Sociology
002f C.
Chase-Dunn
Humanities
and Social Science 1501 Tuesday and
Thursday 8:10- 9:30
TAs:
Elizabeth Bogumil and Armond Hardwick
Sociological Foundations:
The City
W. O. J. Niewencamp, “The
mill at Bruges.” P. 77 in The Modern
Woodcut by Herbert Furst, London: The Bodley
Head. v. 6-7-18
This is a course on the emergence and transformation of human settlement systems[1] in comparative and evolutionary perspective since the Paleolithic Age. We will consider the annual circular treks of nomads from camp to camp, the emergence of winter hamlets and the transition to permanent villages and towns, the emergence and growth of cities, and the co-evolution of sedentary and nomadic peoples, the emergence of the car-based multicentric cities and the development of the contemporary global city system. We will study the forces that have led humans to live in larger and larger urban agglomerations and the problems of sustainability that urban growth processes have created. Topics that will be covered are: problems associated with the estimation of the population sizes of modern and premodern settlements; settlement size distributions; high density and low density settlements; the relationships between empires and cities; the processes of urbanization; world cities and global cities; megacities and slums in the Global South; the whole global system of settlements, the Southern California urban agglomeration; and the problems that are associated with the pattern of low-density urban growth (urban sprawl). We will also study industrial urbanization, megacities and the urbanization of the global system with its world cities tightly linked to one another by communications, transportation, trade and organizational networks. Contemporary urban issues in Southern California and other regions will also be considered.
The course will employ the comparative world-systems
perspective to examine the conditions and problems of living in settlements in
evolutionary perspective. A primer on the modern world-systems perspective is
Thomas Richard Shannon’s An Introduction to the World-Systems Perspective
(Westview 1996). Used copies are widely available.
Grading is based on the midterm exam (20%)
[October 25], the final exam (20%) Monday, December 10. 9-11am (exam does
not begin at 8am) lecture attendance (10%), discussion section attendance
and participation (25%) and a short (less than 10 typed double-spaced pages) research
paper that comparatively analyses the settlement system of a premodern
world-system (25%) [due date December 4].
The midterm and the final will be in-class essay exams. The topic for your research
paper is due October 18.
Readings marked
with an asterisk (*) are required. Others are recommended.
The following required books are available at the Campus Store and are on reserve:
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago
and the Great West
Robert Bruegmann,
Sprawl: a compact history University of Chicago Press 2006
Mike Davis, City of Quartz.
http://www.facultybookshelf.org/course/20259
The Cities Reader
is available on the course iLearn web site.
Thursday, September 27 Overview of the course
October 2 the comparative world-systems perspective
*T.D. Hall
and C. Chase-Dunn, “Global social change
in the long run” Chapter 3.
in C. Chase-Dunn and S. Babones (eds.) Global Social Change. (under course
materials on course iLearn web site) see also C.
Chase-Dunn and B. Lerro, Social Change: Globalization
from the Stone Age to the Present.
The metabolism of
cities
*
C. Chase-Dunn, “The role of ecosettlement systems in social evolution”
in Cities Reader.
Drennan RD, Peterson CE (2006) “Patterned variation in
prehistoric chiefdoms”. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103:
3960–3967 http://www.pnas.org/content/103/11/3960.full.pdf+html
* C. Chase-Dunn “The
changing role of cities in world-systems” in Cities Reader.
* Hiroko
Inoue, Alexis Álvarez, Eugene N. Anderson, Andrew
Owen, Rebecca Álvarez, Kirk Lawrence and Christopher Chase-Dunn“Urban scale
shifts since the Bronze Age: upsweeps, collapses and semiperipheral development”
*Tilly, Charles. 2010
“Cities, states and trust networks” Theory
and Society 39,3/4:265-280. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-010-9119-z
Jill E. Neitzel (ed.) Great Towns and Regional Polities in the
Prehistoric American Southwest and Southeast. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
* Christopher Chase-Dunn, Daniel Pasciuti, Alexis Alvarez and Thomas D. Hall “ The ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian world-systems”
in Cities Reader.
