reorganized around local subsistence, and the fragmentation of the long-distance trade networks that classical-period state systems had sustained. The Roman villa in late antiquity became more self-sufficient; the Han manor estate in the Northern and Southern Dynasties absorbed displaced populations as patron-client units. Sogdian merchants emerged as the new intermediaries on the post-Roman, post-Han Silk Road, building a commercial network on the eastern routes that operated through Central Asian hubs (Samarkand, Bukhara) rather than under direct imperial sponsorship; the trade map’s Silk Road tab traces this Sogdian-heyday phase through the 300–749 era. The post-classical world rebuilt on different foundations.
The chapter’s framing claim (that the economy admits multiple institutional designs operating in parallel) gets its strongest test in the post-classical Eurasian comparison that ch. 2 carries: Tang and Song China, the Caliphates, post-Roman Europe, the Indian Ocean trade world, each operating on institutional foundations that the structural reset opened space for, and none of them simply continuing what the classical empires had built.