ABSTRACT
What is the role of entrepreneurship in ancient economies? This question is pertinent to understanding the origins of merchants—a social class that has long served as both heroes and villains in economic narratives. In this chapter, we draw on the ideas of Mariana Mazzucato to re-examine the role of the world’s earliest clearly documented merchants—those who first emerged in the Bronze Age economies of West Asia. Mazzucato argues that entrepreneurs are inextricably linked to the states that support them and that states are often entrepreneurial in their own endeavors. Drawing on both archaeological and Assyriological sources, we adopt Mazzucato’s lens, finding that ancient merchants took advantage of their connections to entrepreneurial states to accumulate wealth by moving goods into and out of their polities. While this access to international trade helped them acquire unprecedented levels of wealth—becoming a new class of millionaires—these accumulations did not reach levels that could supplant activities usually only undertaken by the states that supported them.
