The claim (as I understand it) is that power was centralized because tin was rare--i.e., had to be imported via sophisticated trade routes, which presumably could be controlled by the state.

In an area where tin is abundant, individuals could easily forge their own bronze weapons, thus making it harder for the state to have a monopoly on high-tech weapons.

So I think the Harappan actually reinforce the theory.

I agree. The author is stretching several assumptions to get to his conclusions. The sub-title suggests he has solved the "Bronze Age collapse" riddle but his statement can simply be considered one of many factors already pointed out in the literature -- not the main reason.

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.

The author also doesn’t really even attempt to explain why the Sea Peoples hypothesis, one pretty well substantiated by a lot of independent evidence, and one which the current consensus theory among experts, is wrong. Is there a prior post we’re supposed to be familiar with?

But IVC had already crashed some 600 years before the bronze age collapse and the populations had migrated to other regions.

I think the argument is the Indus Valley civilization was dependent on international trade with the autocracies further west and collapsed when that network broke down

> 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.

It seems you didn't read the article carefully. The author says that bronze age empires derived their power from the scarcity of tin, which they could obtain via trade routes, but was hard to get hold of for smaller rulers. In your example this scarcity doesn't hold because tin happened to be nearby. So your example is perfectly compatible with his theory.

The generally agreed epoch of Mahabharata war (and also the start of kali yuga or iron age) among Vedic astrologers is about 3102 BC which places the epic deep into the Bronze age territory. Historians generally reject this epoch as it creates the dark age problem (over 2000 years of unexplained historical gap between that war and 500 BC when figures like Bimbisara, Buddha and Ajata Satru start appearing). Their epoch is in the range of 800-2000 BC depending on who you ask.

Having said that, there is nothing to make the bronze age epoch impossible. There is nothing in the epic which may not have been possible in the bronze age based on what we already know about history.