Editorial: Origins, foundations, sustainability and trip lines of good governance: Archaeological and historical considerations

New views on price-making markets and the capitalist impulse: beyond Polanyi

“…The persistent and widely evident resistance to slavery and the profit-driven economic practices associated with it serve as a strong contradiction to Polanyi's notion of a disembedded economy but also his rationale that capitalism and modernity are principally grounded in a newly effusive rational mindset (Blanton et al, 2022). After all, the new practices of the Atlantic slave economy and its outgrowths were widely resisted.…”

“…In recent years, we and our colleagues have employed a collective action approach to answer the question: What conditions allow an exploited and seemingly powerless subaltern class to be incorporated more fully into the broader society and polity (e.g., Fargher, 2008, 2016;Carballo et al, 2014;Blanton et al, 2021Blanton et al, , 2022Fargher and Blanton, 2021;? This research has emphasized the causal significance of a fiscal economy in which a state's resources are jointly produced and effectively and equitably managed ("collective action") (see Levi, 1988).…”

Rethinking Premodern Governance: Passing the Torch

“…Although these institutions were present in most, if not all, sedentary prehispanic societies, the different ways that they were manifested and how they articulated with each other underpinned the marked diversity of Mesoamerican societies, even within single Mesoamerican regions and macroregions across time. Past categorical approaches, most of which projected back from the present or more recent eras, such as the direct historical approach, culture history, terms such as Formative, Classic, and Postclassic (when they referenced more than time), and even the imposition of Marx's Asiatic Mode to another non-Western world, all inadequately account for the organizational diversity that was prehispanic Mesoamerica (e.g., Blanton et al 2022a;Feinman and Carballo 2018;Feinman and Nicholas 2012). Alternatively, if we conduct archaeology looking forward (as well as back), focused on the suite of key institutions in each premodern world and recognize that they were to degrees 'autonomous having separate reach, resources, objectives, and personnel' (Kowalewski and Heredia-Espinoza 2020: 512-513), then we stand a far better chance to describe and explain the diversity that was prehispanic Mesoamerica.…”

“…Here, in this essay, part of a collection that celebrates Claessen's career, it is my privilege to recognize and contextualize what I see as some of Henri Claessen's key conceptual contributions and to endeavor to build on them, leveraging new empirical findings from the past half-century of archaeological research. The aim is to continue to recast comparative approaches to long-term political change and human cooperation in ways that diminish presumptions of linear progress and essentialism, and that continue to strip away the biases of nineteenth century colonialist thinking that long have been embedded in Western social science (e.g., Bhambra and Holmwood 2021;Blanton et al 2022a).…”