Marc Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City (Oxford 1997)
Mario Liverani, The Ancient
Near East.
Algaze, Guillermo. 2005. The
Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early
Mesopotamian Civilization,
David Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East
Africa, C. 10,000 to 2,650 BC
Van De Mieroop,
Marc 2011 A History of Ancient Egypt. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell
*Christopher
Chase-Dunn and Alice Willard, Systems of Cities and
World-Systems in the City Reader.
Barfield, Thomas 1989 The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires
and China, 221 BC to AD 1757. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Thomas D. Hall, Richard Niemeyer, Alexis
Alvarez, Hiroko Inoue, Kirk Lawrence, and Anders Carlson. 2010 “Middlemen and
Marcher States in Central Asia and East/West Empire Synchrony.” Social
Evolution and History 9:1(March):1-29.
Hui, Victoria Tin-bor 2005 War and State Formation in Ancient China and
Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Keightley, D. N. 2000 The Ancestral Landscape: Time,
Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200-1045 B.C.). Berkeley, Institute of East Asian
Studies.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Susan Manning, and Thomas D.
Hall. 2000 ”Rise
and Fall: East-West Synchronicity and Indic Exceptionalism
Reexamined." Social
Science History 24:4
:727-754.
Schwartzberg,
Joseph E. 1992 A Historical Atlas of South
Asia. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992.
* Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Alvarez and
Daniel Pasciuti, “Power and size:
urbanization and empire formation in world-systems” in Cities
Reader
* Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Álvarez, Eugene N. Anderson, Andrew Owen,
Rebecca Álvarez, Kirk Lawrence and Christopher Chase-Dunn “Urban scale shifts since the Bronze Age: upsweeps,
collapses and semiperipheral development”
October 25 Midterm Exam
* Christopher Chase-Dunn, Hiroko Inoue, Alexis
Álvarez, Andrew Owen and Eugene N. Anderson; “The Evolution of Economic
Institutions: City-states and forms of imperialism since the Bronze Age” IROWS Working Paper # 79
* Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Alvarez and Daniel Pasciuti, “Power and size: urbanization and empire formation in world-systems” in Cities Reader.
November 1 From capitalist city-states in
the semiperiphery to a capitalist nation-state in the
core: The rise
of the Dutch republic
* Christopher Chase-Dunn and Alice Willard,
“Cities
in the Central Political/Military Network
Since CE 1200:Size Hierarchy and Domination in
Cities Reader.
Charles
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European states, AD 990-1990
(Blackwell, 1990)
November
6: Cities and World Regions: the Rise of the
West and East/West Synchrony; The urbanization of societies and world
urbanization; From demographic sink to demographic fountain. Industrial cities: World urbanization:
World Cities
and the World Settlement System
* C. Chase-Dunn,
Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Alvarez, Rebecca Alvarez,
Lulin Bao, Eugene N. Anderson, Christian Jaworski, Micah Carlson, Mengxian Li, Stacey Hernandez and Stephanie Hernandez “Cities and
Empires in World Regions Since the Bronze Age” IROWS Working Paper #84 (https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows85/irows85.htm)
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before
European Hegemony (Oxford 1989)
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
November 8 Urbanization in the United
States1: the rise of settlements in North America C. Chase-Dunn and T.D. Hall
“World-systems in North America” http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/c-d&hall/isa97.htm
Pauketat, Timothy R. 2009
The growth of cities in the
U.S.
* William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West Preface,
Chapters 1-4
C. Chase-Dunn, "The
development of core capitalism in the antebellum United States: tariff politics
and class struggle in an upwardly mobile semiperiphery" in Albert J. Bergesen
(ed.) Studies of the Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press. http://www.irows.ucr.edu/cd/papers/ustariffpol.htm
November 13 Urbanization
in the United States2
* William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West Chapters
5- Epilogue
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the 100th
Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the 2nd Opening of the West
NASA on Reese, Michigan http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=82663&src=eoa-iotd
Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring
Neighborhood Effect.
