City
systems and world-systems:
Four
millennia of city growth
and
decline
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute
for Research on World-Systems
University
of California, Riverside
chriscd@mail.ucr.edu
E.
Susan Manning
Sociology,
Hofstra University
Abstract:
This is a study of the growth of cities in four regions over the past 4000 years. We discuss changes in the relationship between political/military power, economic power and city systems with special attention to the rise of European hegemony and the subsequent rise of East Asian world cities. We compare East Asian urban growth with the original heartland of cities in West Asia and North Africa, as well as Europe and the subcontinent of South Asia. This reveals the trajectories of city growth and decline and the relative importance of the different regions over time. And we re-examine the hypothesis of synchronicities of city growth and decline across distant regions as the Afro-eurasian world-system became more and more integrated.
London
at night [V.4-28-03 (6339 words). Cross-Cultural
Research 36, 4 (November) 2002.]
The
comparative study of settlement systems is an important basis of our
understanding of human social evolution.
The processes by which a world inhabited by small nomadic hunter-gatherer
bands became the single global political economy of today involved the growth
of settlement sizes and the expansion of interaction networks. These processes
of growth and expansion were uneven in time and space. Settlements and cities did not always get
larger. There were cycles of growth and decline. And those regions that
originally developed larger settlements and cities were, in later epochs, no
longer the leading regions in terms of the sizes of their largest cities.
Our earlier studies have used data on both city sizes and the territorial sizes of empires to examine different regional interaction systems and the hypothesis that regions distant from one another were experiencing synchronous cycles of growth and decline (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000). Our early study of city-size distributions in Afro-Eurasia (Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 222-223) found an apparent synchronicity between changes in city size distributions and the growth of largest cities in East Asia and West Asia-North Africa over a period of 2000 years. That led us to examine data on the territorial size of empires for similar synchronicity, which we found (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000). This article is a re-examination of the city size data which will enable us to address claims about the relative importance of China in the Afro-eurasian system that have been advanced by Andre Gunder Frank (1998), and to more thoroughly examine the synchronicity hypothesis regarding city growth.
The relationship between power and demography has changed
in important ways over the last 4000 years. Archaeologists sometimes assume a
direct correspondence between population density and societal power in
intersocietal interactions, and they also suppose that the settlement size
hierarchy indicates stratification within a polity (e.g. Kowalewski 1982).
The relationship between stratification and the sizes of settlements needs to be considered both within societies and between them. It is generally assumed that societies that have larger cities will also have greater power than societies with smaller cities, and it is similarly assumed that a society that is internally more stratified will have a steeper city-size distribution – the relative population size of settlements within the society.
Though there was never a simple correlation between population
density and the relative power of societies vis
a vis each other, there has been a rough correspondence between these. Societies that could concentrate greater
numbers of people generally had an advantage in warfare. Exceptions to this
have been semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms and semiperipheral marcher states
that conquered older core powers (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 4). These
less dense, typically less hierarchical and upwardly mobile semiperipheral
polities used geopolitical advantages, as well as superior organizational and
military techniques, to defeat older core societies and to form larger regional
polities. But it was still usually the
case that societies with greater numbers of people and with larger cities had
greater power over other societies than those with lower population densities
and smaller settlements.
In the modern world-system the relationship between population
density and power has become even more complicated. While it is still true that the existence of large cities
indicates the ability of a society to produce and acquire the great resources
necessary to support huge populations living densely, the largest cities are
even less likely than before to be in the most powerful countries. As of 1985, Mexico City became the second
largest urban agglomeration on Earth, and Sao Paolo was then the fourth largest
(Chase-Dunn 1985).
Power among societies is now much more directly a function of
technology than it has been in the past. Machines controlled by a few people
are capable of exercising power over great distances, and huge bodies of armed
men are much less important than they have been in the past. Also economic
power based on the ability to produce profitable high technology commodities
and to control financial resources has become a much more important source of
power than it was in the systems of the tributary empires. In tributary empires
military power was itself predominant, and it was greatly dependent on the
ability to mobilize and supply large armies.
We would not argue that economic power has replaced military power, but
only that economic power has become a much more important basis of predominance
in the modern capitalist world-system than in earlier tributary systems. Economic power also has a demographic basis,
and population density can be an advantage, but it is an advantage that is more
strongly conditioned by technology and organizational features than ever
before.[1]
The problem of synchronicity –
changes of important social structural features that are simultaneous -- is
germane to our understanding of the emergence of the modern world-system out of
the formerly separate regional systems.
