The SETPOL
Framework:
Settlements
and polities
in World-Systems
Artist’s conception of the
Cothon, the military harbor of Carthage
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Hiroko Inoue, Eugene Anderson and David
Wilkinson
v. 1-31-17, 15995 words
This is IROWS Working Paper
#116 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows116/irows116.htm
Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California
Riverside
*Thanks
to Andrew Jorgenson and Thomas Hall for help in developing the ideas in this article.
This article presents the interdisciplinary framework
developed by the SetPol Working Research Group at the University of
California-Riverside for studying sociocultural evolution of complexity and hierarchy
by comparing world-systems. By focusing on the population sizes of settlements
and the territorial sizes of polities[1] we
can pinpoint those periods in which the scale of sociocultural systems were
significantly changing based on relatively simple and knowable quantitative
criteria. Human social organization and interaction
networks have expanded over the long run, but in the medium-run there have been
cycles of rise and fall and occasional upward sweeps and collapses. It is the upward sweeps that account for the
long-term upward trends toward larger cities and polities, and so specifying
when and where the upward sweeps occurred and examining their causes will help
to explain the long-term trend.[2]
This project should include all the
local, regional and intercontinental human interaction networks, including both
nomadic and sedentary world-systems,[3]
though in practice it is necessary to limit ourselves to those regions in which
fairly reliable and frequent estimates of the quantitative sizes of largest
polities and settlements are available.
We focus on the territorial sizes of polities and the population sizes of
settlements because these are relatively easily ascertainable quantitative
indicators of system size and complexity and they allow us to differentiate
between cycles and upsweeps. We need to have an interval scale metric in order
to tell the difference between small and large changes. When human sociocultural systems are studied
over long periods of time we usually find cyclical processes of population
growth and decline, the rise and fall of large and strong polities, etc. Our research needs to be able to tell the difference
between a “normal” upswing or downswing in which a feature of sociocultural
organization is fluctuating around an equilibrium level and a acale change event
of growth or decline that is larger than the “normal” fluctuations. We focus on
the largest settlements and polities in each region rather than on individual
settlements or polities. The size of the
largest settlement or polity are understood to be characteristics of each
regional world-system that vary over time. We identify those instances in which
there have been large increases or decreases in these system-wide
characteristics.[4]
A very long debate has waxed and
waned over how to best bound sociocultural systems in time and space for
purposes of explaining the emergence of complexity and hierarchy in human
societies (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Mann 1986; Tilly 1984; Wallerstein
1974). Our theoretical approach is what we call institutional materialism: an
interdisciplinary approach that combines focusing on the historical emergence
and development of humanly constructed institutions (language, kinship,
production technology, states, money, markets, etc.) and the changing ways that
humans interact with their biological and physical environment. This
theoretical framework deploys what has been called the comparative
world-systems approach to spatially and temporally bounding human sociocultural
systems. Rather than comparing societies
with one another, we compare systems of interacting human polities (or
interpolity systems) and these are empirically bounded in space and time as
interaction networks—multilateral regularized exchanges of materials,
obligations, threats, ideas and information.
World-systems experience oscillations
of expansion and contraction, with occasional large expansions that bring
formerly separate regional systems into systemic intercourse with one another.
These waves of expanded integration, now called globalization, have, in the
last two centuries, created a single linked intercontinental political-economy
in which all national societies are strongly connected. But all earlier regional interaction networks
also experienced expansions and contractions of trade. Archaeological studies
of obsidian and shell exchange show these oscillations even among very
small-scale polities in many regions (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998).
As Tilly (1984) has emphasized,
societies (defined as communities that share a common language and culture) are
messy entities when we consider interaction networks. Many of the networks in
which households are deeply involved are local, while many other important
interactions strongly link the inhabitants of many different societies to one
another. The world-systems perspective has argued that societies are subsystems within a larger system, and that in
order to understand historical development we must focus on the larger system
as a whole. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have developed a nested network approach
for spatially bounding world-systems that enables the comparison of the modern
global system with earlier, smaller regional world-systems. They contend that
the world-system rather than single polities is the most important unit of
analysis for explaining long-term social change because interpolity conflict
and cooperation are very important sources of the selection pressures that
cause sociocultural development. In this essay we explain this nested network
approach to spatially bounding world-systems and we propose a practical
research design for studying the emergence of larger and larger interaction
networks that uses expanding network as the unit of analysis.
One problem with regional
analysis is the effort to define regions in terms of homogenous sociocultural
attributes. Thus, comparative civilizationists have mainly focused on the main
cultural characteristics that are embodied in religions or institutionalized
world-views and have tended to construct lists of such culturally defined
civilizations that then become the “cases” for the study of social change (e.g.
Toynbee 1947-57). The problem here is that most interactive sociocultural
systems are multicultural, and religious ideologies interact with one another,
both diffusing attributes to one another and reactively developing
distinctions. So the effort to spatially bound systems based on religious
beliefs or other ideological characteristics does not produce regions that are
autonomous from one another.
The “culture area” approach developed by
geographer Carl Sauer and used widely by ethnographers and archaeologists tries
to define regions as areas with homogenous contiguous characteristics (e.g.
Wissler 1927). The culture area project gathered and coded valuable information
on all sorts of cultural attributes such as languages, architectural styles,
technologies of production, and kinship structures, and used these to designate
bounded and adjacent “culture areas.”
