World-systems in the Biogeosphere:
Three
Thousand Years
of Urbanization, Empire Formation and Climate Change
Christopher
Chase-Dunn chriscd@mail.ucr.edu
Alexis Alvarez alexisalvarez@earthlink.net
Dan Pasciuti GreyWolf917@aol.com
Institute
for Research on World-Systems
University
of California, Riverside
Ocean surface winds
Abstract: World-systems are human interaction networks that
display oscillations of expansion and contraction, with occasional large
expansions that bring formerly separate regional systems into systemic
intercourse with one another. These waves of expansion, now called
globalization, have, in the last two centuries, created a single integrated
intercontinental political economy in which all national societies are strongly
linked. This paper investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction
networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3000 years. The purpose
is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East
Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the
intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are
climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian
steppe nomads. This paper formulates a strategy of data gathering, system
modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these
causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian
world-system came into being.
To
be presented at the conference on “Nature, Raw Materials and Political Economy”
held in honor of Stephen Bunker’s contribution to political ecology, Madison,
November 2, 2002. Thanks to Tom Hall for helpful comments. V.
10-30-02, (7707 words) This paper is available on the web at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows11/irows11.htm
Outline:
World-Systems are interaction networks
Nested Networks of Information, Trade and Warfare
Core/Periphery Relations
Geosociology interacts with geobiology and geology
The rise of globalization within Afroeurasia
Rise of the
Central System
Teggart’s
Correlations of Historical Events
East/West
Pulsations and Merger
Synchrony of East/West Growth/Decline Phases
PMNs and constant regions.
Territorial
Size of Largest Empire
Population
Size of Largest City
City-size
Distributions
Overall
Population Oscillations and Trend
New results on population from
Mcevedy’s data.
Modeling Synchronization: Lessons from Population Ecology –
the Moran Effect
Regions and patches.
The Comprehensive Model:
Possible
Causes of East/West Synchrony:
Climate
Change: Galloway’s
(1986) Climate and Population Model
Trade
Fluctuations
Central
Asian Steppe Nomad Incursions
Epidemic
Diseases
Testing the Model
In Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan a
traveler from another solar system has crash-landed on one of the moons of
Jupiter and is using his last bit of fuel to beam forces onto the Earth in
order to send a message home. His efforts induce the Central Asian steppe
nomads to behave in a way that causes successive Chinese states to build the
Great Wall in the form of a script that appears from space as a rescue plea.
This trope of distant forces affecting human history is an ironic tool in the
hand of the fiction-smith who pokes fun at us for our hapless intentions. World historians have hypothesized other
powerful mechanisms by which macrosocial processes may have been shaped by
exogenous forces.
Since
Ellsworth Huntington’s Climate and Civilization there has been a growing
literature on how spatial and temporal variation in rainfall, temperature,
prevailing winds and episodic weather extremes have influenced the course of
history. Archaeologists routinely invoke climate change as the explanation for
social and cultural developments. As
much more has been learned about the patterns of global weather these accounts
have become more sophisticated. Bryan Fagan’s (1999) Floods, Famines and
Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations is the most recent and
compelling version. But instead of painting the humans as inert victims of
powerful forces, Fagan argues that climate change has acted as the critical
spur that pushed people to invent and implement radical new ways of interacting
with nature and with one another.
Mike Davis’s (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino
Famines and the Making of the Third World depicts how droughts caused by El Ninos in the nineteenth century
interacted with the rapid integration of peripheral regions into global markets
in a context of colonialism and neocolonialism to bring about unprecedented
huge famines and epidemic disease fatalities in Brazil, India, China and the
Phillipines.
There is also an important literature about how human
action may affect the climate. Much of this is focused on anthropogenic global
warming in the twentieth century, but there is also a literature on how
deforestation, irrigation building and land-use patterns have affected local
weather (e.g. Chew 2001). And a growing research tradition on urban ecology has
discovered the phenomenon of the “urban heat island,” an example of
anthropogenic effects on the local weather (Gallo n.d.).
World-systems are human interaction networks that display
oscillations of expansion and contraction, with occasional very large
expansions that bring regional systems into contact with one another. These
waves of expansion, now called globalization, have, in the last two centuries,
created a single integrated intercontinental political economy in which all
national societies are strongly linked. This paper investigates the
“pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over
the past 3000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating
synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West
Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian
region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change,
epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads.
This paper formulates a strategy of data acquisition, system modeling, and
hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which these causes were the
most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came
into being.[1]
Three
world-systems merge their prestige goods and information networks.