It is plausible that synchronous processes in distant locations indicate
systemness – the interaction of important processes that are influencing local
development. The emergence of an integrated global system has been a long-term
process that has been characterized by pulsation cycles – the expansion and
contraction of interaction networks (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Long-distance trade and long-distance
military campaigns have expanded and then contracted, but the long-term trend
has been greater and greater integration of larger and larger territories. After our re-examination of city
synchronicity we will discuss possible causal explanations for synchronicity in
the Afroeurasian world-system.
The questions we will try to
answer in this article are:
1. what
can patterns of urban growth and decline tell us about the relative
trajectories of development and the relationships among different regions in
the emerging Afroeurasian system? This
problem we shall label “Regional Importance.” And,
2. are there
statistically significant amounts of synchronicity in urban growth and decline
across distant regions that are similar (or different from) the synchronicities
that we have found in the growth and decline of the territorial sizes of
empires? This we shall call “City Synchronicity.”
Regional Importance
Andre
Gunder Frank’s (1998) provocative study of the global economy from 1400 to 1800
CE [2]
contends that China had long been the center of the global system. Franks also
argues that the rise of European hegemony was a sudden and conjunctural development caused by the late emergence in
China of a “high level equilibrium trap” and the success of Europeans in using
bullion extracted from the Americas to buy their way into Chinese
technological, financial and productive success. Frank contends that European hegemony was fragile from the start
and will be short-lived with a predicted new rise of Chinese predominance in
the near future. He also argues that the scholarly ignorance of the importance
of China invalidates all the social science theories that have mistakenly
understood the rise of the West and the differences between the East and the
West. In Frank’s view there never was a transition from feudalism to capitalism
that distinguished Europe from other regions of the world. He argues that the
basic dynamics of development have been similar in the global system for 5000
years (Frank and Gills 1994).
Frank’s
model of development is basically a combination of state expansion and
financial accumulation, although in Reorient
he focuses almost exclusively on financial centrality as the major important
element. His study of global flows of
specie, especially silver, is an important contribution to our understanding of
what happened between 1400 and 1800 CE.
Frank also uses demographic weight, and especially population growth and
growth of the size of cities, as an indicator of relative importance and
developmental success.
It is
our intention to systematically examine the growth of cities in order to shed
more light on Frank’s claims about the relative development of East and West.
Our study will begin in 2000 BCE when we first have data on the population
sizes of cities in different regions.
Though we understand the spatial nature of world-systems in terms of the
sizes of different kinds of interaction networks (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997:
Chapter 3), in this study we will compare the same regions over time despite
the fact that interaction nets grow from being rather small to being global
over the period we are studying. Thus the unit of analysis in this study is the
region, and regions are held constant over the whole period. The regions we will study are:
1. Europe,
including the Mediterranean and Aegean islands, that part of the Eurasian
continent to the west of the Caucasus Mountains, but not Asia Minor (now
Turkey).
2. West Asia- North Africa, including Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, the Levant, and Bactria.
3. The South Asian subcontinent, including the Indus river valley.
4. East Asia, including China, Korea and Japan and Southeast Asia, but not Indonesia.
These regions are defined for purposes of examining the
claims made by Frank and others about relative development and possible
synchronicity.
Measures of importance based on city data
Wilkinson
(1992b,1993) compared East Asia with West Asia using data from Chandler (1987)
on the number of large cities in
each region. Wilkinson (1992, 1993) used political-military interaction
networks (which he calls “civilizations”) as his unit of analysis. Political-military
interaction networks (PMNs) are a good unit of analysis because the alliances
and enmities of polities are an important systemic feature of all
world-systems. But PMNs change in size and location over time.[3]
For purposes of our present study we will use constant regions (described
above) as the unit of analysis.
We have improved upon
Wilkinson’s (1992b,1993) studies by
weighting the cities by their population sizes. Using only the number of cities ignores differences in the sizes
of cities. Figure 1 shows the
population-weighted percentage that our four regions held of the twenty largest
cities[4]
on Earth from 2000 BCE to 1988 CE.[5] We also used the Chandler data, but we
interpolated city sizes from Chandler’s tables in order to estimate the populations
of cities.[6] This provides only a rough guess, but is
still an improvement over Wilkinson’s simple count of the number of cities in
each region.
