Despite the vast evidence on the relevance of the state's institutional capacity, we lack an organic theory of its origins and impact. Established in 2017, the Origins project has started shedding light on this issue by combining the scholarships of archaeologists, Assyriologists, economists, Egyptologists, jurists, paleoclimatologists, and political scientists. Through this unique mix, we are constructing and analyzing the first comprehensive data set of the first stable political, legal, cultural, and market institutions recorded in:
44 major Mesopotamian polities between 3050 and 1750 BCE (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6);
the 34 capitals of the main Egyptian nomes between 2900 and 1750 BCE (7);
29 Indus Valley cities between 3300 and 1900 BCE;
10 Liangshu culture sites between 3300 and 2300 BCE.
The foundational ideas of our approach are that:
Adverse climatic shocks push time-inconsistent elites to grant stronger non-elites' political and property rights to convince them a sufficient part of the return on joint investments will be redistributed via public good provision and thus, to cooperate (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7).
The non-elites reciprocate to democratization by accumulating cultural norms maximizing their investment payoff and signaling their participation despite the limited return on cooperation (6).
By trading-off legal biases with legal uncertainty, the optimal centralization of the legal order eases cooperation in the exploitation of scarce resources.
By balancing returns on trade with exchange inefficiencies (i.e., market power, asymmetric information, and contract incompleteness), markets further support inter-group cooperation.
From a policy point of view, the ORIGINS project provides the first structural empirical analysis of the overall impact of climate change and notably, of its direct effect going through agricultural production and its indirect impact going through state formation and evolution, i.e., state building. While doing so, it opens a research program informing climate policies in developing countries. To elaborate, we are evaluating the external validity of our framework by applying it to the analysis of Europe during the Little Ice Age (8, 9, 10) and the most agricultural countries during the post-war global warming (11).
