History Without Technical Change. Distribution, Productive Inheritance, and the Order of Reproduction in Sraffian Systems

Can an economy have a genuine history even when its technical coefficients do not change? This paper develops a fixed-coefficient theory of productive path dependence. It distinguishes known production methods from the productive structure inherited from the past. Temporary distributive conditions can alter which renewal activities are profitable and therefore the material composition of productive capacity when the same distributive environment returns. History can enter reproduction without entering technology. In a Sraffian framework, the paper separates three meanings of recovery: feasible reconstruction, first restoration under the quantity rule actually followed, and durable restoration. Exact constructions show that these dates can diverge sharply and that inherited capital composition, not aggregate capital alone, governs recovery. The paper also links distributive history to the order of reproduction. Conditional on a distributive sequence and stated closures, a fixed activity catalogue determines competitive supports, wages, physical state maps, and inherited composition. Reversing the sequence can leave aggregate terminal stock unchanged yet alter its composition; under a stated recurrent-capacity rather than maximum-profit criterion, a terminal activity problem can support a different non-cyclic ordering of the same recurrent phases, with different Sraffian Standard properties. The mechanism holds throughout the regular two-parameter distributive region. The result is path dependence based on productive inheritance rather than technological change, learning, or increasing returns. Demand, saving, utilization, finance, and the distributive sequence itself remain exogenous.