Four
millennia of city growth
and
decline
Christopher
Chase-Dunn
Sociology,
University
of California, Riverside
chriscd@mail.ucr.edu
Susan
Manning
Sociology,
Hofstra University
Abstract:
This
is a study of the growth of cities in four regions over the past 4000 years.
We discuss changes in the relationship between political/military power,
economic power andcity systems with
special attention to the rise of European hegemony and the subsequent rise
of East Asian world cities.We compare
East Asian urban growth with the original heartland of cities in West Asia
and North Africa, as well as Europe and the subcontinent of South Asia.
This reveals the trajectories of city growth and decline and the relative
importance of the different regions over time.And
we re-examine the hypothesis of synchronicities of city growth and decline
across distant regions as the Afro-eurasian world-system became more and
more integrated.
V.3-7-01 (6547 words).Submitted to International Studies Quarterly.
The
comparative study of systems of cities, and settlement systems more generally,
is an important basis of our understanding of human social evolution.The
processes by which a world inhabited by small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands
became the single global political economy of today involved the growth
of settlement sizes and the expansion of interaction networks. These processes
of growth and expansion were uneven in time and space.Settlements
and cities did not always get larger. There were cycles of growth and decline.
And those regions that originally developed larger settlements and cities
were, in later epochs, no longer the leading regions in terms of the sizes
of their largest cities.
This paper is a continuation of our studies of patterns of long-term social change.Our earlier studies have used data on both city sizes and the territorial sizes of empires to examine different regional interaction systems and the hypothesis that regions distant from one another were experiencing synchronous cycles of growth and decline (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 1999).Our early study of city-size distributions in Afro-Eurasia (Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 222-223) found an apparent synchronicity between changes in city size distributions and the growth of largest cities in East Asia and West Asia-North Africa over a period of 2000 years.That led us to examine data on the territorial size of empires for similar synchronicity, which we found (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 1999). This paper is a re-examination of the city size data which will enable us to address claims about the relative importance of China in the Afro-eurasian system advanced by Andre Gunder Frank (1998), and to more thoroughly examine the synchronicity hypothesis regarding city growth.
The
relationship between power and demography has changed in important ways
over the last 4000 years. Archaeologists often assume a direct correspondence
between population density and societal power in intersocietal interactions,
and they also assume that the settlement size hierarchy (e.g. Kowalewski
1982) indicates stratification within a polity.
The
relationship between stratification and the sizes of settlements needs
to be considered both within societies and between them.It
is generally assumed that societies that have larger cities will also have
greater power than societies with smaller cities, and it is similarly assumed
that a society that is internally more stratified will have a steeper city-size
distribution – the relative population size of settlements within the society.
Though
there was never a simple correspondence of population density and the relative
power of societies vis a vis each other, there was a general correspondence.Societies
that could concentrate greater numbers of people generally had an advantage
in warfare. Exceptions to this are semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms and
semiperipheral marcher states that conquered older core powers (Chase-Dunn
and Hall 1997: Chapter 4). These less dense, typically less hierarchical
and upwardly mobile semiperipheries used geopolitical advantages as well
as superior organizational and military techniques to defeat older core
societies and to form larger regional polities.But
it was still generally the case that societies with greater numbers of
people and with larger cities had greater power over other societies than
those with lower population densities.
In
the modern world-system the relationship between population density and
power has become even more complicated.While
it is still true that the existence of large cities indicates the ability
of a society to produce and acquire the great resources necessary to support
huge populations living densely, the largest cities are even less likely
than before to be in the most powerful countries.As
of 1988 Mexico City was the second largest urban agglomeration on Earth,
and Sao Paolo was the fourth largest.