Estimation of the population
sizes of ancient cities is fraught with difficulties. In this paper we rely
entirely on Chandler’s estimates, though these are well known to contain
errors, especially for ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.[7]
For our purposes in this paper these errors are unlikely to greatly distort the
answers to the broad questions we are asking. We have begun a project that will
upgrade Chandler’s data using improved methods of estimation based on the work
of anthropologists (Brown 1987, Ember 1973, Hassan 1981) and the late
historical demographer Paul Bairoch (1988). Our method of estimation uses the
areal size of cities and estimates of areal population density and the size of
typical households (Pasciuti and Chase-Dunn 2002). Despite the deficiencies of
the Chandler dataset we contend that the gross comparisons between regions made
in this paper will hold up well after the new upgraded city size dataset has
been constructed.
Figure 1:
Regional Urban Population as a % of the World’s Largest Cities
In
Figure 1 we see the emergence of the world’s first cities in Mesopotamia and
Egypt represented here by the designation West Asia/North Africa. In the upper
left hand corner of the graph the dashed line shows that this region had 100%
of the largest cities on Earth in 2000 BCE.
As other regions developed large cities this monopoly necessarily
diminished, and 4000 years later only a very small percentage of the world’s
largest cities were in this region.
This is strong evidence of the notion of uneven development and the geographical
movement of the cutting edge of societal complexity.
The
relative size-importance of European cities (indicated by the solid line) shows
a long oscillation around a low level, indicating Europe’s peripheral and
semiperipheral location in the larger Afro-eurasian world-system. The long
history of the incorporation of the very small systems of Europe into the
expanding Central
System of West Asia/North Africa is portrayed in Figure 2
(see also Chase-Dunn and Hall, Chapter 9). Europe had been firmly incorporated
into the trade networks of the Central System during the bronze and iron ages.
Figure 1 indicates that by around 1450 CE Europe began a long rise. It passed
East Asia in 1825 CE and peaked in 1850, and then underwent a rapid decline in
importance as indicated by the relative size of largest cities.
Recall that all the largest
cities on Earth, including those in the Americas and Oceania, are in the
denominator of our measure of importance. So in the decades of the 20th
century the percentages shown in Figure 1 do not add up to 100% because some of
the largest cities are in none of the regions tracked (e.g. New York, Mexico City, etc.). When we use changing interaction network
boundaries, as we have done in earlier research, these new large cities are
included within the Central System, but the contribution of this study is to
see what happens when we hold regions constant. Thus Figure 1 indicates that
the relatively smaller and older European cities (e.g. London and Paris), were
surpassed by the much larger American and Japanese cities in the 20th
century.
The trajectory of Europe
displayed in Figure 1 supports part of Gunder Frank’s (1998) analysis, but
contradicts another part. The small cities of Europe in the early period
indicate its peripheral status vis a vis
the core regions of West Asia/North Africa, South Asia and East Asia. As Frank
argues, Europe did not best East Asia (as indicated by city sizes) until the
eighteenth century. But the long
European rise, beginning in the fifteenth century, contradicts Frank’s
depiction of a sudden and conjunctural emergence of European hegemony. Based on relative city sizes it appears that
the rise of Europe occurred over a period of 500 years.
For East
Asia we see in Figure 1 a rapid rise that began in 1200 BCE with the emergence
of the first states in the Yellow River valley. This was followed by a small decline and then another burst of
relative urban growth that began in 361 CE and that rose to a peak in 800 CE,
another decline, and then a further rise to the highest peak of all in 1350 CE. Then there was a small decline and another
peak in 1800. Not until 1825 was East Asia bested by the European cities after
a decline that started in 1800 and continued until 1914, when a recovery began.
The European cities were bested again by the East Asian cities between 1950 and 1970 during the rapid
decline of the European cities in terms of their size-importance among the
world’s largest cities. This most recent rise of the East Asian cities is a consequence of the upward mobility of
Japan and the East Asian NICs in the global political economy. Smith and Timberlake (2001) have
demonstrated the contemporary rising importance of East Asian cities in the
global airline transportation network.
Frank’s
depiction of a sudden and radical decline of China that began in 1800 CE is
supported in Figure 1. His analysis,
which focuses on the period from 1400 to 1800 CE, does not examine the relative
decline of East Asian predominance that began in 1350 and the rise to a new
peak that began in 1650 as indicated in Figure 1.
The
South Asian cities indicate how this region has fared during the long
integration of the Afro-eurasian system.
In Figure 1 the South Asian cities are indicated by the line with
triangles. The early emergence of
cities in the Indus river valley can be seen, as well as their demise, and then
the rise of the Gangetic states that peaked, in terms of city size importance,
in 200 BCE. The Indic cities
disappeared completely from the world’s twenty largest cities in 1200 CE, but
then rose to another peak in 1500 corresponding with the Mughal empire. In 1988 the South Asian cities had risen
once again to a level as high as they had had between 1650 and 1700 CE.
