The Evolution of
Economic Institutions:
City-states and forms of imperialism since the Bronze Age
Circular seal from Dilmun
Christopher
Chase-Dunn, E. N. Anderson,
Hiroko Inoue and Alexis Álvarez
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside
This is IROWS
Working Paper #79 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows79/irows79.htm
To be presented at the
International Studies Association 2015 annual meeting, New Orleans, Friday
February 20, 4 pm, Panel title: “Imperialism in World Regions”
Abstract:
This paper is part of a larger project that studies the evolution of
exchange and exploitation within an anthropological framework that includes
small-scale polities and interpolity systems composed
of sedentary foragers as well as states and empires.[1] The
cases surveyed are considered for their importance in understanding the
evolution of economic and political institutions and modes of
accumulation. The evolutionary
world-systems perspective sees semiperipheral
development as an important cause of human sociocultural evolution. In this paper we discuss the literature on the evolution of economic
institutions in prehistory and consider the roles that semiperipheral
trading polities have played in sociocultural evolution since the emergence of
cities and states in the early Bronze Age. We trace the emergence and spread of
Bronze Age land-based and maritime city-states that specialized in trade as
progenitors and promoters of commodification. We examine how city-states that
were controlled by those who gathered their wealth mainly from trade rather
than taxation may have acted as agents of the expansion and intensification of
commercial trade networks and how a concentration of such city-states in parts
of Europe, and the relative weakness of tributary empires after the decline of
Rome, led to the emergent predominance of capitalism as a logic of social
reproduction and development. We also examine the extent to which thallasocratic city-states pioneered a new form of colonial
imperialism that eventually replaced the older pattern in which states had
conquered their adjacent neighbors to form empires.
Semiperipheral Polities and
the Commodification of Wealth, Land, Labor and Goods Since the Bronze Age
Our theoretical perspective is the
institutional materialist evolutionary world-systems approach.[2]
This perspective focuses on the ways that humans have organized social
production and distribution, and how economic, political, and religious
institutions have evolved in systems of interacting polities (world-systems)
since the Paleolithic Age. We employ an underlying model in which population
pressures and interpolity competition have always
been, and still remain, important causes of social change, while the systemic
logics of social reproduction and growth have gone through qualitative
transformations (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 6). Thus we are both continuationists and transformationists.
The topic of the evolution of
economic and political institutions over the long run of human sociocultural
development is far from finding consensus among social scientists. A heated
debate about how to best characterize the continuities and transformations
since the age when all humans were nomadic foragers emerged with modern social
science and is quite as contentious now as it has always been despite huge
advances in our ability to obtain scientific evidence about human life in the
past. Part of the reason for continued controversy is that it is difficult to
determine the nature of sociocultural institutions with archaeological evidence
alone. And another main factor is that characterizations of the human past have
implications for current debates about human nature and what is possible for
the human future. In the past this debate was described as between “formalists”
who contend that all human societies share a common economic logic based on
individual decision-making and competitive bargaining, whereas “substantivists” claim that economic actions are always
embedded within normative and institutional orders and that there have been
qualitative transformations in the logic of social integration in the
prehistory and history of the emergence of sociocultural complexity.
Recently
a significant and articulate group of archaeologists have remounted the attack
on Karl Polanyi’s substantivist characterization of
the development of qualitatively different modes of socioeconomic integration.
Polanyi described a developmental sequence of institutional arrangements that
were said to characterize the economies of whole societies. His main forms of
economic integration were reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange. His most important contention was that market
trade is not a natural and universal logic of social interaction but is rather
an institutional invention with a history that can be studied. Polanyi claimed
that land, labor and goods are not naturally exchanged as commodities but they
become commercialized and monetized in
the development of human societies.[3]
This is not necessarily a smooth or continuous process. There are waves of
commodification and decommodification. Some things
are more difficult to commodify than other others. It
is easier for standardized goods to be treated as commodities or money than it
is for labor or land to be commodified. And so the
prehistoric and historical processes of commodification of goods, labor and
land were uneven across time and space. And though commodification spread and
deepened, no societies, even our own, commodify all human interactions. Normatively regulated sharing and reciprocity
and politically regulated taxation and tribute continue to exist, but they
exist in a context in which the market economy and commodified
property and labor are the predominant forms.[4]
Polanyi’s
ideas were employed by a whole generation of economic anthropologists as well
as world historians and sociologists, and this entire corpus has been attacked
as having used ideological blinders to force human societies into theoretical
categories that obscure reality. A succinct expression of this critique is
contained in a recent article in the Annual Review of Anthropology by
archaeologists Gary Feinman and Christopher Garraty (2010). This article summarizes the main points
contained in a collection of essays edited by Garraty
and Barbara L. Stark (2010; see also Blanton and Fargher 2012). The
archaeologists who have put together this most recent assault on Polanyi are mainly
Americanists who have themselves done excavations and surface surveys in North,
Central and South America. They make a convincing case that market institutions
and the use of money were important institutions in the political economies
that emerged in Mesoamerica and they note that this aspect of Mesoamerican
societies has been somewhat ignored in the social science literature.[5]
The Feinman and Garraty article contains a helpful overview of the problems
associated with the identification of market systems using only archaeological
evidence. We know that Mesoamerican civilization made extensive use of markets
primarily based on ethnohistoric accounts, not
archaeological evidence. Feinman and Nicholas (2010) propose a multiscalar
approach to the problem of identifying market systems with archaeological
evidence from the valley of Oaxaca and Stark and Garraty
(2010) also present an overview of the challenges and possible solutions for
the problem of identifying marketplace exchange when restricted to archaeological
evidence.