Power
among societies is now much more directly a function of technology than
it has been in the past. Machines controlled by a few people are capable
of exercising power over great distances, and huge bodies of armed men
are much less important than they have been in the past. Also economic
power based on the ability to produce profitable high technology commodities
and the ability to control financial resources has become a much more important
source of power than it was in the systems of the tributary empires. In
tributary empires military power was itself predominant, and it was greatly
dependent on the ability to mobilize and supply large armies.We
would not argue that economic power has replaced military power, but only
that economic power has become a much more important basis of predominance
in the modern capitalist world-system than in earlier tributary systems.Economic
power also has a demographic basis and population density can be an advantage,
but it is an advantage that is more strongly conditioned by technology
and organizational features than ever before.[1]
The
problem of synchronicity – changes of important social structural features
that are simultaneous in time -- is germane to our understanding of the
emergence of the modern world-system out of the formerly separate regional
systems.It is plausible that synchronous
processes in distant locations indicate systemness – the interaction of
important processes that are influencing local developmental. The emergence
of an integrated global system has been a long-term process that has been
characterized by pulsation cycles (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997).Long-distance
trade and long-distance military campaigns have expanded and then contracted,
but the overall trend has been greater and greater integration of larger
and larger territories.After our
re-examination of city synchronicity we will discuss possible causal explanations
for synchronicity in the Afro-eurasian macro-system.
The
questions we will try to answer in this research are:
1. what
can patterns of urban growth and decline tell us about the relative trajectories
of development and the relationships among different regions in the emerging
Afroeurasian system?This problem
we shall label “Regional Importance.” And,
2. are there statistically significant amounts of synchronicity in urban growth and decline across distant regions that are similar (or different from) the synchronicities that we have found in the growth and decline of the territorial sizes of empires? This we shall call “City Synchronicity.”
Regional
Importance
Andre
Gunder Frank’s (1998) provocative study of the global economy from 1400
to 1800 CE[2]
contends that China had long been the center of the global system. Franks
also argues that the rise of European hegemony was a sudden and conjunctural
development caused by the late emergence in China of a “high level equilibrium
trap” and the success of Europeans in using bullion extracted from the
Americas to buy their way into Chinese technological, financial and productive
success.Frank contends that European
hegemony was fragile from the start and will be short-lived with a predicted
new rise of Chinese predominance in the near future. He also argues that
the scholarly ignorance of the importance of China invalidates all the
social science theories that have mistakenly understood the rise of the
West and the differences between the East and the West. In Frank’s view
there never was a transition from feudalism to capitalism that distinguished
Europe from other regions of the world. He argues that the basic dynamics
of development have been similar in the global system for 5000 years (Frank
and Gills 1994).
Frank’s
model of development is basically a combination of state expansion and
financial accumulation, although in Reorient he focuses almost exclusively
on financial centrality as the major important element.His
study of global flows of specie, especially silver, is an important contribution
to our understanding of what happened between 1400 and 1800 CE.Frank
also uses demographic weight, and especially population growth and growth
of the size of cities, as an indicator of relative importance and developmental
success.
It
is our intention to systematically examine the growth of cities in order
to shed more light on Frank’s claims about the relative development of
East and West. Our study will begin in 2000 BCE when we first have data
on the population sizes of cities in different regions.Though
we understand the spatial nature of world-systems in terms of the sizes
of different kinds of interaction networks (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter
3), in this study we will compare the same regions over time despite the
fact thatinteraction nets grow from
being rather small to being global over the period we are studying. Thus
the unit of analysis in this study is the region, and regions are held
constant over the whole period.The
regions we will study are:
1. Europe,
including the Mediterranean and Aegean islands, that part of the Eurasian
continent to the west of the Caucasus Mountains, but not Asia Minor (now
Turkey).
2. West Asia- North Africa, including Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, the Levant, and Bactria.
3. The South Asian subcontinent, including the Indus river valley.
4. East Asia, including China, Korea and Japan and Southeast Asia, but not Indonesia.
These
regions are defined for purposes of examining the claims made by Frank
and others about relative development and possible synchronicity.
Measures
of importance based on city data
Wilkinson
(1992,1993) compared East Asia with West Asia using data from Chandler
(1987) on the number of large cities in each region.Wilkinson
used political-military interaction networks (which he calls “civilizations”)
as his unit of analysis. Political-military interaction networks (PMNs)
are a good unit of analysis because the alliances and enmities of polities
are an important systemic feature of all world-systems. But PMNs change
in size and location over time.[3]
For purposes of our present study we will use constant regions (described
above)as the unit of analysis.
We
have improved upon Wilkinson’s study by weighting the cities by their population
sizes.Using only the number of cities
ignores differences in the sizes of cities.Figure
1 shows the population-weighted percentage that our four regions held of
the twenty largest cities[4]
on Earth from 2000 BCE to 1988 CE.[5]
We also used the Chandler data, but we interpolated city sizes from Chandler’s
tables in order to estimate the populations of cities.[6]This
provides only a rough guess, but is still an improvement over Wilkinson’s
simple count of the number of cities in each region.