The Rise of Europe
Figure
2 shows the largest cities in each region from 1400 to 1988 CE. This, and the
following figures, differ from Figure 1 in that they are not percentages of the
world’s largest cities, but are just graphs of the city sizes for each region.
The most striking feature is the geometric growth rate of city sizes that began
in Europe in the 19th century
and spread to East Asia, South Asia and West Asia/North Africa. [8]
Figure 2: Largest Cities in each Region Since 1400 CE
New York, which became the
largest city in the world by 1925, beating out London, is thus not included
because we are studying constant regions. Tokyo, the third largest city in
1925, had become the largest city on Earth by 1970, and Osaka held third place
in that year. By 1980 Tokyo was still first, but Mexico City held second place,
and Sao Paolo was in fourth place.
The
geometric growth rate in the last two centuries obscures, in Figure 2,
important fluctuations in the period from 1400 to 1850. These are germane to
Frank’s argument about the relative centrality of China and Europe. Figure 3 excludes the period after 1850 in
order to show these fluctuations.
Figure 3: Largest Cities in each Region, 1400-1850 CE
During
the period between 1400 and 1850 the largest cities in South Asia and in West
Asia/North Africa did not increase in size. Rather they fluctuated around a
level that was smaller than the largest East Asian cities at the beginning of
the period, but larger than the largest cities in medieval Europe. Beginning in
1500 the largest European city, Constantinople, began a rapid period of growth
that achieved the size of the largest city in East Asia (Beijing) by 1550. European and Chinese cities were similarly
large until 1700, when Beijing began another period of rapid growth. European
growth experienced another upsurge after 1750 with the mushrooming of London,
but the size of London did not equal that of Beijing until 1825. Within East
Asia, Tokyo did not become larger than Beijing until 1900.
The
patterns shown in Figure 3 are quite similar to those to be found in Figure 4,
a graph of the sum of the three largest city populations in each region, except
that the most recent European rise is shown to have begun earlier, in 1600.
Figure 4: Three Largest Cities in each Region, 1400-1850 CE
Our
examination of the largest cities in Europe and East Asia further reflects upon
Frank’s (1998) characterization of the centrality of China and the rise of
European hegemony. While we have contended above that the “European” rise began
much earlier than Frank describes (shown in Figures 1-4 above), this early rise
appears to have been mainly due to the growth of Ottoman Constantinople. Though Constantinople was within the
continent of Europe as we have defined it, Frank might contend that crediting
the Christian Europeans of later fame with the success of the Ottoman Turks is
unfair, and that this does not challenge his hypothesis of the conjunctural
nature of European hegemony.
But
there are some other facts that need to be taken into account here. The second
and third largest cities in Europe in 1500 were Paris and Venice, followed by
Naples and Milan. From 1500 to 1600
Paris grew from 185,000 to 245,000 and the other large cities of Christian
Europe grew at a similar pace. So the
early upsurge was not due only to the growth of Constantinople. Christian Europe was also experiencing a
sixteenth century boom period. This does not dispute the relatively greater
centrality of China in this period, but it does suggest that Christian Europe
did not remain a peripheral backwater until it finally sprang to hegemony at
the last minute in the 18th century.
Constantinople’s
size leveled off at 700,000 in 1600 and it stayed at that size until 1700,
after which it began to decline. In this same period the largest cities of
Christian Europe were growing rapidly. London grew larger than Constantinople
by 1750.
City Synchronicity
This
section replicates our study of synchronous changes in West and East Asian city
systems. We have excluded the South Asian and European regions from this
analysis because they do not reveal synchronicity with the other regions or
with each other. There are two main differences between what we have done in
this study and what we did in earlier work. The first is that we have grouped
the cities according to constant regions rather than spatially changing
political/military interaction networks (PMNs), as described above. So the West
Asia/North Africa region contains cities in this region over the whole time
period rather than the expanding Central PMN studied by Chase-Dunn and Willard
(1993) and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997). The main difference due to this change
is that emerging cities in the Aegean and points west are not included in the
West Asian/North African region, whereas they were included in the Central PMN. This might reduce the degree of
synchronicity found because most of the Greek and Roman cities are in the
European region, and an important component of the synchronicity found in
earlier work was that between the rise and fall of the Roman and Han empires.
