Global
Social Change in the Long Run
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
Forthcoming in Global Social Change: A Reader, Johns Hopkins University Press. (9720 words) v. 5-4-04
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 1: 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
4: 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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