In
Figure 1 we see the emergence of the world’s first cities in Mesopotamia
and Egypt represented here by the designation West Asia/North Africa. In
the upper left hand corner of the graph the dashed line shows that this
region had 100% of the largest cities on Earth in 2000 BCE.As
other regions developed large cities this monopoly necessarily diminished
and 4000 years later only a very small percentage of the world’s largest
citiesare in this region. This is
strong evidence of the notion of uneven development and the movement of
the cutting edge of societal complexity.
The
relative size importance of European cities (indicated by the solid line)
shows a long oscillation around a low level, indicating Europe’s peripheral
and semiperipheral location in the larger Afro-eurasian world-system. The
long history of the incorporation ofthe
very small systems of Europe into the expanding Central
System
of West Asia/North Africa is portrayed in Chapter 9 of Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997). Europe had been firmly incorporated into the Central System during
the bronze and iron ages. Figure 1 indicates that by around 1450 CE Europe
began a long rise. It passed East Asia in 1825 CE and peaked in 1850, and
then underwent a rapid decline in importance as indicated by the relative
size of large cities.
Recall
that all the largest cities on Earth, including those in the Americas and
Oceania, are in the denominator of our measure of importance. So in the
decades of the 20th century the percentages shown in Figure
1 do not add up to 100% because some of the largest cities are in none
of the regions tracked (e.g. New York,Mexico
City, etc.).When we use changing
interaction network boundaries, as we have done in earlier research, these
new large cities are included within the Central System, but the contribution
of this study is to see what happens when we hold regions constant. Thus
Figure 1 indicates that the relatively smaller and older European cities
(e.g. London and Paris), were surpassed by the much largerAmerican
and Japanese cities in the 20th century.
The
trajectory of Europe displayed in Figure 1 supports part of Gunder Frank’s
(1998) analysis, but contradicts other parts. The small cities of Europe
in the early period indicate its peripheral status vis a vis the
core regions of West Asia/North Africa, South Asia and East Asia. As Frank
argues, Europe did not best East Asia (as indicated by city sizes) until
the eighteenth century.But the long
European rise, beginning in the fifteenth century, contradicts Frank’s
depiction of a sudden and conjunctural emergence of European hegemony.Based
on relative city sizes it appears that the rise of Europe occurred over
a period of 500 years.
For
East Asia we see in Figure 1 a rapid rise that began in 1200 BCE with the
emergence of the first states in the Yellow River valley.This
was followed by a small decline and then another burst of relative urban
growth that began in 361 CE and that rose to a peak in 800 CE, another
decline, and then a further rise to the highest peak of all in 1350 CE.Then
there was a small decline and another peak in 1800. Not until 1825 was
East Asia bested by the European cities after a decline that started in
1800 and continued until 1914, when a recovery began. The European cities
were bested again by the East Asian citiesbetween
1950 and 1970 during the rapid decline of the European cities in terms
of their size importance among the world’s largest cities. This most recent
rise of the East Asian cities is related to the upward mobility of Japan
and the East Asian NICs in the global political economy.Shin
and Timberlake (1999) have demonstrated the contemporary rising importance
of East Asian cities in the global airline transportation network.
Frank’s
depiction of a sudden and radical decline of China that began in 1800 CE
is supported in Figure 1.His analysis,
which focuses on the period from 1400 to 1800 CE, does not examine the
relative decline of East Asian predominance that began in 1350 and the
rise to a new peak that began in 1650 as indicated in Figure 1.
The
South Asian cities indicate how this region has fared during the long integration
of the Afro-eurasian system.In Figure
1 the South Asian cities are indicated by the line with triangles.The
early emergence of cities in the Indus river valley can be seen, as well
as their demise, and then the rise of the Gangetic states that peaked in
terms of city size importance in 200 BCE.The
Indic cities disappeared completely from the world’s 20 largest cities
in 1200 CE, but then rose to another peak in 1500 corresponding with the
Mughal empire.In 1988 the South
Asian cities had risen once again to a level as high as they had had between
1650 and 1700 CE.