It is clear that Polanyi was wrong about
particular cases in which he believed that markets were absent but later
evidence emerged showing that they were present. The most famous of these
instances is not mentioned in the Feinman and Garraty article but came to light in a previous round of
attacks on Polanyi in the 1970’s. Polanyi had asserted that the recently
discovered Kultepe tablets showed that a colonial
enclave of Assur in the town of Kanesh in
Cappadocia, showed that the colonists were operating as political agents of
non-market “administered trade.” In
Polanyi’s theoretical scheme early states engaged in non-market exchange
(gift-giving or tribute) that employed political agents of the king to carry
out the transactions. This is called “administered trade.”
Later research based on a more complete reading
of the Kultepe tablets confirmed that the Old
Assyrians were true merchants calculating profits on their own accounts, not
agents of the Assyrian state (Curtin 1984; and see page 8 below). Polanyi and his students were also wrong
about Mesoamerica, though they were not wrong about the Andes. The problem is that some mistakes in the
identification of cases is not enough to completely discredit a theory.
Polanyi’s contention that most small-scale societies are based on mainly on
reciprocity and sharing, especially as elaborated by Marshall Sahlins (1972), and that these institutional forms of
exchange predate the emergence of proto-money, tribute-gathering and commodified market exchange remains accurate even if he was
wrong about the timing or location of
the emergence of commodified forms. The article by Feinman and Garraty does not
address this issue. But the extreme version of the “formalist” theoretical
perspective claims that all human societies are based on the rational actor
model and a bargaining form of exchange that is similar to market trade. It remains quite plausible that there was
indeed a transition from reciprocity/sharing to redistribution and then later
to market exchange. But these
transitions may have taken place at an earlier and smaller level of complexity
than Polanyi claimed. If this is so it
means that the ability to identify commodified forms
of wealth, goods, property and exchange using archaeological evidence is more
important that has been thought and so the efforts to do this contained in the Garraty and Stark (2010) are to be applauded. One problem
with the existing efforts to develop purely archaeological evidence for market
exchange is that they almost exclusively focus on the comparison between market
exchange and redistributive integration which is presumed to be less efficient
because it requires bringing goods to a central location and then
redistributing them. Little attention has been given to the problem of
distinguishing market exchange (and redistribution) from sharing/reciprocity,
but this problem must be solved if we are to trace the important prehistory of
commodification stateless societies. [6]
Our approach, elaborated below and in Chase-Dunn
et al (2013), contends that early forms of commodification emerged within
small-scale systems based on reciprocity (Chase-Dunn et al 2013) and then slowly
and unevenly within some of the tributary empires, and that city-states
specializing in trade developed institutions and organizational forms and
technologies that facilitated expanded and deepened commodification.
A related
controversy has reemerged over the question of the emergence of capitalism.
Some world-systems theorists claimed that a “capital-imperialist” mode of
accumulation that oscillated between state-organized and market-organized
phases arose in the Bronze Age (Ekholm and Friedman
1982) and that there was no transition
to capitalism that occurred with the rise of European hegemony (Frank and Gills
1994). This perspective does not claim
to shed light on an earlier period in which market institutions were emerging,
and neither does it address the issue of the relative predominance of commodification.
It implies that capital-imperialism arose full-blown in the early states of the
Bronze Age and that there has been no upward trend toward increasing
commodification since then. Some of these same theorists (Frank and Gills) also
claim that there was a single Eurasian world system since the emergence of
early states in Mesopotamia, earning them the title of “ancient hyperglobalists” (Chase-Dunn, Inoue, Heimlich and Neal
2015).
Our
stylized model of the evolution of economic institutions
This
paper will focus mainly on the evolution of economic institutions and the roles
played by semiperipheral polities in the long-term
commodification of goods, wealth, labor and land. It uses the results of a
research project that studies the development of settlements and polities by
comparing regional world-systems and studying them over long periods of time.
