12.A Economic Dynamics in the Hellenistic Empires

The Hellenistic economy was a complex interplay of numerous regionally connected economies, on the one hand, and overarching fiscal-military regimes, on the other.1 The greater fragmentation of the Achaemenid Empire after the establishment of the successor kingdoms created new dividing lines and new political centers in the imperial space of the Afro-Eurasian region. There were now three imperializing monarchies and several breakaway polities that sustained capitals, courts, and armies with the productive capacity of the regions they dominated. Yet despite much regional heterogeneity, the strategies the kings adopted appear to have been similar enough to allow us to approach the Hellenistic world as a connected economic space with recognizable structures that aimed at concentrating imperial capital.2 All successor kingdoms inherited common institutions from the Achaemenids, and the innovations they introduced were informed by the same Graeco-Macedonian experience. Differences accrued from long-term local continuities and the multipolarity of the underlying economic systems that continued to mark the Afro-Eurasian region. The economies of Egypt and Babylonia were shaped by strong institutional traditions that had developed over millennia in response to particular ecologies, social contexts, and religious structures. The economies of the city-states of the Mediterranean, western Asia, the Levant and Judaea profited from their civic organization, agrarian hinterlands, and local networks of exchange that had also developed over