One
limitation of some regional analyses has been the tendency to define regions in
terms of homogenous attributes, either natural or social. Thus comparative
civilizationists have tended to focus on the core cultural characteristics that
are embodied in religions or world-views and to construct lists of culturally
defined civilizations that then become the “cases” for the study of social
change. Another approach that defines regions as areas with homogenous
characteristics is the “culture area” perspective developed by Carl Sauer and
his colleagues (e.g. Wissler 1927). This project gathered information on all
sorts of cultural attributes
--languages, architectural styles, technologies of production, kinship
structures, etc. -- and used these to designate bounded and adjacent “culture areas.”
A
major problem with both the civilizationist and cultural area approaches is the
assumption that homogeneity is a good approach to bounding social systems that
are evolving. Heterogeneity rather than homogeneity has long been an important
aspect of human social systems. The effort to bound systems as homogeneous
regions obscures this important fact. Spatial distributions of homogeneous
characteristics do not bound separate social systems. Indeed, social
heterogeneity is often produced by interaction, as in the case of
core/periphery differentiation. Even sophisticated approaches that examine
distributions of spatial characteristics statistically must make quite
arbitrary choices in order to specify regional boundaries on this basis (e.g.
Burton 1995).
The
world-systems approach focuses instead on human
interaction networks, and so it is able to define its units of analysis as
systemic combinations of very different kinds of societies. This makes it
possible to study multicultural systems and core/periphery relations as cases
that can display dynamics of social evolution.[2]
The relationship between natural regions and human
interaction networks is an important focus of theory and research. Cultural
ecology has stressed the important ways in which local ecological factors
conditioned sociocultural institutions and modes of living. This was an
especially compelling perspective for understanding small-scale systems in
which people were mainly interacting with adjacent neighbors not very far away.
But this kind of local ecological determinism is much less compelling when
world-systems get larger because long-distance interaction networks and the
development of larger scale technologies enable people to impose socially
constructed logics on local ecologies. Some social evolutionists have interpreted
this to mean that social institutions have become progressively less
ecologically determined (e.g. Lenski, Lenski and Nolan 1995). But what has
happened instead is that the spatial scale of ecological constraints have grown
to the point where they are operating globally rather than locally (Chase-Dunn
and Hall 1998).
The
world-systems perspective emerged as a theoretical approach for modeling and
interpreting the expansion and deepening of the European system as it engulfed
the globe over the past five hundred years (Wallerstein 1974; Arrighi
1994;Chase-Dunn 1998;). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of
"advanced" economically developed and powerful states dominating and
exploiting "less developed" peripheral regions has been a central
concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems
approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal
systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1993) have argued that the
contemporary world system is a continuation of a 5000-year old system that
emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have
modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative
study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup
networks composed of sedentary foragers (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998), as
well as larger regional systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian
empires and the contemporary global political economy in their scope of
comparison.
The
comparative world-systems perspective is designed to be general enough to allow
comparisons between quite different systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) define
world-systems as important networks of interaction that impinge upon a local
society and condition social reproduction and social change. They note that
different kinds of interaction often have distinct spatial characteristics and
degrees of importance in different sorts of systems. And they hold that the question
of the degree of systemic interaction between two locales is prior to the
question of core/periphery relations. Indeed they make the existence of
core/periphery relations an empirical question in each case, rather than an
assumed characteristic of all world-systems.
Spatially
bounding world-systems necessarily must proceed from a locale-centric beginning
rather than from a whole-system focus. This is because all human societies,
even nomadic hunter-gatherers, interact importantly with neighboring societies.
Thus if we consider all indirect interactions to be of systemic importance
(even very indirect ones) then there has been a single global world-system
since humankind spread to all the continents. But interaction networks, while
they were always intersocietal, have not always been global in the sense that
actions in one region had major and relatively quick effects on distant
regions. When transportation and communications were over short distances the
world-systems that affected people were small.
Thus
it is necessary to use the notion of "fall-off" of effects over space
to bound the networks of interaction that importantly impinge upon any focal
locale. The world-system of which any locality is a part includes those peoples
whose actions in production, communication, warfare, alliance and trade have a
large and interactive impact on that locality. It is also important to
distinguish between endogenous systemic interaction processes and exogenous
impacts that may importantly change a system but are not part of that system.