A major problem with both the
civilizationist and the cultural area approaches is the assumption that
homogeneity is a good approach to spatially bounding social systems for purposes
of explaining social change. Heterogeneity rather than homogeneity has long
been an important aspect of human social systems because different kinds of
groups often complement one another and interaction
often produces differentiation rather than similarity. The effort to bound systems as homogeneous
regions obscures this important fact. Spatial distributions of homogeneous
characteristics do not bound separate social systems. Examples in which social
heterogeneity was produced by interaction include core/periphery
differentiation, urban/rural, and sedentary/nomadic systems. Owen Lattimore’s
(1940) classic, Inner Asian Frontiers of
China, shows how Central Asian diversified foragers evolved to become
specialized steppe pastoralists because of their interactions with farmers
along the ecological boundary between steppe and loess. The farmer/pastoralist interaction was a
powerful source of social change among Bronze and Iron Age societies for millennia
(e.g. Barfield 1989). And the interaction
between farmers and fishing populations led to the emergence of maritime
polities that specialized in naval power and sea-borne trade such as Dilmun
(Bahrein) in the Arabian/Persian Gulf (Tosi 1986), perhaps the first semiperipheral capitalist
city-state carrying goods between the Indus Valley civilization and Mesopotamia
in the Bronze Age. Bounding regions based on homogenous attributes completely
ignores important interactions among different kinds of societies.
Anthropologists and geographers have
developed complicated multidimensional approaches that examine distributions of
many spatial characteristics statistically (e.g.
Another important point is worth
making regarding the relationship between natural ecological regions (biomes)
and human interaction networks. Biomes are regions that are defined on the
basis of soil type, climate, characteristic plants and animals, etc. The
relationship between human social structures and the natural world is obviously
important, as stressed by cultural ecologists. Comparative research has
demonstrated that empires are more likely to expand into regions that are
ecologically similar to the home region, and so they are more likely to be wide
than to be tall (to expand in the East/West plane rather than North/South
(Turchin, Adams and Hall 2006). Cultural
ecology stresses the important ways in which local ecological factors
conditioned sociocultural institutions and modes of living. This has been 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 and to convert biomes into “anthroms” –
regions in which the ecology has been radically altered by the intervention of
humans (Ellis et al 2010). Some
social evolutionists have interpreted this to mean that social institutions
have become progressively less ecologically constrained (Lenski, Lenski, and
Nolan 1995). But what has happened instead is that the spatial scale of
ecological constraints has grown to the point where they are operating globally
rather than locally (Chase-Dunn and Hall 2006).
Spatially Bounding World-Systems
The world-systems perspective
originally emerged as a theoretical approach for explaining the expansion and
deepening of the modern Europe-centered system as it engulfed the globe over
the past 500 years (Arrighi 1994; Chase-Dunn 1998; Wallerstein 1974). 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 two decades the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis
of earlier interpolity 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 and cities in
The comparative world-systems
perspective is designed to be general enough to allow comparisons between quite
different systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) defined 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 kinds of systems. And they hold that the question of
the nature and 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.
Part of Chase-Dunn and Hall’s claim
that world-system networks are the most important unit analysis for explaining
sociocultural development is based on the hypothesis of semiperipheral
development. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997, Chapter 5) contend that semiperipheral
regions within core/periphery hierarchies have been fertile locations for the implementation
of new technologies of power, and that
semiperipheral polities have played and continue to play important roles in the transformation of
world-systems. Of course semiperipherality is a relational concept that depends
on the nature of the larger system.
Semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms were often the agents of the formation
of larger paramount chiefdomships by conquest (Kirch 1984) and semiperipheral
marcher states have frequently been the founders of large core-wide empires
that accounted for upsweeps in polity size. Semiperipheral capitalist
city-states in the interstices between tributary states and empires were agents
of commodification that expanded trade networks in the Bronze and Iron Ages,
and more recently. The phenomenon of semiperipheral development is the main
force behind the movement in space of the cutting edge of complexity and
hierarchy in human social change. It has mainly been societies out on the edge
of older core regions that rewire the networks and expand the polities.
Spatially bounding world-systems
must necessarily 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
always linked polities that were near to one another, have not always been
global in the sense that actions in one region had important and relatively
quick effects on very distant regions. When transportation and communication
occurred only over short distances world-systems were small. Thus the word
“world” refers to the network of interactions that impinge on any focal locale.
It is necessary to use the notion of
“fall-off” of effects over space (Renfrew 1977) to bound the networks of
interaction that importantly impinge upon any point of origin. 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.
This
method of bounding systems is “place-centric.” It is also important to
distinguish between endogenous systemic interaction processes and exogenous
impacts that may change a system, but are not part of that system. Sweet
potatoes somehow got from South America to the
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) note that
in most intersocietal systems there are several important networks with
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 and
ideas travel. Information is light and it travels a long way, even in systems
based on down-the-line interaction.[6]
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). [7]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 most
world-systems.
World-systems
vary in the degree to which these different kinds of interaction are systemic –
have important impacts on local sociocultural reproduction and social change.
In all systems the Bulk Goods Network (BGN) and the Political-Military Network
(PMN) are systemic. But the Prestige Goods Network varies across systems in
both the ways it may be systemic and the extent to which it is important for
sociocultural reproduction and social change. And the same may be said of the
Information Network (IN).
Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) defined
core/periphery relations in the modern world-system in terms of a hierarchical division of labor
in the production of necessities between different polities or regions. This is
the BGN. In world-system comparative perspective the BGN may or may not be
hierarchical in the sense of unequal exchange in different systems, but it is
always systemic because it is important for reproducing local households and
communities. Political-military interactions among polities (alliances and
warfare) may or may not correspond spatially with the Bulk Goods Network,
though the assumption that polities do not trade or intermarry with their traditional
enemies is often false.
Anthropologists have long noticed
the importance of prestige goods when they are used by elites to reward
subalterns and to control marriage (Sahlins 1972 ; Eckholm and Friedman 1982
; Peregrine 1992 ) And Jane Schneider (1991 ) claimed that, contra Wallerstein, prestige goods flows
across the Silk Roads had played an important role in the development of the
core regions of Eurasia as well. Mary
Helms (1988) has emphasized the importance of exotic ideas as well as goods in
the emergence of theocratic chiefdoms and early states. A study of a very small world-system in
Figure
1: Nested Interaction Networks
The first question for any locale concerns the nature and
spatial characteristics of its links with the above four interaction nets. This
is prior to any consideration of core/periphery relation because one region
must be linked to another by systemic interaction in order for a consideration
of whether or not interpolity relations involve exploitation or domination is
relevant. The spatial characteristics of these networks clearly depend on the
costs of transportation and communications, and whether or not interaction is
only with neighbors or there are regularized long-distance trade journeys 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. Fall-off
in the PMN generally occurs
after two or three indirect links. Suppose polity X is fighting and allying
with its immediate neighbors and sometimes 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 polity? The number of indirect links that bound a PMN is usually 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.