The other difference from
earlier research is the use of a five-city SPI rather than a three-city SPI.
This uses more of the cities in each region in the calculation of the SPI, and
so should be a superior indicator of the city-size aspect of regional city
systems. In practice the values are probably not greatly different from those
obtained using only the three largest cities. The Standardized Primacy Index
(SPI) is a statistic that was invented for comparing city size distributions
(Walters 1985). It calculates a single
number from the population sizes of the largest cities in a region based on
deviations from the rank-size rule.
The rank-size rule hypothesizes that the largest city
will be twice as large as the second largest city, three times as large as the
third largest, and etc. The SPI
calculates the average deviation from this standard in a manner similar to the
Chi squared statistic, and the resulting value is “standardized” by dividing by
the number of cities used to calculate the SPI. This makes it possible to
compare city size distributions with data on different numbers of cities. The
SPI takes a value of zero when a city size distribution meets the rank-size
rule. Negative values indicate a flatter distribution and positive values
indicate a steeper one.
In
addition to the SPI, we used two other indicators of changes in regional city
systems. These are:
·
the population size of the largest city, and
·
the sum of the populations of the three largest cities.
Figure 5
shows our replication of the Eastern-Western comparison based on the five-city
SPI and using spatially constant regions. Visual inspection of Figure 5
suggests a definite correlation between the rise and fall of steep and flat
city size distributions in these distant regions from 800 BCE to 1600 CE.
Before and after this period there is no correspondence between East and West
Asian city size distributions. The
synchronous Pearson’s r correlation coefficient produced by the values in
Figure 5 is .32, and this approaches, but does not reach, statistical
significance.
Figure 5: West Asian and East Asian 5-city Standardized Primacy Indices
Figure 10.7 in Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:217), based on a
three-city SPI and comparing the Central and East Asian PMNs, finds a
synchronous correlation of .44 and this is statistically significant at the .03
level. We suspect that the somewhat
weaker correlation produced in this study is due to the fact that Rome is not
included in the West Asian/North African region, whereas it was included in the
Central PMN. The correlation between
Roman and Han events and development, studied closely by Teggart (1939), was an
important piece of the synchronicity of the Afro-eurasian system. That we find a substantial degree of synchronicity
even when Rome is excluded is additional support for the hypothesis that East
and West Asian growth/decline processes were linked in some way.
Visual
inspection of Figure 5 also suggests a lead-lag relationship between East and
West Asian city size changes. The West Asian/North African city size
distribution seems to be leading the ups and downs by a lag of one or two
hundred years. This may be an important
clue to the nature of the causal relations that link the two regions, but this
suggested lag needs to be investigated using more temporally fine data. The
long periods between measured city sizes in the Chandler data, especially
before 1000 CE, make any statements about synchronicity or lagged relationships
open to a good degree of doubt. On the
other hand, our replication of the synchronicity found in empire size data using temporally finer time points increased the correlation found between
the East Asian and Central PMNs (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 1999). City population data for more time points
and shorter intervals needs to be assembled to see how city synchronicity fairs
with temporally finer data.
Figure 6
shows the trajectories of changes in the population sizes of the largest cities
in East and West Asia over the same period as examined in Figure 5. The
Pearson’s r synchronous correlation coefficient of .55, significant at the .003
level, further supports the hypothesis of East-West Asian city synchronicity.
Figure 6: Largest Cities in West Asia/North Africa and in
East Asia
Visual inspection of Figure 6 also suggests a lead-lag
relationship, but it is more complicated than what is indicated in Figure 5.
The temporal lead of changes in direction (growth and decline) seems to shift
back and forth between West Asia/North Africa and East Asia. For example, the
decline in the size of the largest city that began in East Asia in 800 CE did
not start in West Asia until 900 CE, and the rise that began in East Asia in
1000 CE did not start in West Asia until 1150 CE. On the other hand the earlier
rise and decline seems to have been led by West Asia. Again, these lag
structures require further investigation that uses more temporally fine data
with measurement points that are closer together.
Figure 7
includes data on the three largest cities in each region. The correlation
coefficient further supports the hypothesis of city synchronicity. Visual
inspection suggests another complicated lead-lag relationship with both regions
leading during different periods.
Figure 7: Three Largest Cities in East Asia and West
Asia/North Africa
The
question of causal explanations of the East/West synchronicity of city and
empire growth-decline sequences in this period has been discussed in earlier
studies (Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Chase-Dunn,
Manning and Hall 1999). Basically these boil down to the following
possibilities:
1. Long-distance
trade between these distant regions transmitted economic forces great enough to
bring them into a synchronous pattern of growth and decline.
