Semiperipheral Development and

Empire Upsweeps Since the Bronze Age

Alexis Alvarez, Hiroko Inoue, Kirk Lawrence, Evelyn Courtney,

Edwin Elias, Tony Roberts and Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside

National Science Foundation Grant #: NSF-HSD SES-0527720

To be presented at the IGCC Southern California Symposium session on “Military Action and State Power “ Friday, January 14, 2011, 3:30 pm, UC-Irvine.

v. 1/9/11, 5709 words. Draft. Please do not quote without permission. chriscd@ucr.edu

This paper is available as IROWS Working Paper #56 http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows56/irows56.htm

Abstract: This paper tests one of the implications of the hypothesis of semiperipheral development: that major increases in the sizes of polities have been accomplished mainly by the conquests carried out by semiperipheral marcher states. We examine twenty-four upward sweeps of the largest polities in four world regions and in the expanding Central interpolity system since the Bronze Age to determine whether or not the upsweeps were (or were not) semiperipheral marcher states. The hypothesis of semiperipheral develop holds that polities that are in between the core and periphery (semiperipheral polities) have been, and continue to be, unusually fertile locations for the implementation of organizational and technological innovations. This is because semiperipheral polities have less invested in older institutional structures and than do core societies and they have greater incentives to take risks on new technologies, ideologies and ventures. One important manifestation of this tendency is the semiperipheral marcher state: a recently founded sedentary polity out on the edge of an older core region that is able to conquer the older core polities and to create a core-wide empire. This phenomenon has occurred repeatedly, but it is not the only way in which large empires have been created. This paper proposes a revised typology of core/periphery relations and types of semiperipherality. The Appendix contains a brief summary and bibliography for each empire upsweep.

This paper is a part of a larger project that is studying the growth/decline phases and upward sweeps of settlement and polity sizes in order to test explanations of long-term patterns of human socio-cultural evolution.[1] We use the comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective first outlined by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) as our orienting theoretical approach. The focus is on interpolity systems rather than on single polities.[2] We study how sociocultural evolution occurred in systems of interacting polities.

Regions, Political-Military Networks and Upward Sweeps

There have been millennial trends in which polities have grown in population and territorial size and the total number of human polities has decreased as typical polities got larger. These long-term trends were due primarily to events that we call upward sweeps. All hierarchical world-systems have experienced a cycle of centralization and decentralization in which a large polity in an interpolity system emerged and then declined. This sequence of rise and fall is seen in interpolity systems composed of chiefdoms (Anderson 1994), states, empires and modern hegemons. The most frequently found upward phase in such cycle resulted in a polity that was nearly the same size as the one that existed at the previous peak. This we call a “normal rise.” An “upward sweep” is a doubling of the size of the largest polity in a system relative to the previous peak. These are much less frequent (Alvarez et al 2010).

It is only when an upward movement was sustained and a new higher level of scale became the norm that we call it an upward sweep. Our Polities and Settlements Research Working Group at the Institute of Research on World-Systems[3] has quantitatively identified twenty-four such empire upward sweeps in four world regions since the early Bronze Age (Alvarez et al 2010). These are the events that account for the long-term trend in which polities have become larger and more powerful. In order to identify the empire upsweeps we have used Rein Taagepera’s (1978a,1978b,1979, 1997) estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest states and empires in four world regions and in the interpolity system that David Wilkinson (1987) has called “Central Civilization.”[4]

Figure 1: Largest empires in Mesopotamia, 4500 BCE-1500 BCE

Figure 1 shows the largest empires in Mesopotamia based on Taagepera’s estimates and illustrates the difference between empire upsweeps and normal rises. The Lagash is an upsweep because it is far larger than the largest earlier polities. The Akkadian Empire is gigantic and the upward cycles after it are all normal rises until the Neo-Assyrian Empire comes along (not shown because it is after the beginning of the Central Interpolity System).

We contend that interaction networks, rather than homogenous cultural or ecological regions, are the best way to bound evolving human systems for the purposes of studying the causes of socio-cultural evolution (Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson 2003)[5]. One problem with using interaction networks is that they expand (and contract) over time, which can make results dependent on the decisions one has made about the timing of changes in the spatial boundaries of the network. Our project to quantitatively identify empire upsweeps uses four constant world regions and one political-military interaction network – what we call, following Wilkinson, the Central System. The four constant regions are Mesopotamia, Egypt, East Asia and South Asia. The Central System, a network of allying and warring states and empires, is bounded following Wilkinson.[6] It begins around 1500 BCE when the formerly separate Egyptian and Mesopotamian interpolity systems merged and it then expanded to eventually become the contemporary global international system. The East Asian region was linked by long-distance trade in prestige goods with the Central System since the time of the Roman and Han empires, but East Asia had a substantially separate interpolity system until China was penetrated by the European powers in the 19^th century.[7]

Core/Periphery Relations

The notion of core/periphery relations has been a central concept in both the modern world-system perspective (Wallerstein 1974) and in the comparative world-systems perspective (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991). World-systems are systems of interacting polities and they often (but not always) are organized as interpolity hierarchies in which some polities exploit and dominate other polities. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) redefined the core/periphery distinction to make it more useful for comparing the modern world-system with earlier regional world-systems.