Figure
2: Chronograph of the Emergence of the
Using this conceptual apparatus, we
can construct spatio-temporal chronographs for how the social structures and
interaction networks of human populations changed their spatial scales to
eventuate in the single global political economy of today. Figure 2 uses PMNs as the unit of analysis to show
how what David Wilkinson (1987) calls “Central Civilization,” a PMN that was formed when the Mesopotamian
and Egyptian PMNs merged in about
1500 BCE and which eventually incorporated all the other PMNs into itself to become the
contemporary global interstate system. The timing of mergers and expansions
depicted in Figure 2 are based on Wilkinson’s careful reading of world history
to determine when the regions specified began to make war and alliances with
one another. This kind of chronograph could be constructed for other regions
using the same kinds of historical evidence, and this would be a huge
contribution to our knowledge of the expansion of socio-cultural systems.
World-System Cycles: Rise-and-Fall
and Oscillations
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 oscillations 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. It is a question of the relative size and
distribution of power across a set of interacting polities.
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.,
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) contend
that the causal processes of rise and fall differ to some extent 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.[8]
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
because the modern hegemons have pursued 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 not as 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 literature about what
Chiefs relied more on hierarchical
kinship relations, control of ritual hierarchies, and control of prestige goods
imports than did 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 has made core/periphery relations ever more important for competition
among core powers and has altered the way in which the rise-and-fall process
works in other respects. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997, Chapter. 6) argue that
population growth, degradation of natural resources, and changes in productive
technology and social structure, have generated sociocultural development that
is marked by cycles and occasional upsweeps. This is because any world-system
varies around an equilibrium as a result of both internal instabilities and
environmental fluctuations. Occasionally, on one of the upswings, a system
solves its problems in a new way that allows for substantial expansion. The
point is to explain expansions, qualitative transformations of systemic logics,
and collapses by studying whole world-systems over time and by comparing these
to one another.
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 durée, needs to be
combined with analyses of short-run and middle-run processes to fully
understand social change.
A strong case for the very longue
durée is made by Jared Diamond’s (1997) study of the long-term consequences
of original differences in zoological and botanical wealth or “natural
capital.” The geographical distribution of those species that could be easily
and usefully domesticated (combined with the relative ease of latitudinal vs.
longitudinal diffusion) explains a huge portion of the variation in which
world-systems expanded and incorporated other world-systems.
The diagram in Figure 3 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 oscillations
and rise and fall sequences. The larger PGNs
linked intermittently and then joined. The PMNs
were joined briefly by the Mongol conquerors, and then more permanently when
the Europeans and Americans established Asian treaty ports. The pink area of
Figure 3 depicts the same
It should be noted that the
depiction in Figure 3 of the spatial boundaries of the PMNs and the PGNs is
only an approximation. Another rough depiction of expanding, contracting and
eventually merging is contained in Chase-Dunn and Hall’s (1998) study of
world-systems in
Figure
3: The Eastern and Western PMNs and PGNs
The following section describes the proposed structure and
format for a geo-chronological dataset that focuses on the religious, trade,
conquest, demographic, political, climate change and epidemiological aspects of
settlements and polities in four world regional PMNs and the Central PMN over
the past six millennia. The main purpose
of this dataset is to enable the determination of the
main causes of systemic integration and disintegration.
The Polities
and Settlements in World Interaction Networks (PSWIN) dataset will be
established and maintained by the Settlements and Polities Research Working
Group at the Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS) at the University
of California-Riverside in collaboration with colleagues at other universities.
This data set will be made available for public usage. The dataset will link with the World
Historical Dataverse at the University of
The proposed data set will use CSV data files that
will be stored on the IROWS web site at the
The PSWIN data set will include historical
quantitative estimates of several demographic, political, climate and
epidemiological characteristics of settlements and polities. The
characteristics will be grouped into several world regional PMNs. Additional world regions can be added if
quantitative estimates of the main variables are located. An effort will be made to use the same or
similar metrics across world regions, but in some cases this may not be
possible.
World
Regional PMNs and the Central Political-Military Network
Four
world regional PMNs and the expanding Central PMN will be initially studied:
Each of the
world regional PMNs mentioned is understood in world-systemic terms as
including populations that were importantly interacting. So, for example,
Mesopotamia includes the Susiana Plain in
The SetPol Project
The SetPol project is constructing a multidisciplinary theoretical
research program to test hypotheses about the causes of changes in city and
empire sizes from the second millennium BCE to the present in order to shed
light on the contemporary and near future global situation. The project is inventorying explanations of
scale changes from anthropology, sociology and political science and is developing
and populating templates for a graph database that will allow the use of geographical and network analyses for studying
interactions among cities and empires. This database structure makes it
possible to test causal propositions and models derived from the comparative
evolutionary world-systems perspective, geopolitics and human ecology --
theoretical perspectives that have been developed by sociologists,
anthropologists and political scientists—and constructs a multidisciplinary
sociohistorical theoretical research program. The quantitative graph database
includes the territorial sizes of states and empires (polities), the population
sizes of cities and polities, interaction links and climate change in ten world
regions over the past 3500 years. The project also spatially bounds whole
interaction networks by estimating changes in the boundaries and intensities of
human interactions of several kinds: everyday necessities, the trade of high
value goods, the interactions of fighting and allying polities and the
diffusion of ideas and genetic materials. SetPol codes the power configurations
(unipolar, bipolar, multipolar, etc.) of interstate systems and the
world-system positions of settlements and polities (core, semiperiphery and
periphery) within regional interaction networks. Causal propositions will be
tested using five different units of analysis: individual cities and polities,
networks of interacting cities and polities and spatially constant regions and
the whole Earth as a single context for studying the causes of changes in urban
and polity scales. A research team from archaeology, anthropology, geography,
history, political science, sociology, ecology and climatology will carry out
this first two-year phase. The multidisciplinary theoretical research program
that will be developed will come primarily from anthropology, sociology,
political science and geography, but participation by climatologists,
historians, computer scientists and ecologists will contribute to the
production of an improved database that allows for the use of geographical and
network research methods.
