5. Regionalism and regional economies
EXPLORING THE NORTHERN AEGEAN
AS AN ECONOMIC‘SUPER-REGION’
The northern Aegean as an axis of exchange
and as an interfaceGiven that the landmass explored in this book is divided between three
modern states (Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey), and that it was not unified
politically at any one time within the second half of thefirst millennium
bc, in what sense can we consider it to have operated as an economic
region or regions? It is not a contention of this book that the land area
discussed here was in any sense a unity; it was not. If, however, we accept
that complex societies of the European Iron Age did rely on a network of
supplies, at varying distances from the consumers, and accept the overall
applicability of the concept of Mediterranean‘connectivity’as a struc-
tural component of socio-economic relations, then it ceases to be neces-
sary to think of ancient economies in an‘essentialist’manner, and in
terms of well-defined geographical spaces. It was the economic intercon-
nections between the different communities of the north Aegean that
gave their economies a specific character in classical antiquity. It was the
social expectations of the inhabitants, and the networks of exchange to
provide them with specific commodities, that created the interconnec-
tions linking the various geographical spaces explored here. In a purely
local and geographical context,‘the northern Aegean region’ might
simply refer to the islands of Thasos, Samothrace, Lemnos, and perhaps
Lesbos and Chios, with the adjacent coastlines of the Thermaic Gulf,
Chalkidike, and Thrace as far as the Chersonese; but as soon as we
expand the frame of reference beyond the local and the geographical,
then the scope of enquiry has to embrace more distant partners and
different ecologies. The space under consideration includes a number of
different‘regions’in the physical and administrative senses (whether we