Global
Social Change in the Long Run
Thomas D. Hall and Christopher Chase-Dunn
Forthcoming in Global Social Change: A Reader, Johns Hopkins University Press. (9720 words) v. 12-13-04
The comparative world-systems perspective is a
strategy for explaining social change that focuses on whole intersocietal
systems rather than single societies. The main insight is that important interaction
networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven
polities and cultures together since the beginning of human social evolution.
Explanations of social change need to take intersocietal systems
(world-systems) as the units that evolve. But intersocietal interaction
networks were rather small when transportation was mainly a matter of hiking
with a pack. Globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification
of larger interaction networks, has been increasing for millennia, albeit
unevenly and in waves.
World-systems are systems of societies (see
Figure 1). Systemness means that these societies are interacting
with one another in important ways – interactions are two-way, necessary,
structured, regularized and reproductive. Systemic interconnectedness exists
when interactions importantly influence the lives of people within societies,
and are consequential for social continuity or social change. World-systems may
not cover the entire surface of the planet. Some extend over only parts of the
Earth. The word “world” refers to the importantly connected interaction
networks in which people live, whether these are spatially small or
large.
Figure 1: A world-system
is a system of societies
Only the modern world-system
has become a global (Earth-wide) system composed of national societies and
their states. It is a single economy composed of international trade and
capital flows, transnational corporations that produce products on several
continents, as well as all the economic transactions that occur within
countries and at local levels. The whole world-system is more than just
international relations. It is the whole system of human interactions. The
world economy is all the economic interactions of all the people on Earth, not
just international trade and investment.
The
modern world-system is structured politically as an interstate system – a
system of competing and allying states. Political Scientists commonly call this
the international system, and it is the main focus of the field of
International Relations. Some of these states are much more powerful than others,
but the main organizational feature of the world political system is that it is
multicentric. There is no world state. Rather there is a system of
states. This is a fundamentally important feature of the modern system and of
many earlier regional world-systems as well.
When we discuss and compare different kinds of
world-systems it is important to use concepts that are applicable to all of
them. Polity is a more general term that means any organization with a
single authority that claims sovereign control over a territory or a group of
people. Polities include bands, tribes and chiefdoms as well as states. All
world-systems are politically composed of multiple interacting polities. Thus
we can fruitfully compare the modern interstate system with earlier systems in
which there were tribes or chiefdoms, but no states.
In the modern world-system it is important to
distinguish between nations and states. Nations are groups of people who
share a common culture and a common language. Co-nationals identify with one
another as members of a group with a shared history, similar food preferences
and ideas of proper behavior. To a varying extent nations constitute a
community of people who are willing to make sacrifices for one another.
States are formal organizations such as bureaucracies that exercise and
control legitimate violence within a specific territory. Some states in the
modern world-system are nation-states in which a single nation has its own
state. But others are multinational states in which more than one nation is
controlled by the same state. Ethnic groups are sub-nations,
usually minorities within states in which there is a larger national group.
Ethnic groups and nations are sociologically similar in that they are both
groups of people who identify with one another and share a common culture, but
they often differ with regard to their relationship with states. Ethnic groups
are minorities, whereas nations are majorities within a state.
The modern world-system is also importantly
structured as a core/periphery hierarchy in which some regions contain
economically and militarily powerful states while other regions contain
polities that are much less powerful and less developed. The countries that are
called “advanced, ” in the sense that they have high levels of economic
development, skilled labor forces, high levels of income and powerful,
well-financed states, are the core powers of the modern system. The
modern core includes the United States, and the countries of Europe, Japan,
Australia and Canada.
In the contemporary periphery we have
relatively weak states that are not strongly supported by the populations
within them, and have little power relative to other states in the system. The
colonial empires of the European core states have dominated most of the modern
periphery until recently. These colonial empires have undergone decolonization
and the interstate system of formally sovereign states was extended to the
periphery in a series of waves of decolonization that began in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century with the American independence, follow in the early
nineteenth century by the independence of the Spanish American colonies, and in
the twentieth century by the decolonization of Asia and Africa. Peripheral
regions are also economically less developed in the sense that the economy is
composed of subsistence producers, as well as industries that have relatively
low productivity and that employ unskilled labor. Agriculture in the periphery
is typically performed using simple tools, whereas agriculture in the core is
capital-intensive, employing machinery and non-human, non-animal forms of
energy. Some industries in peripheral countries, such as oil extraction or
mining, may be capital-intensive, but these sectors are often controlled by
core capital.
In the past, peripheral countries have been
primarily exporters of agricultural and mineral raw materials. But even when
they have developed some industrial production, this has usually been less
capital intensive and using less skilled labor than production processes in the
core. The contemporary peripheral countries are most of the countries in Asia,
Africa and Latin America – for example Bangla Desh, Senegal and Bolivia.
The core/periphery hierarchy in the modern
world-system is a system of stratification in which socially structured
inequalities are reproduced by the institutional features of the system (see
Figure 2). The periphery is not “catching up” with the core. Rather both core
and peripheral regions are developing, but most core states are staying well
ahead of most peripheral states. There is also a stratum of countries that are
in between the core and the periphery that we call the semiperiphery.
The semiperiphery in the modern system includes countries that have
intermediate levels of economic development or a balanced mix of developed and
less developed regions. The semiperiphery includes large countries that have
political/military power as a result of their large size, and smaller countries
that are relatively more developed than those in the periphery.