The
Rise of Europe
Figure
2 shows the largest cities in each region from 1400 to 1988 CE. This and
the following figures differ from Figure 1 in that they are not percentages
of the world’s largest cities, but are just graphs of the city sizes for
each region. The most striking feature is the geometric growth rate of
city sizes that began in Europe in the 19th century spread to
East Asia, South Asia and West Asia/North Africa. Again, the big cities
of the Americas are not included in Figure 2.
New
York, which became the largest city in the world by 1925, beating out London,
is thus not included because we are studying constant regions. Tokyo, the
third largest city in 1925, had become the largest city on Earth by 1970,
and Osaka held third place in that year. By 1980 Tokyo was still first,
but Mexico City held second place, and Sao Paolo was in fourth place.
The
geometric growth rate in the last two centuries obscures, in Figure 2,
important fluctuations in the period from 1400 to 1850. These are germane
to Frank’s argument about the relative centrality of China and Europe.Figure
3 excludes the period after 1850 to show these fluctuations.
During
the period between 1400 and 1850 the largest cities in South Asia and in
West Asia/North Africa did not increase in size. Rather they fluctuated
around a level that was smaller that the largest East Asian cities at the
beginning of the period but larger than the largest cities in medieval
Europe. Beginning in 1500 the largest European city, Constantinople, began
a rapid period of growth that achieved the size of the largest city in
East Asia (Peking) by 1550.European
and Chinese cities were similarly large until 1700, when Peking began another
period of rapid growth. European growth experienced another upsurge after
1750 with the mushrooming of London, but the size of London did not equal
that of Peking until 1825. Within East Asia, Tokyo did not become larger
than Peking until 1900.
The
patterns shown in Figure 3 are quite similar to those to be found in Figure
4,a graph of the sum of the three
largest city populations in each region, except that the most recent European
rise is shown to have begun earlier, in 1600.
Our
examination of the largest cities in Europe and East Asia further reflects
upon Frank’s (1998) characterization of the centrality of China and the
rise of European hegemony. While we have contended above that the “European”
rise began much earlier than Frank describes (shown in Figures 1-4 above),
this early rise appears to have been due to the growth of Ottoman Constantinople.Though
Constantinople was within the continent of Europe as wehave
defined it, Frank might contend that crediting the Christian Europeans
of later fame with the success of the Ottoman Turks is unfair, and that
his hypothesis of the conjunctural nature of European hegemony is not challenged
by this.
But
there are some other facts that need to be taken into account here. The
second and third largest cities in Europe in 1500 were Paris and Venice,
followed by Naples and Milan.From
1500 to 1600 Paris grew from 185,000 to 245,000 and the other large cities
of Christian Europe grew at a similar pace.So
the early upsurge was not due only to the growth of Constantinople.Christian
Europe was also experiencing a sixteenth century boom period. This does
not dispute the relatively greater centrality of China in this period,
but it does suggest that Christian Europe did not remain a peripheral backwater
until it finally sprang to hegemony at the last minute in the 18th
century.
Constantinople’s
size leveled off at 700,000 in 1600 and it stayed at that size until 1700,
after which it began to decline. In this same period the largest cities
of Christian Europe were growing rapidly. London grew larger than Constantinople
by 1750.
The
Standardized Primacy Index (SPI) is a statistic that was invented for comparing
city size distributions (Walters 1985).It
calculates a single number from the population sizes of the largest cities
in a region based on deviations from the rank-size rule.[7]
The
SPIs of Europe and East Asia are uncorrelated in the period from 1400 CE
to 1988.East Asia has a rank-size
distribution from 1400 to 1600 while Europe dips through a period of flatness
during this same period, recovering a rank-size distribution in 1550 (see
Figure 5). 
After
1600 East Asia drops to a very flat distribution in 1650, and then slowly
recovers a city-size hierarchy that peaks in 1850, and then declines and
rises again with the predominance of Tokyo. The European distribution declines
also after 1600, but not to a similar depth. It recovers by 1850 and stays
rank-size until 1914 when it again drops toward flatness.
City
Synchronicity
This
section replicates our study of synchronous changes in West and East Asian
city systems. We have excluded the South Asian and European regions from
this analysis because they do not reveal synchronicity with the other regions
or with each other. There are two main differences between what we have
done in this study and what we did in earlier work. The first is that we
have grouped the cities according to constant regions rather than spatially
changing political/military interaction networks (PMNs), as described above.
