FORGING LINKS BETwEEN REGIONS 85
also lowered transaction costs by providing experts who could quickly and
reliably ascertain whether a coin was of good alloy.^84
Conclusion
The Athenians may have lacked much of the abstract conceptual toolbox of
the modern professional economist, but we should not conclude from this
that they were naïve about the economic consequences of the decisions they
made in the Assembly. A hard-nosed empirical understanding of the need for
revenues and the practical measures they could take to increase them was man-
ifest in the various different strategies to reduce transactions costs studied in
this essay. None of these measures were accidental: taken as a whole, it is legit-
imate to speak of a state policy toward trade. Far from being little more than
a series of ad hoc measures to ensure the supply of necessities (grain, metals,
timber), from our sources we can detect a more sophisticated understanding of
trade and finance among Athenians gathered in the assembly, one that was not
aimed at short-term measures, but which looked at these issues with an eye
to the long term. The huge investments the Athenians made in terms of infra-
structure, protecting merchants, and facilitating and supporting their activities
through currency, officials, and courts, not to mention the creative ways in
which they utilized their various forms of honors, is impossible to reconcile
with the minimalist position advocated in much older (and current) scholar-
ship. The Athenians were highly interested in the business of the agora, emporion,
and deigma (and those who used them), and the policy decisions they made in
the assembly bear this out.
NOTES
1 According to Garraty 2010 : 20–26, governments benefit from institutionalizing and regu-
lating the marketplace in at least three ways: to gain tax revenues, to ensure conversion of
surplus commodities, and to control product distributions. Taxing market activities was an
important source of revenue in most premodern states. Marketplace exchanges are spatially
centralized and temporally predictable and therefore were more readily tapped for taxation
than other, decentralized mechanisms of exchange (e.g., reciprocal change), albeit with
substantial costs to the tax assessor (for enforcing tax payments, retaining tax collectors,
book-keeping). Governing agencies may also interfere in marketplace exchanges in order
to facilitate product conversion. For example, markets provide a means for state agents to
convert wealth goods received as tribute into bulk commodities such as food or domestic
wares (or vice versa). Finally, governments may wish to secure the importation of certain
vital commodities or raw materials such as foodstuffs, construction materials, and mineral
resources.
2 The effects that a reduction in transaction costs has on the structure and performance of
organizations and markets have been a central theme of NIE economics since the publica-
tion of Coase’s ‘The Nature of the Firm’ in 1937. For the most part, research on this topic
suggests that lower transaction costs are almost always beneficial and have been linked to