Palace economy

The essence of the idea is that a central administration plans production, assigns elements of the population to carry it out, collects the goods and services thus created, and redistributes them to the producers.

The thread leading to the current use of the terms came from the study of the palaces of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, which flourished in the Late Bronze Age on Crete and mainland Greece respectively.

In The World of Odysseus he noted that most distribution was internal:[5]All the production work, the seeding and harvesting and milling and weaving, even the hunting and raiding, though carried on by individuals, was performed on behalf of the household as a whole ... and from the centre they were redistributed ... Finley further hypothesized that gift-giving, "the basic organizing mechanism among many primitive peoples,"[6] had been developed into a system of exchange, without prices, and dependent on the ad hoc valuation of the exchangers:The act of giving was ... always the first half of a reciprocal action, the other half of which was a counter-gift.Finley's observations were immediately and almost universally accepted[by whom?

Mycenaean ships were sent out from the palace complexes laden with ceramics, oils, perfumes and other goods precisely as though they were exports for sale, rather than gift-giving.

By 1965, the concept of a palace economy was being applied widely to Aegean and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations of the Late Bronze Age.

Halstead summarizes a forum begun by Nakassis and others as[14]The term 'redistribution' has been used with a range of meanings in the context of the Aegean Bronze Age and so obscures rather than illuminates the emergence and functioning of political economies.As early as the Middle Bronze Age, roughly the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by a civilization named Minoan by its discoverer, Sir Arthur Evans, excavating the Palace of Knossos, which he termed the Palace of Minos.

There are legends, such as that of Theseus and the Minotaur, which indicate that tribute of some sort was collected by Crete from overseas locations, but its legendary history is far different from the wars and warriors of the mainland.

Consequently, nothing is known about the economy beyond what can be deduced from the archaeology or inferred by drawing risky parallels to the information presented in Late Bronze Age documents, which can be read.

Produce from surrounding farmland was collected, recorded, and stored in the palaces as seen from the large number of storerooms and pithoi (storage jars) recovered.

The mandala model for describing the patterns of diffuse political power in early Southeast Asian history, originated by O. W. Wolters 1982, does not address economic issues.

Following British agent John Crawfurd's Siam mission in 1822, his journal describes a "palace economy" that he attributes to rapacity.

His mission was delayed at the port of Pak Nam until he had given a satisfactory account of gifts to the palace, ending with interrogation into minute details with regards to the gift of a horse, which Crawfurd considered "but a good specimen of the indelicacy and rapacity which we afterwards found so characteristic of the Siamese Court and its officers, upon every question of a similar nature".