Well, doesn’t the Harappan civilization make a mess out of all this? Tin was nearby, and there’s evidence of bronze artifacts in all kinds of houses across the cities, and in general less evidence of hierarchical power, and certainly nothing like the concentration you see in other Bronze Age civilizations. We don’t have the civilization surviving as is to the Iron Age, because it depopulated before iron smelting became common. But it’s odd to make the claim bronze had to lead to stratified societies. Clearly, not always.
I’m ignorant of the geology there, but Wikipedia says copper was available. If you are saying they had unusually easy access to tin, then they sort of had the ability to make bronze without the long-range trade. Is that right?
That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.
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That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.