Figure 2: Core/Periphery Hierarchy
The
exact boundaries between the core, semiperiphery and periphery are unimportant
because the main point is that there is a continuum of economic and
political/military power that constitutes the core-periphery hierarchy. It does
not matter exactly where we draw lines across this continuum in order to
categorize countries. Indeed we could as well make four or seven categories
instead of three. The categories are only a convenient terminology for pointing
to the fact of international inequality and for indicating that the middle of
this hierarchy may be an important location for processes of social change.
There have been a few cases of upward and downward
mobility in the core/periphery hierarchy, though most countries simply run hard
to stay in the same relative positions that they have long had. A most
spectacular case of upward mobility is the United States. Over the last 300
years the territory that became the U.S. has moved from outside the
Europe-centered system (a separate continent containing several regional
world-systems), to the periphery, to the semiperiphery,
to the core, to the position of hegemonic core state (see below), and now its
hegemony is slowly declining. An example of downward mobility is the United
Kingdom of Great Britain, the hegemon of the nineteenth century and now just
another core society.
The global stratification system is a continuum of
economic and political-military power that is reproduced by the normal operations
of the system. In such a hierarchy there are countries that are difficult to
categorize. For example, most oil-exporting countries have very high levels of
GNP per capita, but their economies do not produce high technology products
that are typical of core countries. They have wealth but not development. The
point here is that the categories (core, periphery and semiperiphery) are just
a convenient set of terms for pointing to different locations on a continuous
and multidimensional hierarchy of power. It is not necessary to have each case
fit neatly into a box. The boxes are only conceptual tools for analyzing the
unequal distribution of power among countries.
When
we use the idea of core/periphery relations for comparing very different kinds
of world-systems we need to broaden the concept a bit and to make an important
distinction (see below). But the most important point is that we should not
assume that all world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies just because
the modern system does. It should be an empirical question in each case as to
whether core/periphery relations exist. Not assuming that world-systems have
core/periphery structures allows us to compare very different kinds of systems
and to study how core/periphery hierarchies themselves emerged and
evolved.
In order to do this it is helpful to distinguish
between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy.
Core/periphery differentiation means that societies with different degrees of
population density, polity size and internal hierarchy are interacting with one
another. As soon as we find village dwellers interacting with nomadic neighbors
we have core/periphery differentiation. Core/periphery hierarchy refers to the
nature of the relationship between societies. This kind of hierarchy exists
when some societies are exploiting or dominating other societies. Examples of
intersocietal domination and exploitation would be the British colonization and
deindustrialization of India, or the conquest and subjugation of Mexico by the
Spaniards. Core/periphery hierarchy is not unique to the modern Europe-centered
world-system of recent centuries. Both the Roman and the Aztec empires
conquered and exploited peripheral peoples as well as adjacent core states.
Distinguishing between core/periphery
differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy allows us to deal with situations
in which larger and more powerful societies are interacting with smaller ones,
but are not exploiting them. It also allows us to examine cases in which smaller,
less dense societies may be exploiting or dominating larger societies. This
latter situation definitely occurred in the long and consequential interaction
between the nomadic horse pastoralists of Central Asia and the agrarian states
and empires of China and Western Asia. The most famous case was that of the
Mongol Empire of Chingis Khan, but confederations of Central Asian steppe
nomads managed to extract tribute from agrarian states long before the rise of
Mongols.
So the modern world-system is now a global economy
with a global political system (the interstate system). It also includes all
the cultural aspects and interaction networks of the human population of the
Earth. Culturally the modern system is composed of: several civilizational
traditions, (e.g. Islam, Christendom, Hinduism, etc.), nationally-defined
cultural entities -- nations (and these are composed of class and functional
subcultures, e.g. lawyers, technocrats, bureaucrats, etc.), and the
cultures of indigenous and minority ethnic groups within states. The modern
system is multicultural in the sense that important political and economic
interaction networks connect people who have rather different languages,
religions and other cultural aspects. Most earlier world-systems have also been
multicultural.
Interaction
networks are regular and repeated
interactions among individuals and groups. Interaction may involve trade,
communication, threats, alliances, migration, marriage, gift giving or
participation in information networks such as radio, television, telephone
conversations, and email. Important interaction networks are those that affect
peoples’ everyday lives, their access to food and necessary raw materials,
their conceptions of who they are, and their security from or vulnerability to
threats and violence. World-systems are fundamentally composed of interaction
networks.
One of the important systemic features of the
modern system is the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers – the so-called
“hegemonic sequence.” A hegemon is a core state that has a significantly
greater amount of economic power than any other state, and that takes on the
political role of system leader. In the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic
performed the role of hegemon in the Europe-centered system, while Great
Britain was the hegemon of the nineteenth century, and the United States has
been the hegemon in the twentieth century. Hegemons provide leadership and
order for the interstate system and the world economy. But the normal operating
processes of the modern system – uneven economic development and competition
among states – make it difficult for hegemons to sustain their dominant
positions, and so they tend to decline. Thus the structure of the core
oscillates back and forth between hegemony and a situation in which several
competing core states have a roughly similar amount of power and are contending
for hegemony – i.e. hegemonic rivalry (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Hegemony and Hegemonic Rivalry
So
the modern world-system is composed of states that are linked to one another by
the world economy and other interaction networks. Earlier world-systems were
also composed of polities, but the interaction networks that linked these
polities were not intercontinental in scale until the expansion of Europe in
the fifteenth century. Before that world-systems were smaller regional affairs.
