ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author understands how and why political economies emerged as part of developing complex societies, chiefdoms, and agrarian states, which can be identified with the Bronze Age of the Old World and the Formative of the New World. He considers agricultural intensification, redistribution, prestige-goods exchange, political warfare, and ideology. The author argues that the evolution of human societies requires a political economy to mobilize the surplus for finance, and the alternative pathways to complexity may use different means to accumulate and distribute this surplus. He describes the role of political institutions in creating different economic conditions cross-culturally and across time. The author analyses the economies of three cases: the complex chiefdoms of the Hawaiian Islands of the Pacific Ocean, the Wanka chiefdoms of Andean South America, and the Danish Bronze Age chiefdoms of northern Europe. Economies are open systems of production, distribution, and consumption of material things and social services.