When we use the idea of core/periphery relations for comparing very different kinds of world-systems we need to broaden the concept a bit and to make an important distinction (see below). But the most important point is that we should not assume that all world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies just because the modern system does. It should be an empirical question in each case as to whether core/periphery relations exist. Not assuming that world-systems have core/periphery structures allows us to compare very different kinds of systems and to study how core/periphery hierarchies themselves have emerged and evolved.

In order to do this it is helpful to distinguish between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy. “Core/periphery differentiation” means that societies with different degrees of population density, polity size and internal hierarchy are interacting with one another. As soon as we find village dwellers interacting with nomadic neighbors we have core/periphery differentiation. “Core/periphery hierarchy” refers to the nature of the relationships between societies. This kind of hierarchy exists when some societies are exploiting or dominating other societies. Examples of intersocietal domination and exploitation would be the British colonization and deindustrialization of India, or the conquest and subjugation of Mexico by the Spaniards. Core/periphery hierarchy is not unique to the modern Europe-centered world-system of recent centuries. Both the Roman and the Aztec empires conquered and exploited peripheral peoples as well as adjacent core states.

Distinguishing between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy allows us to deal with situations in which larger and more powerful societies are interacting with smaller ones, but are not exploiting them. It also allows us to examine cases in which smaller, less dense societies may be exploiting or dominating larger societies. This latter situation definitely occurred in the long and consequential interaction between the nomadic horse pastoralists of Central Asia and the agrarian states and empires of China and Western Asia. The most famous case was that of the Mongol Empire of Chingis Khan, but confederations of Central Asian steppe nomads managed to extract tribute from agrarian states long before the rise of Mongols (Barfield 1993).

We should also note that the question of core/periphery status also needs to be considered with regard to different spatial scales of interaction. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) note that regional world-systems may have important interaction networks that have different spatial scales. They adopt a “place-centric” approach to spatially bounding interaction networks that begins from a focal settlement or polity. The network is spatially bounded by considering how many indirect links are needed to include all the actions have an important impact on the reproduction or transformation of institutions at the focal place. Bulk goods networks, which were usually relatively small, and political-military networks (interpolity systems), which were usually somewhat larger, were important in all systems, and prestige goods networks, which were often much larger, were important in some systems. The issue of core/periphery status always needs to be asked for the bulk goods and political-military networks, and also for the prestige goods level if prestige goods played an important role in socio-cultural reproduction or change.

Semiperipheral Development

The semiperiphery concept was also originally developed to study the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974). But it too has been taken on the road. For Wallerstein the semiperiphery is a kind of middle stratum in the global hierarchy that helps keep the system from breaking down. But Chase-Dunn and Hall claim that semiperipheral societies are often the “seedbeds of change.”

Hub theories of innovation have been popular among world historians (McNeill and McNeill 2003; Christian 2004) and human ecologists (Hawley 1950). These hold that new ideas and institutions emerge in central settlements where information cross-roads are located. The hub theory is undoubtedly partly correct, but it cannot explain some of the long-term patterns of human sociocultural evolution, because if an information cross-road was able to outcompete all contenders then the original information hub would still be the center of the world. But that is not the case. We know that cities and states first emerged in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. Mesopotamia is now Iraq. It had 100% of the world’s largest settlements and most powerful polities in the Early Bronze Age. Now it has none of these. All of the regional world-systems have undergone a process of uneven development in which the old centers were replaced by new centers out on the edge.

Chase-Dunn and Hall assert that it is polities out on the edge that transform the institutional structures and accomplish the upward sweeps. This hypothesis is part of a larger claim that semiperipheral societies often play transformative roles that cause the emergence of complexity and hierarchy within polities and in world-systems. This is the most important justification of the claim that world-systems rather than single polities, are the right unit of analysis for explaining human socio-cultural evolution.