But these had been growing in size with the expansion of trade networks and
long-distance military campaigns for millennia.
Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems
One big difference between the modern world-system
and earlier systems is the spatial scale of different types of interaction
networks. In the modern global system most of the important interaction
networks are themselves global in scale. But in earlier smaller systems there
was a significant difference in spatial scale between networks in which food
and basic raw materials were exchanged and much larger networks of the exchange
of prestige goods or luxuries. Food and basic raw materials we call “bulk
goods” because they have a low value per unit of weight. Indeed it is
uneconomical to carry food very far under premodern conditions of
transportation.
Imagine that the only type of transportation
available is people carrying goods on their backs (or heads). This is a situation
that actually existed everywhere until the domestication of beasts of burden.
Under these conditions a person can carry, say, 30 kilograms of food. Imagine
that this carrier is eating the food as s/he goes. So after a few days walking
all the food will be consumed. This is the economic limit of food
transportation under these conditions of transportation. This does not mean
that food will never be transported farther than this distance, but there would
have to be an important reason for moving it beyond its economic range.
A prestige good (e.g. a very valuable food such as
spices, or jewels or bullion) has a much larger spatial range because a small
amount of such a good may be exchanged for a great deal of food. This is why
prestige goods networks are normally much larger than bulk goods networks. A
network does not usually end as long as there are people with whom one might
trade. Indeed most early trade was what is called down-the-line trade in
which goods are passed from group to group. For any particular group the
effective extent of its of a trade network is that point beyond which nothing
that happens will affect the group of origin.
In order to bound interaction networks we need to
pick a place from which to start – a so-called “place-centric approach.” If we
go looking for actual breaks in interaction networks we will usually not find
them, because almost all groups of people interact with their neighbors. But if
we focus upon a single settlement, for example the precontact indigenous village
of Onancock on the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay (near the boundary
between what are now the states of Virginia and Maryland), we can determine the
spatial scale of the interaction network by finding out how far food moved to
and from our focal village. Food came to Onancock from some maximum distance. A
bit beyond that were groups that were trading food to groups that were directly
sending food to Onancock. If we allow two indirect jumps we are probably far
enough from Onancock so that no matter what happens (e.g. a food shortage or
surplus), it would not have affected the supply of food in Onancock. This outer
limit of Onancock’s indigenous bulk goods network probably included villages at
the very southern and northern ends of the Chesapeake Bay.
Onancock’s prestige goods network was much larger
because prestige goods move farther distances. Indeed, copper that was in use
by the indigenous peoples of the Chesapeake may have come from as far away as
Lake Superior. In between the size of bulk goods networks (BGNs) and prestige
goods networks (PGNs) are the interaction networks in which polities make war
and ally with one another. These are called political-military networks (PMNs). In the case of the Chesapeake world-system at the time of the
arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century Onancock was part of a
district chiefdom in a system of multi-village chiefdoms. Across the bay on the
Western shore were at least two larger polities, the Powhatan and the Conoy
paramount chiefdoms. These were core chiefdoms that were collecting tribute
from a number of smaller district chiefdoms. Onancock was part of an interchiefdom
system of allying and war-making polities. The boundaries of that network
included some indirect links, just as the trade network boundaries did. Thus
the political-military network (PMN) of which Onancock was the focal place
extended to the Delaware Bay in the north and into what is now the state of
North Carolina to the south.
Information, like a prestige good, is light
relative to its value. Information may travel far along trade routes and beyond
the range of goods. Thus information networks (INs) are usually as large or
even larger than Prestige Goods nets (PGNs).
A general picture of the spatial relationships between
different kinds of interaction networks is presented in Figure 4. The actual
spatial scale of important interaction needs to be determined for each
world-system we study, but Figure 4 shows what is generally the case – that BGNs
(bulk goods nets) are smaller than PMNs (political-military nets), and these
are in turn smaller than PGNs (prestige goods nets) and INs (information nets).
Figure 4 The Spatial
Boundaries of World-Systems
Defined
in the way that we have above, world-systems have grown from small to large
over the past twelve millennia as societies and intersocietal systems have
gotten larger, more complex and more hierarchical. This spatial growth of
systems has involved the expansion of some and the incorporation of some into
others. The processes of incorporation have occurred in several ways as systems
distant from one another have linked their interaction networks. Because
interaction nets are of different sizes, it is the largest ones that come into
contact first. Thus information and prestige goods link distant groups long
before they participate in the same political-military or bulk goods networks.
The processes of expansion and incorporation brought different groups of people
together and made the organization of larger and more hierarchical societies
possible. It is in this sense that globalization has been going on for
thousands of years.
Using the conceptual apparatus for spatially
bounding world-systems outlined above we can construct spatio-temporal
chronographs for how the interaction networks of the human population changed
their spatial scales to eventuate in the single global political economy of
today. Figure 3 uses PMNs as the unit of analysis to show how a
"Central" PMN, composed of the merging of the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian PMNs in about 1500 BCE, eventually incorporated all the other PMNs
into itself.