We
start with a brief stylized overview of our version of the evolution of
qualitatively distinct economic institutions and then we will elaborate and
qualify this model by examining different world regions and some particular
cases. In small-scale and egalitarian systems social production is mainly based
on shared conceptions of norms that designate obligations among members of kin
groups. Anthropologists call this the kin-based
mode of production (Wolf 1997). It
is based on consensual moral orders that are imbedded in the mother tongues
that people learn from childhood. The
mobilization of social labor is primarily organized by means of family
obligations based on sharing and reciprocity (Sahlins
1972). In some of these small-scale societies there is also ritualized (sacralized) gifting that reinforces alliances across
households, settlements and sometimes across the boundaries of independent
polities (Douglas 1990). Most of these small-scale systems are egalitarian in
the sense that there may be some gender and age inequalities, but there are
only small inequalities across households.
As sociocultural systems became more
complex, hierarchical kinship distinctions emerged that allowed elites to use
institutionalized power to accumulate resources and to regulate the uses of
land and other valuable natural resources. Classes, forms of property and
prestige goods systems emerged that made it possible for the chiefly elite to
appropriate some of the labor and goods produced by commoners. In some of these
systems prestige goods emerge as a mechanism for symbolizing alliances among
village heads. Under some conditions prestige goods evolved into proto-money
that served as a more general symbol of value in trade networks. Intervillage and interpolity
exchange allowed surplus food to be acquired by villages that were experiencing
a temporary shortage without resort to raiding. In some systems prestige goods
were monopolized by elites and used to reward subalterns and to regulate
marriage, reinforcing the political hierarchy. These are called “prestige goods
systems” in the anthropological literature. But some egalitarian systems had
prestige goods or proto-money that mainly functioned to ensure the provision of
goods for the general population during periods of shortage (e.g. the Wintu – see Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998). Small-scale societies also differed in the
extent to which private property existed. Many had only the usufruct in which
procurement locations were allocated and reallocated by group decision-making
(e.g. the Wintu), whereas others designated privately
held procurement sites that were inheritable property (e.g. the California
Athabascans). But even when privately held sites existed these were not commodified because they could not be bought or sold.
In some systems specialized institutions of
regional control emerged within polities[7]
that were separate from, and over the top of, the kin-organized subsistence and
political economy. These were the first states, and the larger political
economy came to be based on various forms of tithing, taxation,
labor-appropriation and tribute. The general term for this kind of political
economy is the tributary mode of
accumulation. In some of the early states
primordial versions of commodified exchange emerged
such as lending money at interest and letters of credit, but most exchange
continued to be regulated by customary or politically specified rules and rates
of exchange (sharing, reciprocity and redistribution). Interpolity
(foreign) trade was usually carried out by representatives of the state – what
Karl Polanyi (1957a) called
“state-administered trade.” But there were also some early city-states that
specialized in trade. The commodified institutions
that emerged within early tributary states were surrounded by increasingly
powerful state-based institutionalized coercion that regulated most of the
economy, though there was still a sector in which kin-based reciprocity
operated (Zagerell 1986). For thousands of years commodified forms of wealth, land, goods and labor existed
and expanded within commercializing political economies in which
institutionalized coercion was the predominant mode of economic regulation.
Money, cylinder seals, the collection of interest on loans, sales of property,
slave markets, indebtedness, commercialized sexual services, and wage labor all
emerged during the Bronze and Iron Ages (Graeber
2011). There were waves of commercialization in which privately controlled
enterprises played a greater role in economic production and distribution
followed by periods in which states regained great control. Tributary states became semi-commercialized
and learned to extract taxes from business entrerprises
rather than simply confiscating them. And more and more semiperipheral
capitalist city-states specializing in trade and under the political control of
those who made profits from commodity production emerged.
We
define capitalism broadly as a mode
of accumulation in which an elite class of owners and controllers of the major
means of production derives most of its wealth from the production and
distribution of commodities and manipulations of money. This presumes the
existence of a market economy and so the Polanyian
processes of the commodification of goods, wealth, land and labor are well
advanced. But unlike Marx and many others we do not require that work be
primarily or mostly mobilize in the form of wage labor. Coming from the world-systems perspective, we
note that coerced cash crop labor (serfdom and slavery) were fundamental and
necessary parts of the development of modern capitalism, and we suppose that
earlier forms of capitalism also mobilized labor in these and other ways. [8]
The question of how labor was mobilized in the Bronze and Iron Age semiperipheral capitalist city-states is an important one
that has not been much addressed by historians, but should be. A capitalist
state is one in which the elites in control of the state accumulate wealth
mainly by means of profit from trade and the production of commodities.
Eventually
a rather highly commodified system emerged in Western
Europe during the period after the fall of the Roman Empire in which the power
of tributary states was weak. A large
number of semiperipheral capitalist city-states
concentrated first on the Italian peninsula and then spread across the Alps to
the low countries and then to the North Sea and the Baltic. These were agents
of an expanding Mediterranean and Baltic market economy. When territorial
states once again emerged after the infeudation that
followed the collapse of the Roman Empire,
the most powerful of them were shaped by the existence of this strongly commodified regional market economy. The emergent political
elites were dependent on support from merchants and bankers to meet the costs
of raising armies in this very competitive European interstate system. We agree
with Wallerstein (2011:63) that the nature of
European agriculture and class relations were important reasons why emergent
European states were more dependent on capitalists than were states in China or
other rice-growing regions (see also Palat 1995) .
