Events

Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

In this Quantitative History Webinar, Patrick Fitzsimmons of the University of Pennsylvania will present a theory of how lowering the cost of doing violence around 1200 BCE contributed to political fragmentation across the Eastern Mediterranean. He points out that bronze’s reliance on scarce tin concentrated the means of violence among elites, supporting large, centralized empires, while the widespread availability of iron redistributed weapons access to non-elites and weakened elite dominance. Using novel century-level shapefiles of ancient Eastern Mediterranean polities, Patrick exploits staggered iron adoption across 200 km × 200 km grid cells in a two-way fixed-effects framework, finding that iron adoption increases polities per cell by approximately 1.47–1.52 units. An instrumental-variable approach roughly doubles this estimate, and analyses of bronze show the opposite effect. A range of alternative specifications and explanations are tested; all point toward iron’s fragmenting effect.

Discussant: Senhao Hu, PhD student, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS)

Date: April 2, 2026

Time: 09:00 – 10:30
09:00 (Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore)
21:00 (-1, New York)|18:00 (-1, Los Angeles)|02:00 (London)|10:00 (Tokyo)|12:00 (Sydney)

Venue: Zoom Webinar

Language: English

The Quantitative History (QH) Webinar Series aims to provide researchers, teachers, and students with an online intellectual platform to keep up to date with the latest research in the field, promoting the dissemination of research findings and interdisciplinary use of quantitative methods in historical research. The QH Webinar Series, now entering its sixth year, is co-organized by the Centre for Quantitative History at the HKU Business School and the International Society for Quantitative History in partnership with the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Series is now substantially supported by the Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. [AoE/B-704/22-R]).

Conveners: Professors Zhiwu Chen & Chicheng Ma