Figure 5: Chronograph of PMNs [adapted from Wilkinson (1987)]
World-system
Cycles: Rise-and-Fall and Pulsations
Comparative research reveals that all
world-systems exhibit cyclical processes of change. There are two major cyclical
phenomena: the rise and fall of
large polities, and pulsations in
the spatial extent and intensity of trade networks. "Rise and fall" corresponds to changes in the centralization of
political/military power in a set of polities – an “international” system. It
is a question of the relative size of, and distribution of, power across a set
of interacting polities. The term "cycling" has been used to describe
this phenomenon as it operates among chiefdoms (Anderson 1994).
All world-systems in which there are hierarchical
polities experience a cycle in which relatively larger polities grow in power
and size and then decline. This applies to interchiefdom systems as well as
interstate systems, to systems composed of empires, and to the modern rise and fall
of hegemonic core powers (e.g. Britain and the United
States).
Though very egalitarian and small scale systems such as the sedentary foragers
of Northern California (Chase-Dunn and Mann, 1998) do not display a cycle of
rise and fall, they do experience pulsations.
All systems, including even very small and
egalitarian ones, exhibit cyclical expansions and contractions in the spatial
extent and intensity of exchange networks. We call this sequence of trade
expansion and contraction pulsation.
Different kinds of trade (especially bulk goods trade vs. prestige goods trade)
usually have different spatial characteristics. It is also possible that
different sorts of trade exhibit different temporal sequences of expansion and
contraction. It should be an empirical question in each case as to whether or
not changes in the volume of exchange correspond to changes in its spatial
extent. In the modern global system large trade networks cannot get spatially
larger because they are already global in extent.[1]
But they can get denser and more intense relative to smaller networks of
exchange. A good part of what has been called globalization is simply the
intensification of larger interaction networks relative to the intensity of
smaller ones. This kind of integration is often understood to be an upward
trend that has attained its greatest peak in recent decades of so-called global
capitalism. But research on trade and investment shows that there have been two
recent waves of integration, one in the last half of the nineteenth century and
the most recent since World War II (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000).
The simplest hypothesis regarding the temporal
relationships between rise-and-fall and pulsation is that they occur in tandem.
Whether or not this is so, and how it might differ in distinct types of
world-systems, is a set of problems that are amenable to empirical research.
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have contended that the
causal processes of rise and fall differ depending on the predominant mode of
accumulation. One big difference between the rise and fall of empires and the
rise and fall of modern hegemons is in the degree of centralization achieved
within the core. Tributary systems alternate back and forth between a structure
of multiple and competing core states on the one hand and core-wide (or nearly
core-wide) empires on the other. The modern interstate system experiences the
rise
and fall of hegemons, but these never take over the other core states to form a
core-wide empire. This is the case because modern hegemons are pursuing a
capitalist, rather than a tributary form of accumulation.
Analogously, rise and fall works somewhat
differently in interchiefdom systems because the institutions that facilitate
the extraction of resources from distant groups are less fully developed in
chiefdom systems. David G. Anderson's (1994) study of the rise and fall of
Mississippian chiefdoms in the Savannah River valley provides an excellent and
comprehensive
review of the anthropological and sociological literature about what Anderson
calls "cycling," the processes by which a chiefly polity extended
control over adjacent chiefdoms and erected a two-tiered hierarchy of
administration over the tops of local communities. At a later point these
regionally centralized chiefly polities
disintegrated
back toward a system of smaller and less hierarchical polities.
Chiefs relied more completely on hierarchical
kinship relations, control of ritual hierarchies, and control of prestige goods
imports than do the rulers of true states. These chiefly techniques of power
are all highly dependent on normative integration and ideological consensus.
States developed specialized organizations for extracting resources that
chiefdoms lacked -- standing armies and bureaucracies. And states and empires
in the tributary world-systems were more dependent on the projection of armed
force over great distances than modern hegemonic core states have been. The
development of commodity production and mechanisms of financial control, as
well as further development of bureaucratic techniques of power, have allowed
modern hegemons to extract resources from far-away places with much less
overhead cost.
The development of techniques of power have made
core/periphery relations ever more important for competition among core powers
and have altered the way in which the rise-and-fall process works in other
respects. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:Chapter 6) argued that population growth in
interaction with the environment, and changes in productive technology and
social structure produce social evolution that is marked by cycles and periodic
jumps. This is because each world-system oscillates around a central tendency
(mean) due both to internal instabilities and environmental fluctuations.
Occasionally, on one of the upswings, people solve systemic problems in a new
way that allows substantial expansion. We want to explain expansions,
evolutionary changes in systemic logic, and collapses. That is the point of
comparing world-systems.
The multiscalar regional method of
bounding world-systems as nested interaction networks outlined above is
complementary with a multiscalar temporal analysis of the kind suggested by
Fernand Braudel’s work. Temporal depth, the longue
duree, needs to be combined with analyses of short-run and middle-run
processes to fully understand social change. The shallow presentism of most
social science and contemporary culture needs to be denounced at every
opportunity.
A strong case for the very longue duree is made by Jared Diamond’s
(1997) study of original zoological and botanical wealth. The geographical
distribution of those species that could be easily and profitably domesticated
explains a huge portion of the variance regarding which world-systems expanded
and incorporated other world-systems thousands of years hence. Diamond also
contends that the diffusion of domesticated plant and animal species occurs
much more quickly in the latitudinal dimension (East/West) than in the
longitudinal dimension (North/South), and so this explains why domesticated
species spread so quickly to Europe and East Asia from West Asia, while the
spread south into Africa was much slower, and the North/South orientation of
the American continents made diffusion much slower than in the Old World Island
of Eurasia.
