THE COLLAPSE OF THE ÚNĚTICE CULTURE: ECONOMIC EXPLANATION BASED ON THE “DUTCH DISEASE”

• Authors: Svizzero Serge
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Most explanations of social collapse highlight the ecological strain or the role of economic stratification but they hardly try to establish a link between the origins of prosperity and the causes of collapse. Our purpose is to establish such link, i.e. to provide an explanation of collapse based on the origin of prosperity. For cultures of the Bronze Age, the prosperity came from metalworking, i.e. initially from a mining boom and then to the subsequent activities (bronze production) it allowed. In such context, the collapse can be the result of an economic crisis known in modern economic analysis as the “Dutch Disease”, a term that broadly refers to the harmful consequences of large increases in a country’s income. Such explanation is particularly well suited to spell out the collapse of a Central European Early Bronze Age culture, the Únětice culture (2300-1600 B.C.).

Keywords

EN

Bronze Age; Dutch Disease; Central Europe; Social collapse; Únětice culture; metalworking

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: University Service Publishing, Prague, Czech Republic
• Journal: Czech Journal of Social Sciences, Business and Economics
• Year: 2015
• Volume: volume 4
• Issue: Issue 3
• Pages: 6-19

Contributors

author

Svizzero Serge

• Professor of Economics at Faculté de Droit et d’Economie, Université de la Réunion, France