The
first core state (not a semiperipheral city-state)
that was controlled by capitalists was the Dutch federation in the 17th
century. This signaled the arrival of a capitalist world-system in which the
logic of profit making instead of tribute gathering had moved from the semiperiphery to the core and to systemic predominance. The
stylized model presented above needs examination regarding apparent exceptions
and possible misconceptions. Hence we tell our story for different world
regions and examine particular cases that may seem problematic, paying special attending to the actions of
states that specialize in trade and to the issue of “capitalist imperialism.”
Semiperipheral Capitalist
City-States and Commercialization in the Bronze and Iron Ages
We now examine ways in which semiperipheral capitalist city-states may have been agents
of commodification in the Bronze and Iron Ages. We define capitalist states as
those in which greater than half of
appropriated surplus derives from profits from trade and the state is
substantially controlled by those who obtain most of their wealth from
commodity production or market trade. A city-state is defined as an autonomous polity in which the territory
of sovereign control is limited to a single large city and some surrounding
agricultural land.[9] So a capitalist city-state is a city-state in
which over half of the accumulated surplus is derived from trade or commodity
production and that state is controlled by those who accumulate profits. Our focus on these entities stems from
Fernand Braudel’s (1984) discussion of “world
economies” and from Frederic Lane’s (1973, 1979) historical studies of Venice
and his conceptual essays about the nature of “violence-controlling
enterprises.” We have been further
inspired by David Wilkinson’s (2014; 2015) consideration of the nature of
capitalist empires. Wilkinson, also inspired by Braudel,
starts with Venice, Genoa and the Hanseatic League and then looks for and finds
similar entities in earlier ages and far-flung places. We start with the early Bronze Age, and use
Wilkinson’s insights and definitions in our examination of important cases. [10]
The ancient states that emerged in
Mesopotamia were all city-states, but they did not specialize in trade. We
suspect that nearly all primary (pristine) states (states that emerge in a
region in which there have not previously been states) were city-states in
their early years. City-states that specialized in trade emerged in the early
Bronze Age. We note that these specialized trading polities encouraged the
production of a surplus for exchange and that the institutional innovations
that they developed were often taken up by adjacent tributary states, which
impelled internal commercialization.
The capitalist
city-state phenomenon is clearly a different kind of semiperipheral
development from that of the semiperipheral marcher
state.[11] These states pursued a policy of profit
making rather than the acquisition of territory and the use of state power to
tax and extract tribute. They emerged in
the “interstices,” the spaces between the territorial states in world-economies
in which wealth could be had by “buying cheap and selling dear” (merchant
capitalism). One of their consequences was the expansion of trade networks
because their commercial activities provided incentives for farmers and
craftsmen to produce a surplus for trade with distant areas. Thus the
capitalist city-states were promoters of commodification and inter-regional
economic integration.
Most
of the early capitalist city-states were maritime regimes that made profits by
moving goods across the water[12]
e.g. Dilmun. But the old Assyrian city-state used
donkey caravans to move tin and bronze long distances (Larsen 1976). This paper
examines the role that semiperipheral capitalist
city-states played in the rising predominance of money economy, production for
exchange, and state power used for the purpose of accumulating profits rather
than taxes and tribute.
Semiperipheral capitalist city states are autonomous states
that pursue strategies of merchant capitalist trade and (often) the production
of commodities. Before the emergence of the predominance of capitalism in the
modern system these operated in the context of world-systems in which the
predominant mode of accumulation was based on the extraction of tribute and
taxes by means of state-organized institutionalized coercion.
Polanyi claimed that true markets did
not emerge until Iron Age Greece. But in
ancient Southwest Asia and in Mesoamerica, all parties recognized certain
neutral territories as international trade enclaves. These “ports of trade”
(Revere 1957; Chapman, 1957) allowed international exchange to go on even
during periods of warfare between states. Some of these neutral territories
were small cities near the boundaries of larger polities. But each Mesopotamian
city also had a port district within it, and these city districts were often
also treated as if they were neutral free-trade zones (van de Mieroop 1999). Scholars disagree about whether it was
primarily administered trade or market trade that occurred in these enclaves. Ratnagar (1981,: 226–227) contends that Dilmun
(Bahrain) in the Persian Gulf performed this port-of-trade function in the
exchanges between the Harrapan civilization of the
Indus River valley and Mesopotamia. He also cites evidence that indicates that
the Dilmunites later took on the functions of
middlemen carriers operating between the great states, thus becoming early
forbearers of the specialized trading city-states of the Phoenicians.
The rise of the early
empires was accompanied by the continued expansion and deepening of trade
networks (Jennings 2010). Periods of peace and the extension of imperial
governance allowed trade to become more intense and goods to travel farther.