November 15 World Urbanization and Cities in the Global South
*Christopher
Chase-Dunn, “The
coming of urban primacy in Latin America” in Cities Reader.
World Population and Population Density:
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums;
Mike Davis and
Daniel B. Monk, Evil Paradises:
Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
David A. Smith, Third World Cities in
Global Perspective ;
Beaverstock, J V,
Smith, R G and Taylor, P J (1999) ‘A roster of world cities’, Cities, 16, 445-58;
Peter
B. Evans (ed.) Livable Cities;
November 20: Socal: The Southern California
Urban Agglomeration: The premodern world-system in Southern
California;
*C. Chase-Dunn, E. N. Anderson, Hiroko Inoue, and Alexis Álvarez, The Prehistory of Money
in Southern California IROWS Working Paper #80
Lynn H. Gamble
2008, The Chumash World at European
Contact.
November
22 Thanksgiving
November 27 Socal 2:
Suburban power and the “globalization project; “Gated” “Communities”; Order and
Repression; Socal Catholic
Church and Mexico; Fontana
LA
Story; Getting
the Goods
Edna Bonacich
and Richard Appelbaum, Behind the Label
Thomas
C Patterson, From Acorns to Warehouses
Drennan
RD, Peterson CE (2006) “Patterned variation in prehistoric chiefdoms”. Proc Natl Acad Sci
USA 103: 3960–3967;
Michael
E. Smith “Sprawl, squatters and sustainable cities” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:2, 2010;
How and why
Southern California’s population grew so much in one year
https://www.pe.com/2018/03/21/how-and-why-southern-californias-population-grew-so-much-in-one-year/
December
4[Research paper is Due](Final Study Questions Handed Out)
Andres Duany,
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban
Nation;
Mike
Davis, Ecology of Fear
December 6 Lyrical Upsurge
December 10, 9-11 final
exam. The exam does not start at
8am.
Research Paper
The task is to study a premodern[2]
settlement system of a whole political-military network [3]
composed of interacting polities. On October 18
please turn in a single sheet of paper with your name, email address and
the main premodern settlement that will be the focus of your study of a
settlement system and the time period you will study. Also include full citations
for at least three specific library (non-Internet) sources of information about
the focal settlement and the other settlements with which it is interacting.
You may also include internet sources.
A political/military network (PMN) is a network of polities that are allying and making war on one another, like the modern international system or earlier regional PMNs composed of chiefdoms, states or empires. PMNs have settlement systems composed of cities, towns, villages and hamlets and may be in interaction with nomadic peoples who live in temporary camps. Pick a single focal settlement (for example a specific Chumash village before the Europeans arrived in Southern California, or Carthage from 300 to 50 BCE). Use the idea of nested interaction networks in Chase-Dunn and Hall to try to estimate how far the bulk goods, prestige goods, political-military networks and information network extend away from your focal settlement. For example, what is the most distant settlement from which the focal settlement occasionally gets food (etc.)? These are the spatial boundaries of the world-system of which your focal settlement is a part. Also study the relations that the humans living in your focal settlement have with nature: how they get their food, raw materials, fuel, and water? And study the transportation networks that link your focal settlement to other settlements. Use the idea of a settlement size distribution to examine the relative population sizes of the settlements that are linked together in your settlement system. Also use other ideas and readings from the course in your consideration of this settlement system.
Data on the population sizes of cities are available from Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth. The population estimates for the cities in Chandler are in a machine-readable dataset called citypop5.xls that is accessible on the course web site. David Wilkinson’s maps of cities and their civilization may also be helpful. These are at https://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/asa01/wilkinson.htm
Tell the story of the settlement system of which your focal settlement is a part, and suggest explanations for the patterns that you find. The text of your paper should be no longer than 10 typewritten pages of text. Bibliography, pictures and maps can be on additional pages. Include a bibliography of your sources and maps if you can find them. Hard copy of your paper is due in class on December 4.
Read the list of requirements above several times during the period in which you are working on your paper and be sure to do each of the things that are requested. A Guide to Writing Research Papers: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/PlanResearchPaper.html