Athena’s Trees: Olives, the environment, and the Athenian polis

: an investigation into the position of the environment within a New Institutional Economic framework and the development of Athenian institutions

Abstract

New Institutional Economic (NIE) study of the ancient world has tended to neglect the importance of the environment’s impact on economic, but especially non-economic, institutions. Often scholars leave both the natural and human-created environment out of their frameworks entirely. Whilst the study of the environment is a burgeoning area of ancient historical investigation, and some, including J. G. Manning (2020), do consider the importance of the environment in relation to economic activity, the broad impact of environmental factors on economic activities has not yet been fully considered. This thesis aims to position the environment within a NIE framework in order to reveal the impact that the environment had on ancient Greek, specifically Athenian, economic and non-economic institutions. Oliver Williamson outlined a useful and replicable framework for NIE analysis which I build on to create my own framework intended for analysis of the ancient Greek world. In this thesis, I combine features of environmental history with NIE in a manner which allows me to integrate the institution of the human-created environment at what Williamson calls the ‘zero level’ or the most embedded component of his framework (2000: 600). In this thesis, I discuss the current state of ancient NIE scholarship of the ancient world, before drawing on my case study of the olive, to demonstrate how the environment, impacts not only the orthodox economic realms of demography, agriculture, and prices, but also non-economic institutions, including religion, which can shape economic activity. I discuss the reforms of Solon as a way to demonstrate this range of environmental impacts on economic action. All of this allows me to answer the question of where the environment can be positioned in a NIE framework to elucidate how the environment impacted Athenian institutions.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Edwin H Shaw (Supervisor) & Esther Eidinow (Supervisor)