The
long-standing upward trends in the sizes of cities and polities is well known,
but still in dispute are the long-term, proximate and contextual causes of
these trends. The SetPol project improves upon and extends existing
quantitative compilations of estimates of the sizes of cities and polities to
identify those instances in ten world regions in which upsweeps in polity and
city sizes have occurred, and will empirically examine the human and natural
factors that have been hypothesized to be the causes of these instances of
scale change. The project also identifies instances of collapse in the sizes of
polities and cities and studies their causes. The project also develops
accurate approximations of the growth and intensity of interaction networks
that have constituted economic and political globalization since the late
Bronze Age. The project employs both standard comparative methods and recently
developed geographical and network approaches to data analysis that use both
GIS spatial analysis and formal network methods. This contributes to the
scientific understanding of the causes of the emergence of complexity and
hierarchy in human societies and deepens our understanding of sociocultural
evolutionary processes.
The SetPol project uses both quantitative estimates
of population sizes of the largest cities in world regions and estimates of the
territorial sizes of largest states and empires to study the causes of changes
in the scale of human institutions. Upsweeps are instances in which the largest
settlement or polity in a region significantly increases in size for the first
time. The project also uses spatially constant world regions as well as
spatially changing whole interaction networks (world-systems) as units of
analysis. This multidisciplinary research is organized around the territorial
sizes of polities and the population sizes of cities because these are
relatively easily ascertainable quantitative indicators of system size and
complexity. Interval scale metrics are needed in order to tell the difference
between small and large changes in scale.
When human sociocultural systems are studied over long periods of time
cyclical processes of population growth and decline, the rise and fall of large
and strong polities, are empirically evident. This project will employ a
systematic method[10] of
differentiating between a “normal” upswing or downswing in which the scale of
sociocultural organization is fluctuating around an equilibrium level and an
event of growth or decline that is significantly greater than the normal
fluctuations (see Figure 1). Focusing on
the largest cities and polities in each region rather than on individual cities
or polities makes these cycles of upswings, downswings, upsweeps and collapses visible. Are the forces and conditions that cause
upsweeps simply larger than those that cause upswings, or are different factors
involved? Or do they combine in different ways? And are the causes of upsweeps
the same as the causes of collapses but in reverse? The project uses upswings,
upsweeps, downswings, downsweeps and collapses of city and polity sizes as
dependent variables to be explained. This project studies city and polity sizes
in ten world regions from 1500 BCE until 2010 CE.
Figure 1. Types of
Medium-term Scale Change in the Largest Cities and Polities
SetPol builds on and improves earlier data compendia and uses the
upgraded data to more accurately identify upsweep and collapse events (Inoue et
al 2012 and Inoue et al 2015).
An example of results obtained using the territorial sizes of the
largest polities in Europe and East Asia is shown in Figure 2.
Figure
2: Sizes of largest polities in Europe and East Asia (square megameters): 1500 BCE- 2010CE
Figure 2 shows the
sizes of the largest states and empires in Europe and East Asia since 1500 BCE.
Both regions show the overall long-term trend toward greater polity sizes and
also the sequences of shorter-term fluctuations. When we look at Europe’s
trajectory vis a vis East Asia in Figure 2 we can see that the rise of
the Han Empire in China began earlier than the rise of the large Macedonian and
Roman empires in Europe and the decline began earlier in East Asia than it did
in Europe. China did it first, followed not long after by Europe. The European
peak then last rather longer than did the Chinese peak. This was what many have
observed as the unusually long tenure of the Roman Empire. Then Europe went
into a long slump while Tang China recovered. So these waves of empire
formation were partly, but not entirely, synchronous, and Walter Scheidel’s
(2009) idea of the first great divergence[11] is
supported. But the apparent divergence was partly due to the earlier start of
East Asia. The later rise of Europe began in the 15th century,
contrary to Andre Gunder Frank’s (1998,2014) contention that the great
divergence that was the rise of Europe was a late and conjunctural event. Qing
China also got very large but ended up only half as large, in terms of
territorial size, as the British Empire.
The main
multidisciplinary theoretical thrust of SetPol is based on a scope of
comparison that comes from anthropology, archaeology and world history. This
scope is combined with competing explanations of scale changes that come from
ecology, sociology, history and political science, especially international
relations theory.[12] Sociology gave birth to the world-system
perspective (Wallerstein 1974), which posits the existence of a hierarchical
Europe-centered interstate system that emerged in the long sixteenth century CE[13] in
which some polities (those in the core) exploit and dominate others (the
semiperiphery and the periphery). SETPOL
will utilize an anthropological and world historical framework to compare
small, regional and global world-systems over the past 3500 years (Chase-Dunn
and Hall 1997; Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2014). .
Political scientists focus on political
institutions and on international relations, especially regarding power
dynamics among competing states, institutions of diplomacy and arms races.
