Conflict and Growth in Classical Greece

Abstract

What is the impact of political violence on economic development? The political economy literature has variously articulated the pernicious relationship between political violence and growth (Barro 1991; Collier 1999; Fearon & Laitin 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 2004). If a small number of contributions have highlighted some context-dependent positive outcomes (Miguel et al. 2004; Blattman 2009), such outcomes tend to relate more commonly to other types of developmental outcomes, like democracy, or civic participation (Acemoglu & Robinson 2000; Bellows & Miguel 2009). In this paper, we return to the question of whether political violence can coexist with economic growth by analyzing the case of classical Greece (600-300BCE). In this period, Greece’s city states suffered frequent episodes of political violence (stasis; plur. staseis): the average rate is more than once per decade. Yet, in the same period, they also experienced one of the longest-lasting efflorescences of the pre-modern era. Our paper relies on a new dataset of Greek staseis to articulate several mechanisms whereby high-frequency political violence proved compatible with sustained economic growth. Our finding that growth coexisted with endemic violence problematizes the view – common among scholars of institutional and organizational economics, as well as scholars of ancient Greek economic development – that economic growth requires a stable institutional environment characterized by secure property rights, political stability, and relatively low transaction costs.