So maize diffused from Mesoamerica to Eastern North America, but that need not
mean that the two areas were part of the same world-system. Or a virulent
microparasite might contact a population with no developed immunity and ravage
that population. But such an event does not necessarily mean that the region
from which the microparasite came and the region it penetrated are parts of a
single interactive social system. Interactions must be two-way and regularized to be socially systemic. One-shot deals do
not a world-system make.
Chase-Dunn
and Hall (1997) note that in most intersocietal systems there are several
important networks of different spatial scales that impinge upon any particular
locale:
·
Information Networks
(INs)
·
Prestige Goods
Networks (PGNs)
·
Political/Military
Networks (PMNs), and
·
Bulk Goods Networks
(BGNs).
The
largest networks are those in which information travels. Information is light
and it travels a long way, even in systems based on down-the-line interaction.[3]
These are termed Information Networks (INs). A usually somewhat smaller
interaction network is based on the exchange of prestige goods or luxuries that
have a high value/weight ratio. Such
goods travel far, even in
down-the-line systems. These are called Prestige Goods Networks (PGNs). The
next largest interaction net is composed of polities that are allying or making
war with one another. These are called Political/Military Networks (PMNs). And
the smallest networks are those based on a division of labor in the production
of basic everyday
necessities such a food
and raw materials. These are Bulk Goods Networks (BGNs). Figure 1 illustrates
how these interaction networks are spatially related in many world-systems.
Figure 1:
Nested Interaction Networks
The
first question for any focal locale is about the nature and spatial
characteristics of its links with the above four interaction nets. This is
prior to any consideration of core/periphery position because one region must
be linked to another by systemic interaction in order for consideration of
core/periphery relations to be relevant.
The
spatial characteristics of these networks clearly depend on many things - the
costs of transportation and communications, and whether or not interaction is
only with neighbors or there are regularized long-distance trips being made.
But these factors affect all kinds of interaction and so the relative size of
networks is expected to approximate what is shown in Figure 1. As an educated
guess we would suppose that fall-off in the PMN generally occurs after two or
three indirect links. Suppose group A is fighting and allying with its
immediate neighbors and with the immediate neighbors of its neighbors. So its
direct links extend to the neighbors of the neighbors. But how many indirect
links will involve actions that will importantly affect this original group?
The number of indirect links that bound a PMN are probably either two or three.
As polities get larger and interactions occur over greater distances each
indirect link extends much farther across space. But the point of important
fall-off will usually be after either two or three indirect links.
Chase-Dunn
and Hall (1997) divide the conceptualization of core/periphery relations into
two analytically separate aspects:
·
core/periphery
differentiation, and
·
core/periphery
hierarchy.
Core/periphery
differentiation exists when two societies are in systemic interaction with one
another and one of these has higher population density and/or greater
complexity than the other. The second aspect, core/periphery hierarchy, exists
when one society dominates or exploits another. These two aspects often go
together because a society with greater population density/complexity usually
has more power than a society with less of these, and so can effectively
dominate/exploit the less powerful neighbor. But there are important instances
of reversal (e.g. the less dense, less complex Central Asian steppe nomads
exploited agrarian China) and so this analytical separation is necessary so
that the actual relations can be determined in each case.[4]
The question of core/periphery relations needs to be asked at each level of
interaction designated above. It is more difficult to project power over long
distances, and so one would not expect to find strong core/periphery
hierarchies at the level of Information or Prestige Goods Networks. Figure 2 illustrates a core/periphery hierarchy.
Figure 2: Core/Periphery Hierarchy
Core/periphery
hierarchies are important in processes of social evolution because
semiperipheral socities, those that are intermediate between core regions and
peripheral hinterlands, are fertile locations for instititutional innovations
and frequently are the key actors that transform the developmental logic of
world-systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:Chapter 5) call this “semiperipheral
development.” Semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms conquer more senior and older core
chiefdoms to form larger and more centralized complex chiefdoms, as do the much
better know semiperipheral marcher states (e.g. Chin China, Assyria, Achaemenid
Persia, Alexandrian Macedonia, Rome, Islamic Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire).
Semiperipheral capitalist city-states (the Phoenicians, the Italian
city-states, the Hanse cities, Malakka) were the agents of commercialization in
the interstices of the tributary empires. In the modern world-system it has
been the semiperipheral and capitalist Dutch republic, England and the United
States of America that have risen to hegemony and further globalized the
organization of the world economy. Semiperipheral development is still an
important pattern in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Chase-Dunn and Boswell
2002).
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 3:
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.[5]
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 complimentary 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.