Figure 6 below depicts the coming
together of the East Asian and the West Asian/Mediterranean systems. Both the
PGNs and the PMNs are shown, as are the pulsations and rise and fall sequences.
The PGNs linked intermittently and then joined. The Mongol conquerors linked
the PMNs briefly in the thirteenth century, but the Eastern and Western PMNs
were not permanently linked until the Europeans and Americans established Asian
treaty ports in the nineteenth century.
Figure
6: East/West Pulsations and Merger
Modes of Accumulation
In
order to comprehend the qualitative changes that have occurred with the
processes of social evolution we need to conceptualize different logics of
development and the institutional modes by which socially created resources are
produced and accumulated. All societies produce and distribute the goods that
are necessary for everyday life. But the institutional means by which human
labor is mobilized are very different in different kinds of societies. Small
and egalitarian societies rely primarily on normative regulation organized as
commonly shared understandings about the obligations that members of families
have toward one another. When a hunter returns with his game there are definite
rules and understandings about who should receive shares and how much. All
hunters in foraging societies want to be thought of as generous, but they must
also take care of some people (those for whom they are the most responsible)
before they can give to others.
The normative order defines the roles and the obligations,
and the norms and values are affirmed or modified by the continual symbolic and
non-symbolic action of the people. This socially constructed consciousness
is mainly about kinship, but it is also about the nature of the universe of
which the human group is understood as a part. This kind of social economy is
called a kin-based mode of production and accumulation. People work
because they need food and they have obligations to provide food for others.
Accumulation mainly involves the preservation and storage of food supplies for
the season in which food will become scarce. Status is based on the reputation
that one has as a good hunter, a good gatherer, a good family member, or a
talented speaker. Group decisions are made by consensus, which means that the
people keep talking until they have come to an understanding of what to do. The
leaders have authority that is mainly based on their ability to convince others
that they are right. These features are common (but not universal) among
societies and world-systems in which the kin-based modes of accumulation are
the main logic of development.
As societies become larger and more hierarchical,
kinship itself becomes hierarchically defined. Clans and lineages become ranked
so that members of some families are defined as senior or superior to members
of other families. Classical cases of ranked societies were those of the
Pacific Northwest, in which the totem pole represents a hierarchy of clans.
This tendency toward hierarchical kinship resulted in the eventual emergence of
class societies (complex chiefdoms) in which a noble class owned and controlled
key resources and a class of commoners was separated from the control of
important resources and had to rely on the nobles for access to these. Such a
society existed in Hawaii before the arrival of the Europeans.
The tributary modes of accumulation emerged
when institutional coercion became a central form of regulation for inducing
people to work and for the accumulation of social resources. Hierarchical kinship
functions in this way when commoners must provide labor or products to chiefs
in exchange for access to resources that chiefs control by means of both
normative and coercive power.
Normative power does not work well by itself as a basis
for the appropriation of labor or goods by one group from another. Those who
are exploited have a great motive to redefine the situation. The nobles may
have elaborated a vision of the universe in which they were understood to
control natural forces or to mediate interactions with the deities and so
commoners were supposed to be obligated to support these sacred duties by
turning over their produce to the nobles or contributing labor to sacred
projects. But the commoners will have an incentive to disbelieve unless they
have only worse alternatives. Thus the institutions of coercive power are
invented to sustain the extraction of surplus labor and goods from direct
producers. The hierarchical religions and kinship systems of complex chiefdoms
became supplemented in early states by specialized organizations of regional
control -- groups of armed men under the command of the king and bureaucratic
systems of taxation and tribute backed up by the law and by institutionalized
force. The tributary modes of accumulation develop techniques of power that
allowed resources to be extracted over great distances and from large
populations. These are the institutional bases of the states and the
empires.
The third mode of accumulation is based on
markets. Markets can be defined as any situation in which goods are bought and
sold, but we will use the term to denote what are called price-setting
markets in which the competitive trading by large numbers of buyers and
sellers is an important determinant of the price. This is a situation in which
supply and demand operate on the price because buyers and sellers are bidding
against one another. In practice there are very few instances in history or in
modern reality of purely price-setting markets, because political and normative
considerations quite often influence prices. But the price mechanism and
resulting market pressures have become more important. These institutions were
completely absent before the invention of commodities and money.
A commodity is a good that is produced for
sale in a price-setting market in order to make a profit. A pencil is an
example of a modern commodity. It is a fairly standardized product in which the
conditions of production, the cost of raw materials, labor, energy and
pencil-making machines are important forces acting upon the price of the
pencil. Pencils are also produced for a rather competitive market, and so the
socially necessary costs given the current level of technology, plus a certain
amount of profit, adds up to the cost.
The idea of the commodity is an important element
of the definition of the capitalist mode of accumulation. Capitalism is
the concentrated accumulation of profits by the owners of major means of the
production of commodities in a context in which labor and the other main
elements of production are commodified. Commodification means that things are
treated as if they are commodities, even though they may have characteristics
that make this somewhat difficult. So land can be commodified – treated as if
it is a commodity – even though it is a limited good that has not originally
been produced for profitable sale. There is only so much land on earth. We can
divide it up into sections with straight boundaries and price it based on
supply and demand. But it will never be a perfect commodity. This is also the case with human labor time.
