The Bronze Age of Globalization

Continent-spanning supply chains that sustained the advanced technology needed by civilization were set up thousands of years ago and then collapsed. It might happen again.

Darren Tolley/Coast of Cornwall in Great Britain

This article by Stephen Pimentel will be published on Palladium Magazine on December 5th, 2025. To learn more about the lost history of humanity and what lessons it holds for today subscribe to our print edition now and receive PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

Reflection on the ancient world often brings to mind the city-state of Athens, the white columns of the Parthenon, and its philosophers such as Socrates, Diogenes, or Zeno. This seems ancient enough to us, and might seem to be the beginning of what we think of as Western civilization. And yet, already in the fifth century BC, the classical Greeks themselves looked back to a different vanished world, a lost civilization of the Mediterranean further east. It was the world remembered in the Iliad and the Odyssey, of warriors like Achilles besieging Troy and seadogs like Odysseus wandering across strange lands. When the Athenians contemplated antiquity, they reflected on what we today call the Bronze Age: an era defined by a metal that does not occur in nature and which dated from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, a timespan as long as the time from us back to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar.

Bronze alloy is a fabrication, a man-made alloy. The formula was simple enough, a recipe known to smiths from the banks of the Nile to the hillforts of the Danube. You took copper, soft and plentiful and the color of the dying sun, and added tin in a proportion of about ten percent, a ratio arrived at not by calculation but by centuries of trial and error. The added tin made the difference between a metal that bends and a metal that cuts. This technological shift allowed for complex casting and a hard edge for tools and weapons.

Bronze was the strength of the age, the chisel that cut the stone for the Pharaoh’s limestone, the sword that severed the artery, the pin that held the cloak, a synonym for strength in poems written down on papyrus. The material divided the strong from the weak. Without the tin, you had only copper, which bent. You were soft and vulnerable and likely dead.