2. The
cycle of the rise and fall of semiperipheral (or peripheral) states in Central
Asia – the steppe nomad confederations that periodically attacked the agrarian
empires of the East and the West – brought the East and West Asian systems into
synchronicity.
3. It is
possible that epidemic diseases periodically swept across Afroeurasia causing
synchronous waves of urban depopulation and disrupting large empires.
4. Some
force exogenous to both regions created a synchronous pattern of expansion and
contraction. The only candidate is
climate change.
Of probable
relevance is the fact that the South Asian region, spatially in between the
Eastern and Western Asian regions, was not brought into either city or empire
synchronicity with the others (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997, Chase-Dunn Manning and
Hall 2000). And the apparent lack of
any synchronicity before 800 BCE or after 1600 CE is also an important clue.
The possibility of a Western temporal priority suggested by visual inspection
of Figure 5 above, would also be important because causality is assumed to go forward,
but not backward, in time.
Conclusions
We can
report additional support for the hypothesis of city synchronization between
800 BCE and 1600 CE for the distant regions of East Asia and West Asia/North
Africa. The causality that resulted in this phenomenon is still unknown. What
is needed is the operationalization for the relevant regions and time period of
measures of the main hypothesized causal variables: climate change, warfare,
and long-distance trade. Further research will also improve upon the city and
empire size data, and should investigate the relationship between these within
and across regions (e.g. Chase-Dunn, Alvarez and Pasciuti 2002).
Our
examination of the problem of the relative importance of regions relies
exclusively on the population sizes of cities, a less than ideal indicator of
power and relative centrality as discussed in the introductory section of this
paper. Nevertheless, our results suggest some possible problems with Andre
Gunder Frank’s (1998) characterization of the relationship between Europe and
China before and during the rise of European hegemony. Frank’s contention that
Europe was primarily a peripheral region relative to the core regions of the
Afro-eurasian world-system is supported by the city data, with some qualifications. Europe was for millennia a periphery of the
large cities and powerful empires of ancient West Asian and North Africa. The
Greek and Roman cores were instances of semiperipheral marcher states that conquered
important parts of the older West Asian/North African core. After the decline
of the Western Roman Empire, the core shifted back toward the East and Europe
was once again importantly peripheral.
The
synchronicity findings support the idea proposed in Frank and Gills (1994) that
there was an integrated Afro-eurasian world-system much earlier than most
historians and civilizationists suppose. But we cannot yet be certain that
interaction networks were important causes of the synchronicity, and if they
were, we do not know which kind of interaction was most important.
Counter
to Frank’s contention, however, the rise of European hegemony was not a sudden
conjunctural event that was due solely to a developmental crisis in China. The
city population data indicate that an important renewed core formation process
had been emerging within Europe since at least the 14th
century. This was partly a consequence
of European extraction of resources from its own expanded periphery. But it was
also likely due to the unusually virulent form of capitalist accumulation
within Europe, and the effects of this on the nature and actions of states. The
development of European capitalism began among the city-states of Italy. It
spread to the European interstate system, eventually resulting in the first
capitalist nation-state – the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century as well
as the later rise of the hegemony of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the
nineteenth century. This process of regional core formation and its associated
emphasis on capitalist commodity production further spread and
institutionalized the logic of capitalist accumulation by defeating the efforts
of territorial empires (Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France) to return the expanding
European core to a more tributary mode of accumulation.
Acknowledging
some of the uniquenesses of the emerging European hegemony does not require us
to ignore the important continuities that also existed as well as the
consequential ways in which European developments were linked with processes
going on in the rest of the Afroeurasian world-system.
The more
recent emergence of East Asian cities as again the very largest cities on Earth
occurred in a context that was structurally and developmentally distinct from
the multi-core system that still existed in 1800 CE. Now there is only one core
because all core states are directly interacting with one another. While the
multi-core system prior to the eighteenth century was undoubtedly systemically
integrated to an important extent, it was not as interdependent as the global
world-system has now become.
A new East Asian hegemony is by
no means a certainty, as both the United States and German-led Europe will be
strong contenders in the coming period of
hegemonic rivalry (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1999). In this competition
megacities may be more a liability than an advantage because the costs of these
huge human agglomerations have continued to increase, while the benefits have
been somewhat diminished by the falling costs of transportation and
communication. Nevertheless megacities
will continue to be an indicator of predominance because societies that can
afford them will have demonstrated the ability to mobilize huge resources.
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