The commodification of goods and wealth had long been emerging within and
between the states of Mesopotamia. Contracts of sale of lands and interest-bearing
loans were known from the Early Dynastic period, and prices were clearly
reflecting shortages in the Ur III period
In the Old Babylonian
period we find a clear instance of a semiperipheral
capitalist city-state. This was the Old Assyrian merchant dynasty centered in
the city of Assur on the upper Tigris (in what is now Syria), with its colonial
enclaves of Assyrian merchants located in distant cities far up into Anatolia
(what is now Turkey) (Larsen 1976, 1987). Assur was a land-based merchant
capitalist city-state with a far-flung set of colonies in the midst of an
interstate system in which most states were still extracting surplus from their
own peasants and pursuing a strategy of territorial expansion by means of
conquest. The Old Assyrians maintained an effective structure of
self-governance and religious devotion to the God of Assur that allowed them to
coordinate the activities of their central city and its distant colonies. This
is an early instance of what Philip Curtin (1984) called a “trade diaspora,” in
which an ethnic or religious group specializes in cross-cultural trade in a
region of great cultural diversity.[13]
The merchant capitalism of Assur, unlike that of most
capitalist city-states, was not based on sea trade (as were, e.g., the Phoenician,
Italian, and German city-states). But the Old Assyrians did occupy a key
transportation site on the Tigris that enabled them to tap into profit streams
generated by the exchange of eastern tin and Mesopotamian textiles for silver.
Bronze was being produced in Anatolia using copper from the north and tin
imported from Bactria (Afghanistan). The demand for tin was great, and the
merchants of Assur were able to make large profits by negotiating trade
treaties with the many states along the trade routes that allowed them access
to markets at agreed-upon taxation rates. They also organized the
transportation of goods over long distances by means of donkey caravans, and
they maintained an effective structure of self-governance and religious
devotion to the god of Assur that allowed them to coordinate the activities of
their central city and its distant colonies.
Much of the
evidence that we have about the institutional nature of exchange carried out by
the Old Assyrian city-state and its colonies comes from the Kultepe
tablets at Kanesh, an archive of business records and
letters that show how the merchants organized and governed their business
activities (Veenhof 1995). The records show that the
merchants were trading on their own accounts for profit. They were not agents
of the Assyrian state carrying out “administered trade ” akin to tribute exchanges
among states. As mentioned above, Karl Polanyi (1957a) had used an early and inaccurate examination of
the Kultepe tablets as evidence that the Assyrian
trade was state-organized exchange rather than market exchange. Polanyi
underestimated the antiquity of market-based exchange. But he was right to
claim that market exchange was an invention that emerged slowly in the context
of kin-based reciprocity and state-based administered trade.
The later history of Assur is also an
interesting case that is relevant for our understanding of semiperipheral
development. The Old Assyrians and the city of Assur were conquered by Hammarabi, the Amorite king of Babylon in 1756 BCE. The
Amorites were originally Semitic-speaking nomadic people from the mountains of
Syria. But they conquered states in Mesopotamia and established kingdoms in the
late Bronze Age. Thus the status of the claim that the Neo-Assyrians were a semiperipheral marcher state is based on the originally semiperipheral location of the capital far up the Tigris,
and on the conquest of the capital by formerly peripheral Amorites.
The Amorites became
the ruling class, though they adopted the language and some of the religion of
the Assyrians. Their much later re-emergence as the Neo-Assyrian Empire was a
fascinating instance in which what had earlier been a semiperipheral
capitalist city-state eventually adopted the marcher state strategy of
conquest,[14] and their
success in this latter venture created an empire upward sweep that was larger
than any other that had been before it in Southwestern Asia (Inoue et al 2012).
Capitalist
city-states and ports of trade
Sabloff and Rathje (1975)
contend that the same settlement can oscillate back and forth between being a
“port of trade” (a neutral territory that is used for administered trade
between different competing states and empires – see Polanyi et al 1957) and a “trading port” (an
autonomous and sovereign polity that actively pursues policies that facilitate
profitable trade). This latter corresponds to what we have meant by a semiperipheral capitalist city-state. Sabloff and Rathje also contend
that a trading port is more likely to emerge during a period in which tributary
states within the same region are weak, whereas a port of trade is more likely
during a period in which there are large and strong tributary states.[15] Sabloff and Rathje carried out an archaeological investigation of
Cozumel, an island off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Their
project on Cozumel was designed to try to test the hypothesis that it had been
a trading state with a cosmopolitan and tolerant merchant elite during the
so-called Late Post-classic period of the Mayan state system just before the
arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century (see also Kepecs,
Feinman and Boucher 1994). There had long been a busy
coastal trade network based on transportation in large dugout canoes among
Mayan and Mexican polities along Caribbean coast of Mesoamerica (McKillop 2005
and see Figure 3). If Sabloff and Rathje are right
autonomous trading ports (semiperipheral capitalist
city states) are more likely to emerge during the fall part of the cycle of
rise and fall of empires that all state systems seem to exhibit.
