Paper Round

Week of July 25, 2022

Welcome to Paper Round, the weekly bulletin for paid subscribers. Each week, I’ll offer up interesting papers, articles, graphs, and videos as well as notices about upcoming events in the economic history-adjacent community.

On we go!

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Ian Morris, in a manuscript submitted to the Journal of Social Computing, evaluates the data collection/generation efforts at the Seshat project, arguing that we need a more flexible category of social organization than the “polity” to evaluate how the Greeks developed “collecting computing” technologies: government, money, infrastructure, information system, and texts. He also argues that the “big question” in studying the so-called “Axial age” is why large, coercion-intensive empires Old-World Axial Age is why some of its large, coercion-intensive empires absorbed the small, capital-intensive city-states that developed these technologies.