World-Systems
Figure 2.1: A world-system is a system of societies
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.[1]
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 2.2).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.
The modern semiperiphery includes Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, China, India, South Africa, Russia, Israel, Ireland, Middle Eastern oil exporting countries, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The hierarchies that exist between societies do not dissolve the class/caste hierarchies that exist within societies. The differences in absolute wealth between core and periphery, say between the United States and China, affects the comparative status and power of the classes within each society. To be upper middle-class in the core United States involves more wealth and power than being upper-middle class in semiperipheral China. So too, a member of the skilled working class in another core country, Germany, enjoys a higher standard of living than a skilled worker in Bolivia.
Figure
2.2: 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[2]),
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 interactionbetween
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 theseare
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. [3]
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 2.3).
Figure 2.3: 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)
hasa 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).[4]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 2.4.The actual spatial scale of important interaction needs to be determined for each world-system we study, but Figure 2.4 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 2.4 The Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems 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 becamesupplemented
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
wewill 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.So
to 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 Before
the story is told it will be helpful to have a map of the territory of
world-systems evolution.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. It
will become evident in the chapters that follow that there are several
different important kinds of semiperipheries, and that 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
couldbe recombinedin
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 ofEurope 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
2.7 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
2.7 Basic Iteration Model of World-System Evolution 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 (19xx) 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. The consequences
of the above processes are that the economics of production change for
the worse.According to Joseph Tainter
(19xx), 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 resist our moving in with them. 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
endeavour 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 2.7 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 2.8: Temporary Institutional
Shortcuts in the Iteration Model The
basic ideas have now been described.We
have a philosophical standpoint, a method, a theoretical approach (institutional
materialism) and an orienting strategy (the comparative world-systems perspective).Let
us now turn to the process by which an individual learns to become a social
being by developing a social self, including the ability to reason abstractly
Now we have enough
macrosociological tools from the comparative world-systems approach. Now
let us turn to the social self, personality, identity and questions of
the nature of the individual human being. With a carefully selected and
thoughtfully packed bag of conceptual camping equipment we will be ready
for an excursion into the
realm of stateless systems and trekking with the nomads.