Figure
1: Linda Schele's drawing from an incised bone found
at Tikal, showing a number of Mayan paddler gods carrying a maize god in a
dugout canoe. © David Schele, Foundation for the
Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. www.famsi.org
This general idea also corresponds
with the notion that world-systems have oscillated between periods in which
they are more integrated by horizontal networks of exchange versus periods in
which corporate and hierarchical organization is more predominant (Ekholm and Friedman 1982; Blanton and Fargher
2012)). Such oscillations may have been
based on the alternative successes and failures of tributary marcher states and
capitalist city-states.
The
upward sweeps of empires in which very large empires emerged in regional
world-systems for the first time were probably facilitated by the actions of
specialized trading states. By extending trade networks local producers were
encouraged to produce for exchange and for export. This increased the value of
territories for expanding states. The
ground was prepared for the upward sweeps of empire conquest by the activities
of capitalist city-states. If this is true upward sweeps in which larger states
emerged to encompass regions that had already been unified by trade should have
occurred after a period in which semiperipheral
capitalist city-states had been flourishing. [16]
Regarding upward sweeps of the population sizes of cities, these generally
followed upward sweeps of empires because it was empires that built the largest
cities as their capitals. The settlements of semiperipheral
capitalist city-states were usually much smaller than the capital cities of
empires. As we shall see below, Carthage was the only capitalist city that
became the largest city in a world-system until the rise of London.
More
Capitalist City-States: the Phoenicians in the Eastern Mediterranean
In the Eastern Mediterranean the Minoans on
Crete and the Mycenaeans in the Aegean had carried on
an early sea-going trade. During the
late second millennium BCE the Mediterranean was upset by migrations from the
north, peripheral peoples who the Egyptians called the “Sea Peoples.” These sea-going raiders disrupted the
sea-borne trade relations between Egypt and the Levant. The early Lebanese town of Byblos had long been
a tributary supplier of cedar to Egypt, but the arrival of the Sea Peoples interfered
with this trade (Cline 2014).
Eventually the new peoples settled on
the Lebanese and Palestinian coast and mixed with the older Semitic tribes
there. Out of this admixture the
Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon emerged,
transforming piracy into merchant capitalism, an instance of what ecologists
call the emergence of mutualism from predation.
The Phoenicians specialized in trading across the whole Mediterranean,
especially in exchanging with primitive peoples to whom the products of the old
East were, at first, preciosities (prestige goods). They also maintained a degree of autonomy as
carriers of goods between empires, especially the Egyptians and the
Assyrians. The Phoenicians established a
colony for the production of copper on Cyprus, and began a manufacturing
industry that provided inexpensive glass vases to mass markets throughout the
Mediterranean. They had stolen the
Egyptian secret of glass production and improved upon it for use in the carrying
trade (Frankenstein 1978; Herm, 1975; Markoe 2000).
Thus the Phoenicians expanded the
“exchanging unequals”, in which trade occurs between
peoples that have not previously been integrated by exchange and so the items
have values that are unrelated to those of the separate economic spheres (Amin
1980). With repeated and increasing
exchanges the formerly separate regions become integrated into a single system
of economic value. Buying cheap and
selling dear (arbitrage) was the specialized purpose of the Phoenician
city-states. These independent temple-cities of coastal Lebanon were early
examples of autonomous capitalist states in which profit-taking through
commerce was the dominant raison d’etat (purpose of the state). Their success led to “hiving off” in which
groups of Phoenicians would to abroad to establish new city-states. They
eventually spread as far as present-day Cadiz (Gades)
on the Atlantic coast of Spain, and they traded down the Red Sea to East Africa
and India and down the west coast of Africa, where they had a port at Moghador in what is now Mauretania. The Phoenicians also had alliances with the
land-based Hebrew states of Judah and Israel, building the temple at Jerusalem
under contract.
There are intermediate forms between a
completely uncommodified exchange network and one in
which commodification is the
predominant form. Land, wealth and labor
are never perfect commodities in any historical system, even in the
present. Rather commodification is a
matter of degree. The Phoenicians
engaged in merchant capitalism by
buying and selling the products of different, relatively isolated areas around
the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In doing this they brought the separate
economies of these areas into interaction, subjecting the division of labor
within each to the market forces generated in the network as a whole. The Phoenicians also produced manufactured
goods for export, and these were not only prestige goods. Of course one of
their most important exports was a prime example of a prestige good. They knew
the secret of how to die cloth with a brilliant purple derived from sea snails
and so they had a monopoly on “imperial purple” which every king and emperor
needed to symbolize power. They also specialized in producing cheap copies that
could expand market demand by lowering prices. The Phoenician glass implements
industry and the textile industry were not just merchant capitalism, but rather
production capitalism in which imported technical knowledge was applied to the
mass production of commodities (Herm, 1975: 80). We do not know how the logic of costs
operated regarding raw materials, built environment and labor in the cities of Tyre and Sidon where these industries were located. The commodification of labor power may have
been constrained in many ways, by kin networks or state regulation. But it seems reasonable to assume that these
forms of labor control, however they were organized, were influenced by the
competitive logic of the larger Mediterranean political economy.