International relations theory focuses on geopolitics as a struggle for power
in which military capabilities and warfare are central components. Geopolitics
is most often understood as a multiplayer game in which territorial strategies
are an important element, in means and ends, of power struggles. Most
international relations theorists focus on the interstate system that emerged
in Europe after being institutionally defined by the treaty of Westphalia in
1648 CE. SETPOL uses an anthropological and world historical framework to
examine the nature of interstate systems since the emergence of early states in
Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997) contended that world-systems, defined as interaction networks with
consequential effects for local social structures, are the most important unit
of analysis for explaining large-scale social change. The evolutionary[14]
world-systems perspective allows comparisons between whole interaction networks
that are different in size, period and location. They point out that different kinds of
interaction have distinct spatial characteristics and degrees of importance in
different kinds of world-systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) employ a
place-centric approach that bounds spatial networks by asking what reproduces
or changes the social structures of a designated locality. Always important are
low value per unit of weight food and other everyday raw materials (bulk goods)
that form a network that is usually spatially smaller than the network of
political/military interaction. And there are even larger networks formed by
exchanges of information and prestige goods that may be consequential for local
social structures. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) also turn the issue of
core/periphery hierarchies into an empirical question rather than a
definitional assumption. The evolutionary comparative world-systems approach
allows for the possibility that world-systems might exist that do not have
core/periphery hierarchies, and indeed the small-scale system in indigenous
Northern California studied by Chase-Dunn and Mann (1998) had very limited
interpolity domination and exploitation. Core/periphery hierarchies emerge and
evolve, along with other types of inequality, as the capabilities of some
polities to extract resources from distant peoples develop.
Most state-based
world-systems are organized as hierarchical interstate systems in which core
polities and cities exploit and dominate non-core peoples. Power is organized
in different ways in different systems and so what semiperipherality is in any
system depends on what coreness and peripherality are. These are relational
concepts. But it is possible to identify these world-system positions in very
different kinds of systems based on common characteristics that are associated
with them such as population density, geographical location, and differences in
modes of accumulation (foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture, scale
of irrigation, industrialization). Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) describe a
phenomenon they call “semiperipheral development.” This involves the observation that peoples
and polities that are semiperipheral vis a vis the larger world-system
of which they are a part are more likely to implement technological and
organizational forms that facilitate upward mobility and/or that change the
developmental logic of world-systems.
One variety of this phenomenon involves semiperipheral marcher
states that conquer older core regions to produce an upsweep in polity size.
Another variety involves semiperipheral capitalist city-states that are agents
of commodification—the expansion and deepening of trade networks. Increasing
trade and production for exchange facilitates provides a fertile context for
the emergence of larger cities and larger polities.
There are several possible processes that might
account for the phenomenon of semiperipheral development.
Randall Collins (1999) has argued that the phenomenon of marcher states
conquering other states to make larger empires is due to the “marcher state
advantage.” Being out on the edge of a core region of competing states allows
more maneuverability because it is not necessary to defend the rear. This
geopolitical advantage allows military resources to be concentrated on
vulnerable neighbors. Peter Turchin (2003) has argued that the relevant process
is one in which group solidarity is enhanced by being on a “metaethnic
frontier” in which the clash of contending cultures produces strong cohesion
and cooperation within a frontier polity, allowing it to perform great feats.
Carroll Quigley (1961) distilled a somewhat similar theory from the works of
Arnold Toynbee. Another factor affecting within-group solidarity is the
different degrees of internal stratification usually found in premodern systems
between the core and the semiperiphery. Core societies develop old, crusty and
bloated elites who rely on mercenaries and “foreigners” as subalterns, while
semiperipheral leaders are often charismatic individuals who identify with
their soldiers and citizens (and vice versa). Less inequality within a polity
often means greater group solidarity and this may be an important part of the
semiperipheral advantage. Ibn Khaldun’s (1958) model of nomadic barbarians
conquering decrepit old civilizations has been an inspiration to some of this
thinking. And the tie with internal inequality may also be linked with waves of
population growth and unrest within polities – the so-called “secular cycle”
(Goldstone 1991; Turchin and Nefadov 2009).
Hub theories of innovation have been popular among
world historians (e.g. McNeill and McNeill 2003; Christian 2004) and human
ecologists (Hawley 1950). These hold that new ideas and institutions emerge in
central settlements where information crossroads are located. Mixing and recombination
of ideas and information leads to the emergence of new formulations. Recent studies have shown evidence that
information exchange, innovations, and political, economic and social
activities increase exponentially with city size (Ortman et al. 2014; Ortman
et al. 2015).
Esther Boserup (1965) developed a
demographic theory that focuses on population growth and population pressure as
the master variables behind social change. Technological change was explained
as an adaptation to population density nearing or exceeding the carrying
capacity of the environment under a given technological regime. Cultural
ecology and population pressure have important implications for sociocultural
development when they are combined with the idea of social and ecological
circumscription proposed by Robert Carneiro (1978). Carneiro explained
the social organizational ruptures that produced the first states in terms of
population pressure in a geographic situation in which outmigration was
impossible or very costly. Under these conditions people stay and fight rather
than migrating. High levels of warfare killed off population and reduced
population pressures. Some systems got caught in a vicious cycle in which
warfare operated as a demographic regulator (e.g. Kirch 1991). But in other
systems people became tired of warfare and allowed the emergence of elites who
organized larger polities that regulated conflict and resource allocation
(property). The elements of population pressure, intensification of production,
ecological degradation, technological change, conflict, and circumscription are
combined in different ways by different theorists, but these are the main
ingredients that comprise most of the explanations of long run cultural
evolution by archaeologists and many anthropologists (e.g., Johnson and Earle
1987; see also Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 6).
