just described for Boiotia, in a political context such as the one that is our central concern it is difficult to accept the power implications of this claim. For actors to impose institutions that will govern the actions of others, they must either use (or have) overwhelming force, or they must secure the consent of others. But if they can secure the consent of others, should we not expect that those others would want to have a significant role in shaping the institutions? In a political context, in other words, institutions are more likely to be exogenous in imperial situations than in contexts of endogenous state formation.
One of the most intriguing facets of the process of state formation is the emergence of formal institutions from a situation in which there was no universally recognized system for the distribution of power or the resolution of disputes—only competing individuals and, in the case of the koinon, competing poleis interacting in a world governed by norms but not laws.37 In similar circumstances in the medieval Mediterranean, it has been shown that formal institutions emerged from arrangements made by merchant guilds, nonstate agents, to enforce contracts in the absence of state legal provisions. These institutions laid the framework for later economic growth.38 And the conception of institutions as rules cannot account for this phenomenon, for it assumes that the state has a monopoly on coercive power and can enforce its rules. But the very ability for a state to do this can only be seen as an outcome of institutional development.39
In an important recent book, the economist and historian Avner Greif has proposed an alternative approach to institutions that lends itself extremely well to the problem of institutional dynamics—the emergence and change of institutions over time—as well as to thinking about how institutions affect the behavior of groups, not just of individuals. Greif defines institutions as systems “of rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior.”40 This definition incorporates both informal (rules, beliefs, and norms) and formal (organizations) institutions under the central fact that they all contribute to producing regular behavior, eliciting predictable responses and choices from individuals and groups. The claim that rules, beliefs, and norms play a role in generating regular behavior is superficially obvious, but the role of such informal institutional elements is largely ignored by most economists and political scientists, which is why institutional dynamics have been so difficult to understand. But if we see these institutional elements as contributing to the regularity of behavior, then we can see individual actions and the social and political conditions to which they respond as being recursively related and mutually constitutive.41 And this allows us in turn to see how institutions emerge gradually and endogenously. Change occurs when old institutions become inadequate, whether because of endogenous or exogenous factors. Yet those old institutions have a powerful effect on the direction of institutional change, for they provide “a cognitive framework, information, normative guidance, and a way to anticipate what others may do to coordinate their behavior with their responses.”42 Change tends thus to be incremental; the rootedness of institutions in the past, the way in which they are internalized by individuals such that they affect their understanding of the world, makes comprehensive, wholesale institutional change difficult and rare. Refinement will always be preferred to revolution.43 For this reason institutions are path-dependent and sticky.44 And the farther one travels along a particular path, the more attractive that path becomes relative to others, and the more costly it becomes to turn in another direction.45 But revolution—wholesale change—can occur when crises reveal the complete deficiency of old institutions, and when it does the path ramifies; such moments are critical junctures.46
AN EXAMPLE
Let me return from theory to history and offer one example (undocumented and undetailed for now) that anticipates the argument sustained over the course of this book. The belief that the Boiotians were a distinct population group contributed to a norm of cooperation, despite significant competition, among the many communities that comprised this group in the archaic period. This belief was promulgated above all by myths and by rituals that enacted those myths in sanctuaries common to all Boiotians. The norm of cooperation in turn facilitated exchange between individuals from different Boiotian communities, despite the lack of any formal means of enforcing contracts or recourse in the event of goods being stolen or buyers or sellers being cheated. In the late sixth century exchange between Boiotian communities was facilitated by the production of a cooperative coinage, a coinage produced by multiple poleis on the same weight standard with a common type, again despite the lack of a state encompassing all these communities that could have demanded their cooperation in this matter or simply issued the coins itself. The norm of cooperation was reinforced by the same religious interactions that generated it as well as by the interactions and cooperation of individuals and communities in the economic sphere; it also contributed to military cooperation. Despite all this cooperation, the Boiotian communities were distinct state entities; they were poleis with their own laws, magistracies, and identities, although the details of these are rarely evident to us for the archaic period. And this fundamental fact strongly influenced the way in which the Boiotians cooperated; entrenched polis interests made the possibility of a unified Boiotian state, or the political synoikism of all the Boiotian communities into a single polis on the Attic model, highly unlikely. Thus we find resistance to early proposals that communities should contribute to the Boiotians.
An exogenous shock exposed the profound deficiencies of the Boiotians’ loose cooperative institutions: the region was conquered by the Athenians in 457, and at least some of its communities appear to have been subjected to tribute payment. At this critical juncture, it became apparent that the costs of developing new institutions to strengthen the ties between Boiotian communities, to regularize their old habits of cooperation, and to prevent departures from these habits were less than the cost of attempting to operate in the old ways despite the dramatically changed environment. When the Athenians were expelled from the region a decade later, the Boiotians developed a new set of institutions that regularized their cooperation. A new political entity, the koinon, was created that incorporated the old poleis. The poleis persisted as both states and social entities, but some of their powers were shifted to the koinon, which was governed by representatives of the poleis. Although this was a wholesale innovation, rather than an incremental change, the path was still influenced by the old institutions. Religion had always been a context for interaction, and it was by means of an essentially religious discourse that the Boiotians had articulated their group identity; as a result, the new koinon quickly made itself a part of the religious life of Boiotia and availed itself of the power of religious ritual to integrate and legitimate. At the same time it used its powers to strengthen and facilitate old patterns of economic interaction that had occurred spontaneously but at some risk when there was no state entity to govern and protect exchange between individuals of different states. As the evidence becomes richer and more detailed over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods, we see the Boiotian koinon investing its authority in these spheres of behavior in complex and fascinating ways. The biggest innovation, of course, lay in the way that public decisions were made, above all relating to the conduct of interstate relations, diplomacy, and warfare. But the political innovation, the creation of what we can recognize as federal institutions, occurred against a backdrop of spontaneous cooperation and competition, frequent religious and economic interactions. It is for this reason that the koinon in Boiotia was never a narrowly political phenomenon: this was a state with a deep engagement in the religious and economic lives of its citizens and member communities.
This critical juncture of the mid-fifth century determined the path on which the Boiotians traveled for the rest of their independent political existence. There were incremental adjustments and refinements to the set of institutions established in this period, which accommodated both exogenous and endogenous change over the course of the fourth century and the early Hellenistic period. But the Boiotians had constructed their political reality as one in which poleis would retain local autonomy and an institutional presence in the direction of public affairs at the regional level, while the koinon would direct interstate relations and commit itself to protecting not only the political but also the religious and economic unity of the region. The process can be seen overall as one in which the behavior of individual agents generated norms of cooperation that became inadequate in the challenging political climate of fifth-century