The network node theory does not well account for the spatially uneven nature of evolutionary change. The cutting edge of evolution moves. Old centers are often transcended by societies out on the edge that are able to rewire network nodes in a way that expands the spatial scale of networks.

Semiperipheral development has taken various forms: semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, semiperipheral marcher states, semiperipheral capitalist city states, the semiperipheral position of Europe in the larger Afroeurasian world-system, modern semiperipheral nations that rise to hegemony, and contemporary semiperipheral societies that engage in and support novel and potentially transformative economic and political activities.

            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 (2005) 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 society, 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 have 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. Less stratification often can mean greater group solidarity. And this may be an important part of the semiperipheral advantage.

            But Toynbee also suggested another way in which the peoples of semiperipheral regions might be motivated to take risks with new ideas, technologies and strategies. Semiperipheral polities are often located in ecologically marginal regions that have poor soil and little water or other disadvantages. Patrick Kirch relies on this idea of ecological marginality in his depiction of the process by which semiperipheral marcher chiefs are most often the conquerors that create island-wide paramount chiefdoms in the Pacific (Kirch 1984). It is quite possible that all these features combine to produce what Alexander Gershenkron (1962) called “the advantages of backwardness” that allow some semiperipheral societies to transform and to dominate regional world-systems.

As we have already said, the idea of semiperipheral development claims that those innovations that transform the logic of development and allow world-systems to get larger, more complex and more hierarchical come mainly from semiperipheral polities. Some semiperipheral polities are unusually fertile locations for the invention and implementation of new strategies. Semiperipheral polities are often involved in processes of rapid internal class formation and state formation and they do not have large investments in and commitments to doing things the way they have been done in older core polities. They do not have institutional or infrastructural sunk costs. So they are freer to implement new institutions and to experiment with new technologies.

There are several different important kinds of semiperipheries, and they not only transform systems but they also often take over and become the new hegemonic core polity. We have already mentioned semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms. The societies that conquered and unified a number of smaller chiefdoms into larger paramount chiefdoms were usually from semiperipheral locations. Peripheral peoples did not usually have the institutional and material resources that would allow them to make important inventions and to implement these or to take over older core regions. It was in the semiperiphery that core and peripheral social characteristics could be recombined in new ways. Sometimes this meant that new techniques of power or political legitimacy were invented and implemented in semiperipheral societies.

Much better known than semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms is the phenomenon of semiperipheral marcher states. Many of the largest empires have been assembled by conquerors who come from semiperipheral societies. Famous examples are often thought to be: the Achaemenid Persians (but see below), the Macedonians led by Alexander, the Romans, the Islamic Caliphates, the Ottomans, the Manchus and the Aztecs.

But some semiperipheries transform institutions, but do not take over the interpolity system. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states operated on the edges of the tributary empires where they bought and sold goods in widely separate locations, encouraging people to produce a surplus for trade. The Phoenician cities (e.g. Tyre, Carthage, etc.), as well as Malacca, Venice and Genoa, spread commodification by producing manufactured goods and trading them across great regions. In this way the semiperipheral capitalist city-states were agents of the development of markets and the expansion of trade networks, and so they helped to transform the world of the tributary empires without themselves becoming new core powers.

Semiperipheral locations can lead to very different kinds of transformative action. Semiperipheral capitalist city-states were agents of commodification that, by their activities of trading and producing manufactures, encouraged the expansion and deepening of production for exchange in world regions. The most famous of these were the Phoenician city-states, the Italian city-states and the German cities of the Hanseatic League, but probably Dilmun and definitely the Old Assyrian City-State functioned similarly in the Bronze Age. Malakka was such in Southeast Asia, and Osaka, though it was never had autonomous sovereignty, played a similar role in Japan. These were the first capitalist states in which state power was mainly used to facilitate profit-making rather than the extraction of taxes and tribute.

The modern world-system has experienced a sequence of the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. The Dutch, the British and the U.S. were countries that had formerly been in semiperipheral positions relative to the modern core/periphery hierarchy. And indeed the rise of Europe within the larger Afroeurasian world-system was also a case of semiperipheral development, one in which a formerly peripheral and then semiperipheral region rose to become a new core and to bring all the regions into a now-global interpolity system.[8]