The diagram 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
Synchronization of Empires, Cities and Demographic Waves
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 2000; Chase-Dunn and Manning
2002). Frederick Teggart’s (1939) path-breaking world historical study
of temporal correlations between events on the edges of the Roman and Han
Empires argued the thesis that incursions by Central Asian steppe nomads were
the key to East/West synchrony. An early study of city-size distributions in
Afroeurasia (Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993; see also Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 222-223)
found an apparent synchrony 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 sizes of empires for similar synchrony, which we found
(Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 1999). Chase-Dunn and Manning (2002) have
re-examined the city size data using constant regions[6]
rather than PMNs to see if the East/West synchronous city growth hypothesis
holds when the units that are compared are somewhat different. Their results
confirm the existence of East/West city growth synchrony.
Here we present a new analysis of East/West synchrony
that uses overall population estimates compiled by McEvedy and Jones
(1975). They note a synchrony in
periods of regional demographic growth and decline during the late first
millennium BCE and during the first millennium CE between East Asia and the
Mediterranean. Interestingly, Mc Evedy and Jones (1975:345-346) reject the idea
that climate change may have caused this synchrony in favor of a hypothesis of
parallel and connected technological and organizational change.
We have computed the
partial correlations, controlling for year to remove the trend, of population
levels from 1000 BCE to 1800 CE among three regions. We stop at 1800 CE because
the trend becomes exponential after that and would drown out earlier middle
range variations. What we want to know is whether or not the middle term ups
and downs, what we have called growth/decline phases, are synchronous or not.
We examine four regions: East Asia, South Asia and West Asia/Mediterranean and
Europe.[7]
These are the same constant regions that Chase-Dunn and Manning (2002) used to
study the synchrony of city growth/decline phases.
|
|
West Asia/Mediterranean |
East Asia |
South Asia |
Europe |
|
West Asia/Mediterranean |
1 |
.81 (26) |
.60 (26) |
.79 (26) |
|
East Asia |
|
1 |
.88 (26) |
.95 (26) |
|
South Asia |
|
|
1 |
.92 (26) |
|
Europe |
|
|
|
1 |
Table 1:
Inter-regional Partial Correlations of Population Change Controlling for Year,
1000 BCE-1800CE (population estimates from McEvedy and Jones 1975)
Table 1 shows the partial correlation coefficients of
population change estimates for four Old World regions. These have been
detrended in two ways in order to look for synchronous growth-decline phases
across regions. We eliminate the years after 1800 CE when most of the regions
were undergoing geometric growth rates. And we compute the inter-regional
correlations controlling for year, which should take out the long-term trend.
The results in Table 1 are somewhat surprising. There are
statistically significant partial correlations among all the regions despite
our efforts to take out the long-term trend. The correlation between East Asia
and the West Asian/Mediterranean region is higher than that for either city or
empire size cross-regional partial correlations (.81), but it is not as high as
some of the other coefficients in Table 1. Curiously the correlations between
Europe and both East Asia and South Asia are very high (.95, .92). The lowest correlation is between West Asia
and South Asia (.60). And the correlation between Europe and the West
Asia/Mediterranean region is relatively low despite that these two “regions” overlap
geographically (see Footnote 7).
It is possible that these high partial correlations are
partly due to the rather coarse temporal resolution of the population estimates
that we have extracted from graphs produced by McEvedy and Jones (1975). Our
data set is organized in one hundred year intervals, a temporal resolution that
smooths out most of the growth/decline fluctuations we are trying to study.
Unfortunately McEvedy and Jones do not present enough detail about the evidence
they used to produce their graphs. We are looking into the possibility that
this material may be obtained.
Figure
5 presents the demographic data in graphical form for the same four regions.
Figure 5: Regional Population Growth (from McEvedy and Jones, 1975)
Examination of Figure 5 shows both the long-term trends and
the shorter-term variations, though these have been smoothed by the low
temporal resolution just discussed. What we see is a long hump that starts
slowly in 1000 BCE and winds back down to a low point around 600 CE in all the
regions except South Asia. In South Asia the slump does not appear. This is the
East/West synchrony noted by McEvedy and Jones. After about 600 CE all the
regions go up again, but then the patterns partly diverge. The East Asian rise
is early and steeper. All the regions except South Asia display a partly
synchronous decline after the twelfth century. East Asia has another decline in
the seventeenth century and this is also a period of slow growth in Europe and
decline in West Asia, but South Asia continues to grow in this period. The West
Asian/Mediterranean region does not partake in the rapid population growth that
sweeps the other regions after the fifteenth century.