The other great contribution
that the Phoenicians made to the culture of the Central PMN was the phonetic
alphabet. The Phoenicians seem to have
adapted earlier phonetic alphabets from Egypt and Ugarit and spread their
version all over the Mediterranean. A
phonetic script allows sounds to be represented by symbols. Hieroglyphic
writing represents ideas instead of sounds, so that thousands of characters
must be memorized in order to achieve literacy. Phonetic alphabets can
represent language with only several dozen symbols. This makes reading and
writing possible without having to spend years memorizing characters that
represent ideas. This implementation of
a new technology and its adaptation to everyday life was a huge contribution of
the Phoenicians and was an important part of their contribution to the spread
of market exchange in the Mediterranean.
Semiperipherality seems to facilitate
implementation of new technologies and organizational forms rather than the
original invention of those forms. The genius of both semiperipheral
marchers and semiperipheral capitalist city-states is
in knowing which innovations borrowed from elsewhere to invest in.
Figure 2: Phoenician
war galley c.700 BCE
Dominant powers at sea, the Phoenicians
built their cities on promontories or islands where they could be protected
from land attack. Tyre
was built on a rocky reef that was separated from the the
mainland by open water. It was only conquered after Alexander's army built a
causeway to it (Markoe 2000). Although fairly
autonomous, as mentioned by Diakonoff above, the
Phoenicians were not averse to paying tribute to whichever land-based empire
was currently responsible for the peace. They allied with the Persians in their
war against Greece, thereby gaining the permanent enmity of the Greeks, who characterized
them as “pirates.” The Phoenicians never achieved political unity amongst their
far-flung cities, and one of their split-off groups founded Carthage, to become
the center of a largely independent
trade network in the Western Mediterranean. The Carthaginians long battled with
the Greeks over Sardinia, and in one of their temporary conquests of a Greek
colony they discovered the superior art and craft products of Greek
culture. After this, statues of Greek
gods appeared in the gardens of Carthaginian aristocrats, although when they
were direly pressed by a Greek conqueror from Sardinia, they flooded back to
their old religion, carrying out a massive human sacrifice to try to appease
their old gods.
Figure 3: Greek and Phoenician
colonies in the Mediterranean, 4th century BCE . Source: Griechischen und phönizischen
Kolonien.jpg. Gepgepgep
The rise of Carthage was due to the successful
trading enterprises of its Phoenician founders.
Carthage became the largest city in the Central PMN[17]
in terms of population size (Inoue et al
2015), whereas earlier and later semiperipheral
capitalist city-states were more usually smaller cities specializing in the
carrying trade between the larger capitals of territorial empires. Carthage
began as a typical Phoenician city-state specializing in trade rather than
conquest, but it shifted toward the territorial strategy and this may be why
the city became so large (Ameling 2011). Though
Carthage did develop a sizeable territorial empire, it was not large compared
with earlier or contemporary largest empires. But its combination of trade and
conquest produced an urban population size upsweep. Regarding the issue of capitalist
imperialism, Walter Scheidel’s (xxxx)
essay on Carthage points out that the politics of empire involves strong
contradictions because an expanding empires granting of rights to conquered
territories necessarily reduces the value of the rights of older citizens.
The Greek city-states invented a new
type of polity that combined sea-borne trade with advanced commodity production
in agriculture (Roztoftzeff 1941). The Phoenician
temple-cities were so specialized in trade that they did not usually concern
themselves with revenues or profits from agricultural land, preferring to
import most of their food. Their colonies in the Western Mediterranean, like
the original cities on the Lebanese coast, were set up on promontories, and
oriented toward the sea. The Greek
polies, on the other hand, were associations of landholders. Their uniqueness
was not in their autonomy from imperial rule. This was shared by other autonomous
cities of Western Asia and the Mediterranean.
What made the Greek cities different was the small and inconsequential
nature of the state sector compared with the private sector (Diakonoff, 1982).
Sparta, of course, was a notable
exception.
The polity of most of the Greek city-states
was primarily an association of private landowners rather than itself a major
landowner and economic sector. This, and the high level of commodity
production, was the main feature that made Greek society different.
Unlike the Phoenicians, who, with the
exception of Carthage, only set up ports
of trade, the Greeks had more traditional attitudes toward expansion and
conquest. The purpose of conquest was
booty and the purpose of colonies was to settle citizens who could farm, and
provide food for the mother city. The
cultural disapproval of merchants did not prevent Greeks from engaging in
trade, but it may have partly accounted for the large number of foreigners (metics) who lived in
Athens. While most Greek colonies were established
for the purposes designated above, there were a few that specialized in trade
(Curtin, 1984). And as the cultural
Hellenization of the Central PMN proceeded, many Greeks became long-distance
traders.