Indicators of Semiperipherality

The main purpose of this paper is to determine how many of the twenty-four quantitatively identified empire upsweeps were the result of semiperipheral marcher states. In order to do this we need to specify what we mean by semiperipherality. This is not a simple task because the core/periphery distinction is a relational concept. In other words, what semiperipherality is depends on the larger context in which it occurs – the nature of the polities that are interacting with one another and the nature of their interactions. The most general definition of the semiperiphery is: an intermediate location in an interpolity core/periphery structure. The minimal definition of core/periphery relations, as mentioned above, is that polities with different degrees of population density and internal hierarchy and complexity are interacting with one another. This is what we have called “core/periphery differentiation.” The idea of “core/periphery hierarchy” is more stringent. It requires interpolity domination and exploitation. In this study we will be looking for evidence that a polity that conquered other polities and was responsible for an upward sweep was semiperipheral relative to the other societies it was interacting with before it started on the road to conquest. We will use four main empirical indicators to make such determinations:

· the geographical location of the society relative to other societies that have greater or lesser amounts of population density. Is it out on the edge of a region of core polities?, and

· the relative level of development: population density, which is usually indicated by the sizes of settlements, the relative degree of complexity and hierarchy, the mode of production: e.g foraging, pastoralism, nomadism vs. sedentism, horticulture vs. agriculture, the size of irrigation systems, etc. Hunter-gatherers or pastoralists are usually peripheral to more sedentary agriculturalists; and

· the recency of the adoption of sedentism, agriculture, class formation and state formation, and

· relative ecological marginality.

The Aztecs are perhaps a proto-typical example of a semiperipheral marcher state. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who migrated into the Valley of Mexico and settled on an uninhabited island in a lake. There had already been large states and empires in the Valley of Mexico for centuries. They hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers, developed a class distinction between nobles and commoners and claimed to have been descended from the Toltecs, an earlier empire. Then they began conquering the older core states of the valley of Mexico, strategically picking first on weak and unpopular ones until they had gathered enough resources to “roll up the system.” The Aztec story has some of the elements that we will use in examining our upsweep cases: recency of sedentism, class formation and state formation. We will also use geographical location. Randall Collins (1999) contends that the marcher advantage is the main explanation for the marcher-state phenomenon. The marcher advantage is a geopolitical advantage that derives from location on the edge of a system of core states. Such a location means that there are no serious challengers on one front and so a state in this kind of location can afford to concentrate all its resources toward potential victims in the center.

Another indicator of semiperipheral location is relative environmental desirability. Core societies usually hold to best locations in terms of soil and water. The semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms of the Pacific Islands were typically from the dry side of the island where land was steeper and soil was thinner. Of course, which land is better depends on the kind of resources that are being used and the technologies available for appropriating resources. But ecological marginality is an indicator of semiperipherality.

Another issue is semiperipheral to what? A polity may have different relationships with other polities in the same interpolity network. For example, Macedonia had one kind relationship with the other Greek states, and a different kind of relationship with the Persian Empire. Semiperipherality is relative to the system as a whole, but may also be affected by important differences between other states in a system and by the existence of different kinds of relations with those other states.

The alternatives to semiperipherality are coreness and peripheralness. Core states are older, more stratified, have bigger settlements, and they have had the accoutrements of civilization, such as writing, longer. Peripheral societies are nomadic hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, hill people, or desert people. If they are sedentary, their villages are small relative to the settlements of those with which they are interacting. We should anticipate that some conquest empires were formed by peripheral marcher states or by old core states that made a comeback. David Wilkinson’s (1991) survey of the core, peripheral and semiperipheral zones of thirteen interpolity systems, is helpful in suggesting criteria for designating these zones, but Wilkinson did not address the question we are asking here: were the polities that produced empire upward sweeps semiperipheral before they did this?

We should also note that some large empires have been formed by internal revolt in which a subordinate ethnic group or caste revolted and took power in an existing state and then carried out an expansion by conquest. The slave-soldiers of the Mamluk Sultanate are an obvious example, and Norman Yoffee (1991) has contended that Akkadian empire was the result of a ethnic revolt (but see below). The point here is that this is a possible alternative to the semiperipheral marcher state route to empire upsweep.

So we anticipate that we may find four types of upsweeps:

· internal revolt, and

· core state restoration, (e.g. the Third Dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian restoration in Mesopotamia or the Ming Dynasty in China in which the Han Chinese threw out the Mongol Yuan rulers, and

· peripheral marcher states, in which a polity composed of peripheral peoples conquers the core, (e.g. the Mongol Empire) and

· semiperipheral marcher states.

Our review of the upsweeps may also produce a typology of semiperipheral marcher states (SMS) based on different combinations of the features discussed above. Our effort to locate evidence in favor or against the semiperipheral status of the upsweeps will prove more difficult for the early cases. Thus we will categorize the upsweeps in terms of degree of certainty: yes means a high degree of certainty, maybe means little or contradictory evidence, and no means significant evidence to the contrary. We will also discuss the level of certainty regarding the other logical possibilities listed above for those cases to which they are applicable.