The
Moran Effect in Population Ecology
The temporal aspects of climate change cycles lead easily
to hypotheses about how these may be causes of certain cyclical (or at least
sequential) phenomena in human affairs. And this is especially the case when
cycles in distant regions appear to come into synchrony. Population ecologists have long studied the
phenomenon of increases and then decreases in the population densities of plant
and animal species. They model population dynamics of species within adjacent
and distant “patches,” explaining how predator-prey relationships, food
availability, and migration affect the cycles of population growth and decline.
P.A.P. Moran’s (1953) study of the
population cycles of the Canadian lynx led him to formulate what has become
known as the “Moran effect” – the idea that synchronized exogenous shocks to
local oscillating systems will cause them to come into synchrony even when the
exogenous shocks do not themselves display much periodicity (Ranta, et al
1996; Ranta et al 1999).
Population ecologists usually have climate change in mind as the most
likely source of exogenous shocks.
The important implications of the Moran effect for our
problem of the causes of synchrony are that any exogenous shock can bring
oscillating systems into synchrony even if the temporal features of the
exogenous variable are completely different from the temporality of the local
oscillating systems. A meteor impact could reset local systems and put them
into synchrony. Turchin and Hall (2002) also point out that the empirical study
of synchrony requires exact measurement and fine temporality, and also many
oscillations and many different cases of oscillating systems in order to
disentangle different plausible causes of synchrony. These are daunting
requisites for our single case of East/West synchrony.
Comparable other
instances of distant systems that come into weak contact with one another can
be found. Within the Old World, the
Mesopotamian and Egyptian core regions were interacting with one another by
means of prestige goods exchange from about 3000 BCE until their PMNs merged in
1500 BCE. Chase-Dunn and Hall (2001) have already examined this case for
synchronicity and have not found it, though the data on Bronze Age city and
empire sizes are crude with regard to temporality and accuracy. It is also
possible to study the temporality of rise and fall and oscillations in the New
World. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1998b) and Stephen Kowalewski (2002) have not found
synchrony between distant systems in the new world, though much more systematic
and comparable research needs to be done before firm conclusions are possible.
The
Moran effect implies that synchrony occurs easily because a single exogenous
impact that resets systems with similar endogenous oscillations will bring them
into synchrony. But if this is true we would expect to find more synchrony than
we have found up to now. Population
ecology also usually finds greater synchrony in patches that are close to one
another than in those that are more distant (Ranta et al 1999), but this
is not what we find in Afroeurasia. The South Asian system, intermediate
between East and West, seems to be marching to its own drummer.
Modeling Climate Change Effects on Population
Patrick Galloway (1986) models the way in which climate
change can affect human population growth. He argues that it was climate change
that caused the synchrony of demographic cycles noted by McEvedy and Jones
(1975). Galloway’s model is depicted in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Galloway’s
(1986) Climate and Population Model
Galloway’s model is entirely plausible and could easily
be amended to include affects on city growth and empire-formation. But in order
for this model to account for synchrony across regions the changes in
temperature (and other climatological variables) would need to also be
synchronous, or else there would have to at least be an initial strong
climatological shift that affects all the regions during the same period. The only way to sort this out is to obtain
indicators of climate change in or near to the regions we are studying in the
relevant time periods. Knowing about the climate change record in Greenland
will not settle the question, because despite global teleconnections, climate
change is ultimately local. Our effort to gather the relevant climate change
data has only just gotten under way.
A
Comprehensive Model of the Causes of Inter-regional Synchrony
We can propose a comprehensive model of all the plausible
causes of East/West synchrony. The purpose of complex causal modeling is to
allow us to discover the relative strengths of different causal mechanisms by
examining the logic implications of causal relations and the parameters that
are hypothesize to be operant. Figure 7 displays a complex causal model that
contains all the hypothesized effects that result in the East/West synchrony
discussed above.
Figure 7 Comprehensive
East/West Synchrony Model
This model can be translated into a complex system of
structural equations and estimated parameters for these can allow us to examine
the conditions under which causation can lead to synchrony. We plan to combine this theoretical exercise
with a campaign to improve our empirical knowledge of the population sizes of
cities and the territorial sizes of empires and climate change over the past
3000 years (e.g. Pasciuti and Chase-Dunn 2002). By approaching the problem from the angles of both induction and
deduction we hope to be able to estimate the relative strengths of the
different hypothesized cause of East/West synchrony. And the outcome should be
a better understanding of the way in which human systems have interacted with
biological and geological processes in world history.
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