SetPol’s main dependent variables are changes in
the scale of polities and cities. Individual polities and cities will be
studied, and the sizes of the largest of these within regions and interaction
networks will be studied as characteristics of the region or the network.[15]
As mentioned above this project will divide the indicators of scale change into
upswings, upsweeps, downswings, downsweeps, surges and collapses (Inoue et
al 2012). Though these are all based on the sizes of largest cities and
polities, timing and the way in which the unit of analysis is employed (regions
vs different kinds of networks) will affect the identification of these scale
changes. The main independent variables that will be studied are: the
world-system positions of polities and cities (core-semiperiphery-periphery),
the power configurations of interstate systems (unipolar, bipolar, multipolar,
etc.) (Wilkinson 2003), changes in the intensity of warfare, network node
centrality, the centralization of whole networks (graph centrality); climate
change, and environmental degradation. The project will also examine the extent
to which changes in the sizes of cities are associated with changes in the
sizes polities. In addition to focusing on the largest cities or polities in
each region or network, the project will also compute and study the size
distributions of largest cities and polities. Urban geographers have long
theorized about the causes and consequences of city size distributions.[16]
Our comparison of largest polities in East Asia, Europe and the Central
Political/Military Network[17] enable us to ascertain how the size
distributions have changed over time and how these may be related with scale
changes and possible inter-regional synchronies.
The SetPol theoretical
research program is developing and testing an integrated synthetic model of the
long-term causes of human sociocultural evolution – specifically the growth of
cities and polities, but also increasing structural complexity and hierarchy in
human polities and world-systems. The integrated model combines the iteration
model produced by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 6; Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2014: Figure 2.5 on page 27) with the structural demographic model developed by
Jack Goldstone (1991) and elaborated and formalized by Peter Turchin and Sergey
Nefadov (2009). This multilevel model includes processes that operate within
settlements and polities, especially demographic growth, population pressure,
growing inequalities, social movements and state failure, with processes that
operate between polities (warfare, interpolity trade, semiperipheral
development, etc.) and climate change and epidemic diseases.
The Comparative Framework
SetPol
studies expanding and contracting interaction networks among human polities and
settlements as both units of analysis and as causal contexts of scale changes
in the sizes of cities and empires. Human interaction networks have expanded
and intensified over the long run (globalization), but in the medium-run there
have been cycles of network expansion and contraction.
The best way to spatially bound human social
systems is an old question that continues to generate heated disputes among
social scientists. Michael Mann (1986) notes that different important kinds of
interaction have different spatial scales, and so the notion that societies
have single spatial boundaries is usually incorrect and causes much
misunderstanding. Many regionalists define regions in terms of homogenous
attributes, either natural or social.
Comparative civilizationists have tended to focus on the core cultural
characteristics that are embodied in religions or world-views and have
constructed lists of such culturally defined civilizations that then become the
“cases” for the study of social change (e.g. Melko and Leighton 1987). Another
approach that defines regions as areas with homogenous characteristics is the
“culture area” approach developed by Alfred L. Kroeber and his colleagues (e.g.
Wissler 1927; Kroeber 1944). This project gathered valuable information on all
sorts of cultural attributes such as languages, architectural styles,
technologies of production, and kinship structures, and used these to designate
bounded and adjacent “culture areas” that have been widely used to organize
studies of indigenous peoples (e.g. Sturtevant 1978-2007, the Smithsonian
Handbook of North American Indians).
A major problem with both the civilizationist and
the cultural area traditions is the assumption that homogeneity is a good
approach to bounding whole social systems. Heterogeneity rather than
homogeneity has long been an important aspect of human social systems because
different kinds of groups often complement one another and interaction often
produces co-evolution and differentiation.[18] 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 cases of core/periphery differentiation, urban/rural, and
sedentary/nomadic systems. Even sophisticated approaches that examine
distributions of spatial characteristics statistically must make quite
arbitrary choices in order to specify regional boundaries (Burton, Moore,
Whiting and Romney 1996).
David Wilkinson (2003) has made a strong case for
studying civilizations as networks of allying and fighting polities and he has
produced a chronograph of the expansion of the interstate system that emerged
when the Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems became linked around 1500 BCE
(Wilkinson 1987). Many world-systems scholars have contended that trade
networks are the best unit of analysis for spatially bounding whole systems
(Abu-Lughod 1989; Beaujard 2005, 2010). Immanuel Wallerstein (1995; 2011
[1974]) contends that a hierarchical core/periphery division of labor,
especially the one that emerged with Europe as its core in the long 16th
century CE, is the best way to spatially bound a world-system. And several
eminent scholars have claimed that there has been a single global (Earth-wide)
system for millennia (Lenski 2005; Frank and Gills 1994; Modelski 2003;
Modelski, Devezas and Thompson 2008, and Chew 2001, 2007). The SetPol project
operationalizes all these units of analysis and pits them against one another
regarding their relevance for explaining scale changes of polities and cities.
We also have convened a workshop to more completely and accurately specify the
changes in trade and PMN network boundaries since 1500 BCE (Chase-Dunn et al
2015a). And we also use constant regions to make comparisons so that it is
possible to compare the results with what we find when we use spatially-bounded
networks.
.
Figure 3: Ten world regions for studying the
emergence of large cities and polities
These boundaries have been chosen in order to
facilitate the comparative study of the emergence of largest cities and polities
over the past 3500 years. The regional
boundaries shown are mainly matters of convenience. All cities and polities are
geocoded so that different regional configurations can easily be used by other
researchers. These regions have been chosen in order to construct a data
compendium that will include information on all the areas of the Earth where
humans have lived in large numbers. The regions specified in Figure 3 are
mainly based on our knowledge of where large cities and empires emerged in the
period we are studying. But we have also considered the social science
literature that has hypothesized comparisons and connections among regions in
our designation of regions. We are well aware of the issue of Eurocentrism in
social science and the obvious point that “Europe” is not a continent, but is
rather a promontory of Eurasia (Lewis and Wigen 1997). Social science itself
has been constructed around comparisons between East and West and so an
important way to scientifically address the issues of comparison and
connections is to use some of the categories that have been constructed in the
past to see whether alleged differences (or similarities) are supported or
contradicted by quantitative data.
