Practice question · Multiple choice
A Bronze Age chief in Denmark could be cut off from weapons by events in Afghanistan. What does that dependency do to political structure?
Hints
- Ask what a chief must maintain to keep his warriors armed, and where it is.
- Copper is local, tin is not. Who becomes indispensable?
Show the answer
D. It concentrates power in whoever controls the exchange
Why
Authority follows the scarce input, and tin arrived only through long chains of exchange, so the people who could keep those chains open were the people who ruled. Iron dissolved the arrangement precisely because it needed no distant partner, which is why the metal's abundance was politically explosive.
Practise The Bronze Age and Metallurgy
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