ABSTRACT
In summary, foreign mercantile activity and the consumption of foreign goods by the local autochthonous élite may be seen as the primary factor initiating social change in the Early Iron Age Balkans. Beginning as an attempt to secure the scarce resources accruing to the suppliers of raw materials to the classical markets, economic and political centralization led to an increasing demand for foreign status-marking goods and their local equivalents, thus further drawing the region into the Mediterranean orbit. The development which followed the initiation of foreign trade contacts led to (or accelerated an already existing trend towards) the evolution of historically attested large-scale tribal states. The failure of the societies of Serbia and, more generally, southeastern Europe to follow the trajectory of the states to the west, which led to primitive industrialization, the growth of an autonomous middle class, and a social structure that stressed achievement rather than ascription, may be sought in the primacy of extractive industries in the Balkans. The reliance on extraction rather than production led to the concentration of wealth and power in a small élite who controlled the contacts with those buying the raw material and supplying the luxury goods. Finally, the Roman conquest, motivated by the presence of raw materials and extractive industries, as well as by a need to secure the Empire’s borders, terminated this internal evolution, incorporating Serbia and its environs into the Roman political state and mass-market.