So the West Asia/North Africa region contains cities in this region over
the whole time period rather than the expanding Central PMN studied by
Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997). The main
difference due to this change is that emerging cities in the Aegean and
points west are not included in the West Asian/North African region, whereas
they were included in the Central PMN.This
might reduce the degree of synchronicity found because most of the Greek
and Roman cities are in the European region, and an important component
of the synchronicity found in earlier work was that between the rise and
fall of the Roman and Han empires.
The
other difference from earlier research is the use of a five-city SPI rather
than a three-city SPI. This uses more of the cities in each region in the
calculation of the SPI, and so should be a superior indicator of the city-size
aspect of regional city systems. In practice the values are probably not
greatly different from those obtained using only the three largest cities.
In
addition to the SPI, we used two other indicators of changes in regional
city systems.These are:
·the
population size of the largest city, and
·the
sum of the populations of the three largest cities.
Figure
6 shows our replication of the Eastern-Western comparison based on the
five-city SPI and using spatially constant regions. Visual inspection of
Figure 2 suggests a definite correlation between the rise and fall of steep
and flat city size distributions in these distant regions from 800 BCE
to 1600 CE. Before and after this period there is no correspondence between
East and West Asian city size distributions.The
synchronous Pearson’s r correlation coefficient produced by the values
in Figure 6 is .32, and this approaches, but does not reach, statistical
significance.
Figure
10.7 in Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:217), based on a three-city SPI and comparing
the Central and East Asian PMNs, finds a synchronous correlation of .44
and this is statistically significant at the .03 level.We
suspect that the somewhat weaker correlation produced in this study is
due to the fact that Rome is not included in the West Asian/North African
region, whereas it was included in the Central PMN.The
correlation between Roman and Han events and development, studied closely
by Teggart (1939), was an important piece of the synchronicity of the Afro-eurasian
system.That we finda
substantial degree of synchronicity even when Rome is excluded is additional
support for the hypothesis that East and West Asian growth/decline processes
were linked in some way.
Visual
inspection of Figure 6 also suggests a lead-lag relationship between East
and West Asian city size changes. The West Asian/North African city size
distribution seems to be leading the ups and downs by a lag of one or two
hundred years.This may be an important
clue to the nature of the causal relations that link the two regions, but
this suggestedlag needs to be investigated
using more temporally fine data. The long periods between measured city
sizes in the Chandler data, especially before 1000 CE, make any statements
about synchronicity or lagged relationships open to a good degree of doubt.On
the other hand, our replication of the synchronicity found in empire
size data using temporally finer time points increased the correlation
found between the East Asian and Central PMNs (Chase-Dunn, Manning and
Hall 1999).City population data
for more time points and shorter intervals needs to be assembled to see
how city synchronicity fairs with temporally finer data.
Figure
7 shows the trajectories of changes in the population sizes of the largest
cities in East and West Asia over the same period as examined in Figure
6. The Pearson’s r synchronous correlation coefficient of .55, significant
at the .003 level, further supports the hypothesis of East-West Asian city
synchronicity.
Visual
inspection of Figure 7 also suggests a lead-lag relationship, but it is
more complicated than indicated in Figure 6. The temporal lead of changes
in direction (growth and decline) seems to shift back and forth between
West Asia/North Africa and East Asia. For example, the decline in the size
of the largest city that began in East Asia in 800 CE did not start in
West Asia until 900 CE, and the rise that began in East Asia in 1000 CE
did not start in West Asia until 1150 CE. On the other hand the earlier
rise and decline seems to have been led by West Asia. Again, these lag
structures require further investigation that uses more temporally fine
data with measurement points that are closer together.
Figure
8 includes data on the three largest cities in each region. The correlation
coefficient further supports the hypothesis of city synchronicity. Visual
inspection suggests another complicated lead-lag relationship with both
regions leading during different periods.
Figure 8: Three Largest
Cities in East Asia and West Asia/North Africa
1.Long-distance
trade between these distant regions transmitted economic forces great enough
to bring them into a synchronous pattern of growth and decline.
2.The
cycle of the rise and fall of semiperipheral (or peripheral) states in
Central Asia – the steppe nomad confederations that periodically attacked
the agrarian empires of the East and the West – brought the East and West
Asian systems into synchronicity.
