The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts". A program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, GRI maintains a research library, organizes exhibitions and other events, sponsors a residential scholars program, publishes books, and produces electronic databases (Getty Publications).
State capacity is critical for development. Yet, the question of how states learn – that is, how they acquire and incorporate information to improve performance over time – has received little attention. In this paper, we draw from organizational theory and the political economy of knowledge and innovation to study the components of effective learning in states as organizations. We focus on three functionally simple, but well-documented early states in ancient Greece: Sparta, Athens, and Macedon. We argue that Macedon’s superior performance relied on a learning model capable of integrating both experiential and experimental knowledge within existing structures. By directing our attention away from the early modern period, where much work in economic history and historical political economy is concentrated, our account challenges the focus of the existing literature on processes of centralization. Instead, we highlight organizational factors that may promote capacity-enhancing learning even in the context of weak centralization.
FLAME is an online digital humanities project providing economic data for investigations of the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (CE 325-750) in Western Eurasia and North Africa. While accumulating, entering, and displaying the data, the project's leadership has become increasingly aware of the inherent distortions in these data. These deviations operate on various levels, from the disparate events that provide the coin finds that serve as the basis of its data to previously unexamined scholarly biases that underpin such a quantitative approach to historical analysis. By systematically examining these phenomena, we hope to frame a discussion of such inherent biases in other digital humanities undertakings.