The commodification of land is an historical
process that began when “real property” was first legally defined and sold. The
conceptualization of places as abstract, measurable, substitutable and salable
space is an institutional redefinition that took thousands of years to develop
and to spread to all regions of the Earth.
The
capitalist modes of production also required the redefinition of wealth as
money. The first storable and tradable valuables were probably prestige goods.
These were used by local elites in trade with adjacent peoples, and eventually
as symbols of superior status. Trade among simple societies is primarily
organized as gift giving among elites in which allegiances are created and
sustained. Originally prestige goods were used only in specific circumstances
by certain elites. This “proto-money” was eventually redefined and
institutionalized as the so-called “universal equivalent” that serves as a
general measure of value for all sorts of goods and that can be used by almost
anyone to buy almost anything. The institution of money has a long and
complicated history, but suffice it to say here that it has been a prerequisite
for the emergence of price-setting markets and capitalism as increasingly
important forms of social regulation. Once markets and capital become the
predominant form of accumulation we can speak of capitalist systems.
Patterns and Causes of Social Evolution
It
is important to understand the similarities, but also the important differences
between biological and social evolution. These are discussed in Chase-Dunn and
Lerro 2005: Chapter 1). This section describes a general causal model that
explains the emergence of larger hierarchies and the development of productive
technologies. It also points to a pattern that is noticeable only when we study
world-systems rather than individual societies. The pattern is called semiperipheral
development. This means that those innovations that transform the logic of
development and allow world-systems to get larger and more hierarchical come
mainly from semiperipheral societies. Some semiperipheral societies are
unusually fertile locations for the invention and implementation of new
institutional structures. And semiperipheral societies are not constrained to
the same degree as older core societies from having invested huge resources in
doing things in the old way. So they are freer to implement new institutions.
There are several different important kinds of
semiperipheries, and these not only transform systems but they also often take
over and become new core societies. We have already mentioned semiperipheral
marcher chiefdoms. The societies that conquered and unified a number of smaller
chiefdoms into larger paramount chiefdoms were usually from semiperipheral
locations. Peripheral peoples did not usually have the institutional and
material resources that would allow them to make important inventions and to
implement these or to take over older core regions. It was in the semiperiphery
that core and peripheral social characteristics could be recombined in new
ways. Sometimes this meant that new techniques of power or political legitimacy
were invented and implemented in semiperipheral societies.
Much better known than semiperipheral marcher
chiefdoms is the phenomenon of semiperipheral marcher states. The largest
empires have been assembled by conquerors who come from semiperipheral
societies. The following semiperipheral marchers are well known: the Achaemenid
Persians, the Macedonians led by Alexander The Great, the Romans, the Ottomans,
the Manchus and the Aztecs.
But some semiperipheries transform institutions,
but do not take over. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states operated on the
edges of the tributary empires where they bought and sold goods in widely
separate locations, encouraging people to produce a surplus for trade. The
Phoenician cities (e.g. Tyre, Carthage, etc.), as well as Malacca, Venice and
Genoa, spread commodification by producing manufactured goods and trading them
across great regions. In this way the semiperipheral capitalist city-states
were agents of the development of markets and the expansion of trade networks,
and so they helped to transform the world of the tributary empires without
themselves becoming new core powers.
In the modern world-system we have already
mentioned the process of the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. All of the
cases we mentioned – the Dutch, the British and the U.S. – were countries that
had formerly been in semiperipheral positions relative to the regional
core/periphery hierarchies within which they existed. And indeed the rise of
Europe within the larger Afroeurasian world-system was also a case of
semiperipheral development, one in which a formerly peripheral and then
semiperipheral region rose to become the new core of what had been a huge
multi-core world-system.
The idea of semiperipheral development does not
claim that all semiperipheral societies perform transformational roles, nor
does it contend that every important innovation came from the semiperiphery.
The point is rather that semiperipheries have been unusually prolific sites for
the invention of those institutions that have expanded and transformed many
small systems into the particular kind of global system that we have today.
This observation would not be possible without the conceptual apparatus of the
comparative world-systems perspective.
But what have been the proximate causes that led
semiperipheral societies to invent new institutional solutions to problems?
Some of the problems that needed to be solved were new unintended consequences
of earlier inventions, but others were very old problems that kept emerging
again and again as systems expanded – e.g. population pressure and ecological
degradation. It is these basic problems that make it possible for us to specify
a single underlying causal model of world-systems evolution. Figure 7 shows
what is called the “ iteration model” that links demographic, ecological and
interactional processes with the emergence of new production technologies,
bigger polities and greater degrees of hierarchy.
Figure 7 Basic Iteration Model of World-System Evolution
This
is called an iteration model because it has an important positive feedback mechanism
in which the original causes are themselves consequences of the things that
they cause. Thus the process goes around and around, which is what has caused
the world-systems to expand to the global level. Starting at the top we see
population growth. The idea here is that all human societies contain a
biological impetus to grow that is based on sexuality. This impetus is both
controlled and encouraged by social institutions. Some societies try to
regulate population growth by means of e.g. infanticide, abortion and taboos on
sexual relations during nursing. These institutional means of regulation are
costly, and when greater amounts of food are available these types of
regulation tend to be eased. Other kinds of societies encourage population
growth by means of channeling sexual energy toward reproduction, pro-natalist
ideologies and support for large families. All societies experience periodic
“baby booms” when social circumstances are somewhat more propitious for
reproduction, and thus, over the long run, the population tends to grow despite
institutional mechanisms that try to control it.