3.World-systems
may undergo similar sequences of expansion and contraction due to internal
dynamics. If the Central and East Asia systems just happened to get going
at about the same time, then their internal processes could have created
a synchronicity that has little to do with causal relationships linking
the two regions.
4.Some
force exogenous to both regions created a synchronous pattern of expansion
and contraction.The only candidate
is climate change.
Of
possible relevance is the fact that the South Asian region, spatially in
between the Eastern and Western Asian regions, was not brought into either
city or empire synchronicity with the others (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997,
Chase-Dunn Manning and Hall 1999).And
the apparent lack of any synchronicity before 800 BCE or after 1600 CE
is also an important clue. The possibility of a Western temporal priority
suggested by visual inspection of Figure 6 above, would also be important
because causality is assumed to go forward, but not backward, in time.
Conclusions
We
can report additional support for the hypothesis of city synchronization
between 800 BCE and 1600 CE for the distant regions of East Asia and West
Asia/North Africa. The causality that resulted in this phenomenon is still
unknown. What is needed is the operationalization for the relevant regions
and time period of measures of the main hypothesized causal variables:
climate change, warfare, and long-distance trade (e.g. Chase-Dunn 1995).
Further research should also improve upon the existing city and empire
size data, and should investigate the relationship between these within
and across regions.
Our
examination of the problem of the relative importance of regions relies
exclusively on the population sizes of cities, a less than ideal indicator
of power and relative centrality as discussed in the introductory section
of this paper. Nevertheless, our results suggest some possible problems
with Frank’s characterization of the relationship between Europe and China
before and during the rise of European hegemony. Frank’s contention that
Europe was primarily a peripheral region relative to the core regions of
the Afro-eurasian world-system is supported by the city data, with some
qualifications.Europe was for millennia
a periphery of the large cities and powerful empires of ancient West Asian
and North Africa. The Greek and Roman cores were instances of semiperipheral
marcher states that conquered important parts of the older West Asian/North
African core. After the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the core shifted
back toward the East and Europe was once again importantly peripheral.
The
synchronicity findings support the idea proposed in Frank and Gills (1994)
that there was an integrated Afro-eurasian world-system much earlier than
most historians and civilizationists suppose. But we cannot yet be certain
that interaction networks were important causes of the synchronicity, and
if they were, we do not know which kind of interaction was most important.
Counter
to Frank’s contention, however, the rise of European hegemony was not a
sudden conjunctural event that was due solely to a developmental crisis
in China. The city population data indicate that an important renewed core
formation process had been occurring within Europe since at least the 14th
century.This was partly a consequence
of European extraction of resources from its own expanded periphery. But
it was also likely due to the unusually virulent form of capitalistic accumulation
within Europe, and the effects of this on the nature and actions of states.
The development of European capitalism began among the city-states of Italy.
It spread to the European interstate system, eventually resulting in the
first capitalist nation-state – the Dutch Republic of the 17th
century as well as the later rise of the hegemony of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain in the 18th century. This process of regional
core formation and its associated emphasis on capitalist commodity production
further spread and institutionalized the logic of capitalist accumulation
by defeating the efforts of territorial empires (Hapsburgs, Napoleonic
France) to return the expanding European core to a more tributary mode
of accumulation.
Acknowledging
some of the uniquenesses of the emerging European hegemony does not require
us to ignore the important continuities that also existed as well as the
consequential ways in which European developments were linked with processes
going on in the rest of the Afro-eurasian world-system.
The
more recent emergence of East Asian cities as again the very largest cities
on Earth occurred in a context that was structurally and developmentally
distinct from the multi-core system that still existed in 1800. Now there
is only one core because all core states are directly interacting with
one another. While the multi-core system prior to the 18th century
was undoubtedly systemically integrated to an important extent, it was
not as interdependent as the global world-system has now become.
A
new East Asian hegemony is by no means a certainty, as both the United
States and German-led Europe will be strong contenders in the next period
of hegemonic rivalry (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1999). In this competition
megacities may be more a liability than an advantage because the costs
of these huge human agglomerations have continued to increase, while the
benefits have been somewhat diminished by the falling costs of transportation
and communication.Nevertheless megacities
will continue to be an indicator of predominance because societies that
can afford them will have demonstrated the ability to mobilize huge resources.
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