Admittedly some of the
bounding decisions we have made are somewhat arbitrary. We included the
Caribbean with South America rather than with North and Central America because
migrants from South America mainly peopled it. We made a great effort to have
only ten world regions rather than some larger number of regions in order to
keep our data gathering structure from becoming too complicated. But it should
be recalled that all of the settlements and polities we study are geocoded, so
if other researchers want to reconfigure regions in a different way they easily
can.
Using world regions designated in this way allows
us to address the important issues raised by world historians and
civilizationists who compare regions (e.g. Pomeranz 2000; Scheidel 2009, Wong
1997; Morris 2010, Frank 1998). The SetPol project is also be able to compare
the use of these spatially constant regions with what we find when we use
expanding networks (e.g. Chase-Dunn et al 2015b). The proposed
operationalization of network boundaries is based on a propositional inventory
of statements by social scientists about when smaller networks expanded, merged
and when larger networks engulfed smaller ones (e.g. Beaujard 2005; 2010;
Wilkinson 1992a; 1992b, 1993). The project uses data on trade networks,
historical accounts of warfare and diplomacy and studies of the diffusion of
plants, animals, and technologies and ideas to evaluate the claims made by
scholars about interaction networks and the timing of their expansions.
Chronological
Issues
For purposes of comparing the timing of changes in
city and polity sizes across different world regions it is important to have
accurate absolute chronologies for the regions being compared in order to
examine issues of priority and synchrony. Unfortunately there is still
considerable disagreement about the absolute dating for Mesopotamia before 1500
BCE. Mario Liverani (2014: 9-16) explains why estimates of absolute dates are
so uncertain. Relative dates of events needed for estimating polity and city
sizes are based on “king lists.” Thus an event, such as a conquest, is said to
have occurred in the third year of the reign of King X. Considerable effort has
been made to figure out the correspondences between different kings’ lists in
Mesopotamia and their correspondence with Egyptian king lists, which are more
continuous. These are then converted in to calendar years by ascertaining their
relationships with astronomical events such as eclipses. Unfortunately there is
a period after the fall of the Babylonian empire in which king lists are
missing for Mesopotamia, and there is disagreement about the timing of
astronomical events. Thus the length in years of the occluded period is in
dispute, and this results in so-called, short, medium and long chronologies for
the period before the Late Bronze Age, with an error of as much as 100 years.
Absolute dating is needed in order to compare the timing of scale changes
across world regions. It matters whether or not the city of Ur was sacked
in 2004 BCE, and thus is eliminated from the list of large cities and large
polities in 2000 BCE, or in some other year 50 years earlier or later. Liverani
(2014: 15) is satisfied to use the middle chronology for Mesopotamia and the
surrounding regions, but he is not trying to compare the timing of changes in
the Ancient Near East with other world regions. The SetPol project uses the
middle chronology, while being careful to determine which chronology has been
used in the sources from which estimates are coded. It is important to be chary
regarding temporal comparisons among regions before 1500 BCE.
The
SetPol goal is to achieve a minimum temporal resolution of every twenty-five
years because the project is studying middle-run growth/decline phases of
polities and cities. Archaeological evidence of the areal sizes of settlements
and hearth counts can be used to estimate settlement sizes, but the limitation
here is often temporal resolution. Studies that rely on radiocarbon dating and
archaeological phase periodization often do not achieve a level of temporal
resolution that would make settlement growth/decline phases visible (e.g.
Ortman, Cabaniss, Sturm and Bettancourt 2014). When temporal resolution is
poorer than every 100 years it is likely that some of the cycles of growth and
decline will be missed. In the first
phase of our project we will focus on regions for which both documentary and
archaeological evidence are available, and since this phase begins with 1500
BCE we do not need to worry about the issue of absolute dates when comparing
world regions.
Data Upgrading[19]
Improving of estimates of the population sizes of settlements and the
territorial sizes of polities is an endless task, but much has been
accomplished. The long term intent of the SETPOL project is to include all the
towns and cities with 10,0000 or more people and all the polities with .01 or
larger square megameters of territory in the ten world regions from 4000 BCE to
2010 CE. But in the exploratory phase of the project (the first two years) the
project will prioritize by focusing on upgrading existing data sets that
include the ten largest cities and polities in each of the world regions
at 25-year intervals since 1500 BCE.
Improving estimates of the territorial sizes of polities
Determining
scale shifts requires real metric (interval-level) estimates, not just
periodizations of growth and decline. The territorial sizes of polities are
difficult to estimate from archaeological evidence alone (see Smith and Montiel 2001). What the SETPOL project wants to know is the size of the area
over which a central power exercises a degree of control that allows for the
appropriation of important resources (taxes and tribute). The ability to
extract resources falls off with distance from the center in all polities, and
controlling larger and larger territories requires the invention of new
transportation, communications and organizational technologies [what Michael
Mann (1986) has called “techniques of power”]. Military technologies and bureaucracies
are important institutional inventions that make possible the extraction of
resources over great distances, but so are new ideologies and new technologies
of communication (Innis 1950).[20]
Estimating
the territorial sizes of states and empires has been based on the use of
published historical atlases and historical accounts. Premodern states and
empires often had fuzzy boundaries. Bounding polities is based primarily on
knowledge about who conquered which city, and whether or not, and for how long,
tribute was paid to the conquering polity. Sometimes it is difficult to tell
whether or not tribute is asymmetrical or symmetrical exchange. Only
asymmetrical (unequal) exchange signifies a tributary imperial relationship.
Otherwise it is just trade and does not signify an extractive relationship.
The pioneer coder of the territorial sizes of
polities is Rein Taagepera (1978a, 1978b, 1979, and 1997). The SETPOL project
builds upon Taagepera’s monumental work and uses his methods. Taagepera used
Atlases and historical descriptions of events to estimate the territorial sizes
of states and empires. This project will improve upon his estimates by using
Atlases that had not been published when Taagepera did his work (e.g.