Intensification is caused by population growth. This means that
when the number of mouths to feed increases greater efforts are needed to
produce food and other necessities of life and so people exploit the resources
they have been exploiting more intensively. This usually leads, in turn, to ecological
degradation because all human production processes use up the natural
environment. More production leads to greater environmental degradation. This
occurs because more resources are extracted, and because of the polluting
consequences of production and consumption activities. Nomadic hunter-gatherers
depleted the herds of big game and Polynesian horticulturalists deforested many
a Pacific island. Environmental degradation is not a new phenomenon. Only its
global scale is new.
As
Jared Diamond (1998) points out all continents around the world did not start
with the same animal and plant resources. In West Asia both plants (barley and
wheat) and animals (sheep, goats, cows, and oxen) were more easily domesticated
than the plants and animals of Africa and the New World. Since domesticated
plants and animals can more easily diffuse lattitudinally (East and West) than
longitudinally (North and South) these inventions spread more quickly to Europe
and East Asia than they did to Africa. These exogenous factors affect the
timing and speed of hierarchy formation and technological development, as so
climate change and geographical obstacles that affect transportation and
communications. It is widely believed that the emergence of an early large
state on the Nile was greatly facilitated by the ease of controlling
transportation and communications in that linear environment, while the more
complicated geography of Mesopotamia slowed stabilized the system of
city-states and slowed the emergence of a core-wide empire. Patrick Kirch
contends that it was the difficult geography of the Marquesas Island (short
steep valleys separated by high mountains and treacherous coasts) that
prevented the emergence of island-wide paramount chiefdoms, and kept the
Marquesas in the “nasty bottom” of the iteration model.
The consequences of the above processes are that the
economics of production change for the worse. According to Joseph Tainter
(1988), after a certain point increased investment in complexity does not
result in proportionate increasing returns. This occurs in the areas of
agricultural production, information processing and communication, including
education and maintenance of information channels. Sociopolitical control and
specialization, such as military and the police, also develop diminishing
returns. Tainter points out that marginal returns can occur in at least four
instances: benefits constant, costs rising; benefits rising, costs rising
faster; benefits falling, costs constant; benefits falling, costs rising.
When herds are depleted the hunters must go
farther to find game. The combined sequence from population growth to
intensification to environmental degradation leads to population pressure,
the negative economic effects on production activities. The growing effort
needed to produce enough food is a big incentive for people to migrate. And so
humans populated the whole Earth. If the herds in this valley are depleted we
may be able to find a new place where they are more abundant.
Migration eventually leads to circumscription. Circumscription
is the condition that no new desirable locations are available for emigration.
This can be because all the herds in all the adjacent valleys are depleted, or
because all the alternative locations are deserts or high mountains, or because
all adjacent desirable locations are already occupied by people who will
effectively resist immigration.
The condition of social circumscription in which
adjacent locations are already occupied is, under conditions of population
pressure, likely to lead to a rise in the level of intergroup and intragroup
conflict. This is because more people are competing for fewer resources.
Warfare and other kinds of conflict are more prevalent under such conditions.
All systems experience some warfare, but warfare becomes a focus of social
endeavor that often has a life of its own. Boys are trained to be warriors and
societies make decisions based on the presumption that they will be attacked or
will be attacking other groups. Even in situations of seemingly endemic warfare
the amount of conflict varies cyclically. Figure 7 shows an arrow with a
negative sign going from conflict back to population pressure. This is because
high levels of conflict reduce the size of the population as warriors are
killed off and non-combatants die because their food supplies have been
destroyed. Some systems get stuck in a vicious cycle of population pressure and
warfare.
But
situations such as this are also propitious for the emergence of new
institutional structures. It is in these situations that semiperipheral
development is likely to occur. People get tired of endemic conflict. One
solution is the emergence of a new hierarchy or a larger polity that can
regulate access to resources in a way that generates less conflict. The
emergence of a new larger polity usually occurs as a result of successful
conquest of a number of smaller polities by a semiperipheral marcher. The
larger polity creates peace by means of an organized force that is greater than
any force likely to be brought against it. The new polity reconstructs the
institutions of control over territory and resources, often concentrating control
and wealth for a new elite. And larger and more hierarchical polities often
invest in new technologies of production that change the way in which resources
are utilized. They produce more food and other necessaries by using new
technologies or by intensifying the use of old technologies. New technologies
can expand the number of people that can be supported in the territory. This
makes population growth more likely, and so the iteration model is primed to go
around again.
The iteration model has kept expanding the size of
world-systems and developing new technologies and forms of regulation but, at
least so far, it has not permanently solved the original problems of ecological
degradation and population pressure. What has happened is the emergence of
institutions such as states and markets that articulate changes in the
economics of production more directly with changes in political organization
and technology. This allows the institutional structures to readjust without
having to go through short cycles at the messy bottom end of the model.
Figure 8: Temporary Institutional Shortcuts in the
Iteration Model
Another way to say this is that political and market institutions allow
for some adjustments to occur without greatly increasing the level of systemic
conflict. This said, the level of conflict has remained quite high, because the
rate of expansion and technological change has increased. Even though
institutional mechanisms of articulation have emerged, these have not
permanently lowered the amount of systemic conflict because the rates of change
in the other variables have increased.
