ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an analysis of the economic organization in the historical bureaucratic societies, attempting to indicate how various types of free resources have developed in this field. It examines frequently owned and managed by the state, by state contractors, or by guilds. Even in Sassanid Persia, the least differentiated of the societies studied, a rather marked commercial, manufacturing and "industrial" activity developed. The developed accumulation and conservation of resources by the rulers, and the regulation for political purposes, of movement of trade and of prices. Thus there developed, in the economic systems of the societies authors have examined, side-by-side, different types of mechanisms of exchange. The respective extents to which the purely economic mechanisms were operative necessarily varied among the different societies; and in each society, large sectors of the economic system were still embedded in other, non-economic groups.