Schwartzberg (1992). The project will also use
online sources such as the University of Sydney Timemap Project. The values
produced from these tertiary sources will be checked with regional experts (see
Data Management section).The SETPOL polity data template utilizes Taagepera’s
method of coding the year in which polity sizes change, usually as a result of
conquests, and will designate area in square megameters as Taagepera did.[21] It will
also include a standardized identification code for each separate polity,
fields for alternative names of the polity, geocodes for the location of the
capital city and estimates of the population size of the polity.[22]
Improving estimates of the population sizes of
cities and territorial sizes of states and empires
SETPOL is developing a template for coding characteristics
of individual cities that include estimates of the size of the built up area as
well as estimates of the population size. The city template also includes
unique identifiers for each city, fields for alternative names of the city and
the geocode of the city center. For the
location identification, the geo URI scheme is applied.[23] The data are structured in the three
dimensions—each city has sets of variables, and each of these variables has
varying value ranges and time intervals. The variables and their definitions
are being developed in collaboration with the SESHAT project team in order to
avoid redundancies in collecting data. A template for polities for coding
similar variables is also being constructed.
Making accurate
estimations of the population sizes of both contemporary and early urbanized
areas involves several complicated problems. Daniel Pasciuti (Pasciuti 2003;
Pasciuti and Chase-Dunn 2003) has proposed a measurement error model for
estimating the sizes of settlements based on the literature in archaeology,
demography and urban geography.[24] The SETPOL
project defines a settlement as a spatially contiguous built-up area.[25] This is
the best operationalization for comparing the sizes of settlements across
different polities and cultures because it ignores the complicated issues of
governance boundaries (e.g. municipal districts, etc). But it still has some
problems. Most cultures have nucleated settlements in which residential areas
surround a monumental, governmental or commercial center. In such cases it is
fairly easy to spatially bound a contiguous built up area based on the
declining spatial density of human constructions. But other cultures space
residences out rather than concentrating them near a central place (e.g. many
of the settlements in the prehistoric American Southwest such as Chaco Canyon). In such cases it is necessary to choose a
standard radius from the center in order to make comparisons of population
sizes over time or across cultures.
Existing compilations of city sizes rely primarily
on:
1.
Tertius Chandler 1987 Four Thousand Years of
Urban Growth: The Edwin Mellen Press
2.
George Modelski 2003 World Cities: –3000 to 2000.
Washington, DC: Faros 2000
3.
Ian Morris
2013 The Measure of Civilization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Tertius
Chandler’s (1987) compendium is still the most comprehensive study of large
cities, but substantial improvements were made in George Modelski’s (2003)
compendium. Ian Morris also provides estimates of the largest cities in his
book on measuring the development of Eastern and Western civilizations (Morris
2013). The SETPOL project will improve upon existing city size compilations by
collaborating with other projects and incorporating data sets produced by
others.[26]
The proposed city template includes both the calendar year in which the size of
a city is known to have rapidly changed (e.g. the example of the sack of Ur
mentioned above) as well as interpolated estimates for the standardized years
used by Chandler and Modelski.[27]
This project
will contribute to the scientific understanding of the emergence of complexity
and hierarchy in human societies. The long-term upsweep of the scale of cities
and polities is widely known, but heated debates still rage regarding the
proximate and contextual causes of these trends. While certain human and
natural factors have been famously hypothesized to be the causes of instances
of these scale changes, empirical testing of hypothetical causes has been
daunted by the limited comprehensiveness, accuracy, and verifiability of extant
data sets on the scale changes. So SETPOL will improve the testability of
causal hypotheses by generating a data set that is better in these regards. SETPOL
will also contribute to the accurate delineation of the spatial boundaries of
trade and political/military interaction networks as they merged and engulfed
one another to constitute the contemporary global system of today.[28] The project will use not only
well-established methods for organizing and analyzing data, but also a graph
data structure that will allow the combination of GIS with formal network
analysis. The project will increase the legibility of the complex spatial
processes that led to the emergence of the increasingly global society of
today.
Multidisciplinary Character of the Project
The SETPOL database will use standardized
geographical network protocols in order to make the data freely available for
use by scholars from different disciplines. The framework of comparison is
anthropological and world historical. The hypotheses to be tested come from
causal models proposed by political scientists, anthropologists and
sociologists, especially those who are informed by multidisciplinary
perspectives such as geopolitics, human ecology, and the comparative evolutionary
world-systems approach. The SETPOL project emphasizes cooperative
multidisciplinary exploration of the pathways by which scale changes have
occurred in cities and polities. The project
will coordinate and collaborate with other multidisciplinary consortia that are
currently compiling relevant data. The project will further develop a
multidisciplinary theoretical research program by engaging scholars from
different disciplines at the levels of empirical measurement and the
development and testing of causal models. The SETPOL project produces articles,
monographs and infograms that are intended for a broad multidisciplinary
audience.
Broader Impacts
The project's intellectual impact lies in the
development of a more holistic multidisciplinary approach to understanding the
connections between climate change, demographic expansion and contraction and
the size and complexity of human social organization. By
confirming or disconfirming the accuracy of contending scientific models of the
development of complexity and hierarchy in human societies, the project will
help scholars, educators and policy-makers to grasp the main patterns of
historical sociocultural evolution. Such
understanding matters for societal responses to major challenges of the 21st
century: climate change, ecological degradation, population density, the
emergence of global city regions, the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers,
and transitions from a unipolar to a multipolar geopolitical structure. The
project will also allow provide fresh evidence on the comparisons of
similarities and differences across world regions with important implications
for explanations of uneven East/West development – issues that have been
totemic and fundamental in the development of social sciences since the
eighteenth century. The project will have important implications regarding the
understanding of past systemic resilience and collapse, and these will have
significant implications for the future. The SETPOL project will develop
undergraduate and graduate-level courses and research projects to train
students to do multidisciplinary research and particularly to develop
infographic presentations for teaching scholars and the general public.
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