It is also difficult to understand
why and where innovative social change emerges without a conceptualization of
the world-system as a whole. New organizational forms that transform
institutions and that lead to upward mobility most often emerge from societies
in semiperipheral locations. Thus all
the countries that became hegemonic core states in the modern system had
formerly been semiperipheral (the Dutch, the British, and the United States).
This is a continuation of the long-term pattern of social evolution that
Chase-Dunn Hall (1997) have called “semiperipheral development.” Semiperipheral marcher states and
semiperipheral capitalist city-states had acted as the main agents of empire
formation and commercialization for millennia. This phenomenon arguably also
includes organizational innovations in contemporary semiperipheral countries
(e.g. Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that may transform the now-global
system.
This approach requires that we think structurally.
We must be able to abstract from the particularities of the game of musical
chairs that constitutes uneven development in the system to see the structural
continuities. The core/periphery
hierarchy remains, though some countries have moved up or down. The interstate system remains, though the
internationalization of capital has further constrained the abilities of states
to structure national economies. States
have always been subjected to larger geopolitical and economic forces in the
world-system, and as is still the case, some have been more successful at
exploiting opportunities and protecting themselves from liabilities than
others.
In this perspective many of the phenomena that
have been called “globalization” correspond to recently expanded international
trade, financial flows and foreign investment by transnational corporations and
banks. Much of the globalization discourse assumes that until recently there
were separate national societies and economies, and that these have now been
superseded by an expansion of international integration driven by information
and transportation technologies. Rather
than a wholly unique and new phenomenon, globalization is primarily
international economic integration, and as such it is a feature of the world-system
that has been oscillating as well as increasing for centuries. Recent research
comparing the 19th and 20th centuries has shown that
trade globalization is both a cycle and a trend.
The Great Chartered Companies of the seventeenth
century were already playing an important role in shaping the development of
world regions. Certainly the transnational corporations of the present are much
more important players, but the point is that “foreign investment’ is not an
institution that only became important since 1970 (nor since World War II). Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has shown that
finance capital has been a central component of the commanding heights of the
world-system since the fourteenth century.
The current floods and ebbs of world money are typical of the late phase
of very long “systemic cycles of accumulation.”
Most world-systems scholars contend
that leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the periphery as
inert are grave mistakes, not only for reasons of completeness, but also
because the ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral
resources and labor has been a major factor in deciding the winners of the
competition among core contenders. And the resistance to exploitation and
domination mounted by peripheral peoples has played a powerful role in shaping
the historical development of world orders.
Thus world history cannot be properly understood without attention to
the core/periphery hierarchy.
Phillip McMichael (2000) has studied the
“globalization project” – the abandoning of Keynesian models of national
development and a new (or renewed) emphasis on deregulation and opening
national commodity and financial markets to foreign trade and investment. This approach focuses on the political and
ideological aspects of the recent wave of international integration. The term
many prefer for this turn in global discourse is “neo-liberalism” but it has
also been called “Reaganism/Thatcherism” and the “Washington Consensus.” The
worldwide decline of the political left predated the revolutions of 1989 and the
demise of the Soviet Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by these
events. The structural basis of the
rise of the globalization project is the new level of integration reached by
the global capitalist class. The internationalization of capital has long been
an important part of the trend toward economic globalization. And there have
been many claims to represent the general interests of business before. Indeed
every modern hegemon has made this claim. But the real integration of the
interests of capitalists all over the world has very likely reached a level
greater than at the peak of the nineteenth century wave of globalization.
This is the part of the theory of a global stage
of capitalism that must be taken most seriously, though it can certainly be
overdone. The world-system has now
reached a point at which both the old interstate system based on separate
national capitalist classes, and new institutions representing the global
interests of capital exist, and are powerful simultaneously. In this light each country can be seen to
have an important ruling class fraction that is allied with the transnational
capitalist class. The big question is whether or not this new level of
transnational integration will be strong enough to prevent competition among
states for world hegemony from turning into warfare, as it has always done in
the past, during a period in which a hegemon (now the United States) is
declining.
The insight that capitalist
globalization has occurred in waves, and that these waves of integration are
followed by periods of globalization backlash has important implications for
the future. Capitalist globalization increased both intranational and
international inequalities in the nineteenth century and it has done the same
thing in the late twentieth century (O’Rourke and Williamson 2000). Those
countries and groups that are left out of the “beautiful époque” either
mobilize to challenge the hegemony of the powerful or they retreat into
self-reliance, or both.
Globalization protests emerged in the non-core
with the anti-IMF riots of the 1980s. The several transnational social
movements that participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle brought
globalization protest to the attention of observers in the core, and this
resistance to capitalist globalization has continued and grown despite the
setback that occurred in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington in 2001.
There is an apparent tension between
those who advocate deglobalization and delinking from the global capitalist
economy and the building of stronger, more cooperative and self-reliant social
relations in the periphery and semiperiphery, on the one hand, and those who
seek to mobilize support for new, or reformed institutions of democratic global
governance. Self-reliance by itself, though an understandable reaction to
exploitation, is not likely to solve the problems of humanity in the long run.
The great challenge of the twenty-first century will be the building of a
democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. World-systems theory
can be an important contributor to this effort.
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