Table 1 shows the twenty-four cases identified as empires upsweeps in our quantitative study based on Taagepera’s estimates of the territorial sizes of large empires (Alvarez et al 1010). The first two are from the Mesopotamian Region.

		Largest Size	Approximate	Semiperipheral Marcher State?
	Name	Sq Megameters	Year of Largest Size
Mesopotamian Region
Empire Upsweep 1	Lagash	0.5	2375 BC	No
Empire Upsweep 2	Akkadian	0.8	2250 BC	Yes
Egyptian Region
Empire Upsweep 3		0.4	2700 BC	?
Empire Upsweep 4	Hyksos	0.65	1650 BC	Yes
Empire Upsweep 5	Merger of Egypt and Mesopotamia	1	1525 BC
Early Central PMN
Empire Upsweep 6	Egypt (New Kingdom,18^th dynasty)	1	1450 BC	No (revival)
Empire Upsweep 7	Neo-Assyrians	1.4	670 BC	?
Empire Upsweep 8	Persians	5.4	480 BC	?
Empire Upsweep 9	Macedonia	5.2	323 BC	Yes
Late Central PMN
Empire Upsweep 10	Rome	5	117 AD	Yes
Empire Upsweep 11	GokTurks	3.5	630 AD	Yes
Empire Upsweep 12	Islam	11.1	720 AD	Yes
Empire Upsweep 13	Mongol-Yuan	24	1309 AD	No (peripheral marcher state)
Empire Upsweep 14	British	35.5	1920 AD	Yes
Early East Asian
Empire Upsweep 15	Shang	0.7	1300 BC	Yes
Empire Upsweep 16	Chu	0.8	300 BC	Yes
Empire Upsweep 17	Qin	2.3	230 BC	Yes
Empire Upsweep 18	Western Han	6	50 BC	?
Late East Asian
Empire Upsweep 19	Hsiung-nu	9	176 BC	No
Empire Upsweep 20	Eastern Han	6.5	100 AD	?
Empire Upsweep 21	Mongols	24	1309 AD	No (peripheral marcher state)
Empire Upsweep 22	Qing	14.7	1790 AD	Yes
South Asian
Empire Upsweep 23	Mauryan	3.75	100 BC	?
Empire Upsweep 24	Mogul	4	1690 AD	Yes

Table 1: Upward Sweeps of the Territorial Sizes of Empires

This paper is inconclusive because we have not finished our work classifying the empire upsweeps. The results shown in Table 1 are tentative. The ? are of two kinds. In some cases we have not been able to find any hard evidence;. In others we have not yet come to a conclusion in a situation where the evidence is thin or contradictory. And some of the Yeses may be subject to change. But if these results hold, we have already shown that about one half of all the cases are semiperipheral marcher states. This would mean that the theory of semiperipheral development does not explain everything, but also that it cannot be ignored in any explanation of the long-term trend in the rise of polity size.

Appendix: Classification of Empire Upsweeps with regard to status as semiperipheral

marcher states http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows56/appendix/appendix.htm

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[1] We use the term evolution despite its tawdry history as a justification of imperialism, racism and gender hierarchy. We are talking about socio-cultural evolution, not biological evolution and we are well aware that teleology and progress need to be washed out of the concept of evolution before it can be scientifically useful (Sanderson 1990; 2006).

[2] We use the term “polity” to generally denote a spatially-bounded realm of sovereign authority such as a band, tribe, chiefdom, state or empire.

[3] http://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html

[4] An interpolity system is a set of interacting polities that make alliances and war with one another. In other contexts we have called this a “political-military network” to distinguish it from other interactions that typically have smaller or larger spatial scales – bulk goods networks and prestige goods networks.

[5] This is because interpolity interaction often causes crosspolity differentiation, not homogeneity. Using “culture areas” obscures such cases of co-evolution.

[6] We would love to have included other world regions such as Mesoamerica or the Andes, but quantitative estimates of the territorial sizes of polities are not currently available over enough time and with sufficient temporal resolution for the study of cycles and upward sweeps in these. Documentary evidence is required for the estimation of the territorial sizes of polities.

[7] We should also note that conquest is not the only road to state formation, as is illustrated by the partial success of the process of European unification since World War II. This is important for thinking about the potential for future global state formation (Chase-Dunn and Inoue 2010).

[8] There may be an analogous phenomenon to interpolity semiperipheral development that occurs within polities. Organizations such as firms that are competing with each other may also exhibit aspects of the “advantages of backwardness.”