Karl Polanyi argued in favor of the existence
of price-setting markets at Athens in his essay entitled “Aristotle Discovers
the Economy” (Polanyi 1957b:87). He
contended that coinage in small denominations indicates a real peoples’ market
in which it had become possible to buy a prepared meal on the street. Greek
generals undertook to provide meals for their troops on the road by encouraging
local provisioners to set up markets ahead of the
army's arrival. Polanyi saw these as indicators that a generalized commodity
economy had emerged within the Greek sphere of influence.
How should the political economy of the early
Central System be described? Within the great empires trade and production for
exchange grew, but two tendencies limited both.
As of old, empires tried to monopolize exchange. This was accomplished
by trying to convert long-distance trade into tribute-taking and local trade
into royal monopolies by which the king
could extract surplus product from a dependent population. But private trading and markets tended to
emerge and to grow. They were often constrained by a shortage of generalized
media of exchange (money). Shortage of
money stimulated and was reinforced by usury (very high interested
loan-making), and by the tendency of emperors and kings to horde money.
In the interstices between the tributary
empires, as along the Lebanese coast, and in other peripheral and semiperipheral areas, market trade was less constrained.
This is where the capitalist city-states emerged, the purest cases being the
autonomous Phoenician cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks, especially at Athens,
demonstrated that even an agricultural state can expand market market exchange and can benefit from it. This trick, the
coexistence of a tributary mode of accumulation with a large measure of
commercialization, was pioneered in semiperipheral
Athens, but was later learned by some of the large commercializing empires
(Sanderson 1995).
The literature on the Italian and
German city-states is vast. Fernand Braudel (1984)
defined a “world economy” as rotating around a single economically central
city. Frederic Lane’s studies of Venice led him to examine the relationship
between state power and profits. He developed the idea of “protection rent” by
which he meant the differential return to capitalists due to having the support
of a state that provided protection at cost or with less overhead (Lane 1979).
The profit difference between this and that of capitalists in competing states
that were less efficient is termed protection rent. This idea is still important in the notion of
“the lean state.”
Giovanni Arrighi
(1984) saw the original hegemony that led the emergence of predominant
capitalist in Europe as due largely to an alliance between Genoa and Portugal.
The Genoese supported Portugal’s effort to circumnavigate Africa as a way of
going around the Venetian monopoly of spices from the East Indies.
Semiperipheral Capitalism in
Other World Regions
It
is important to ask about the existence of
capitalist city-states in other world regions. What happened to
capitalist efforts to gain state power in South Asia, East Asia and South East
Asia? Commercialization was occurring in these regions as it did in the West.
The tributary states were developing commodified
wealth (money), markets, and small commodity production within the tributary
states. The Sung Dynasty in China is famous for its use of paper money and that
vast scale of its steel industry. Melakka, a
city-state in what is now Malaysia, was a semiperipheral
capitalist city-state in the sea-borne carrying trade and allied with China
(Curtin 1984). But there was also a maritime capitalist state in Fujian and
Taiwan that emerged in the 17th century transition from the Ming to
the Qing dynasties (Arrighi 2007:333-4; Hung
2001). Koxinga was the local nickname of the adventurer Zheng Chenggong who took Taiwan from the Dutch and tried, for a
time, to maintain autonomy from the Qing dynasty as a semiperipheral
capitalist city-state. Instead he returned to the mainland in an effort to
depose the Manchus, but failed. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states in the East were not
as densely concentrated as they became in Europe, where the Italian and German
Hanse city-states flourished to create a regional maritime economy that
influenced the emergence of national states. Capitalists were not absent from
the stage in East Asia, but neither did they succeed in conquering the
commanding heights of state power as they did in some of the emerging powerful
states in the West.
[more on
specialized trading cities in East Asia (Osaka) and the story of capitalism in
Japan told by Randy Collins and Stephen Sanderson]
Southeast Asian Trading City-states
Indian and Indonesian commerce made the Indian
Ocean a very busy place from the Roman Empire times on. The Roman Empire had a
huge spice trade from India and Indonesia (Miller 1969; Crone 1987 disputed the
size and importance of this trade, but archaeology has since proved Miller
right). India and Indonesia had huge
voyaging and trading enterprises in their own right. East Africa was explored by Indonesians
during Roman times, and Madagascar was colonized from Borneo and to a lesser
extent other Indonesian islands by 500 CE.
It has been noted that the south Indian coast
is littered with Roman coins and other goods, but none occurs in China (Hansen
2012), and in fact there are almost no Indian imports in China either. Later, however, trade from west to east
became extensive. Medieval records show
that China was importing quite large amounts of frankincense and other
items. Apparently the rise of the
Islamic empires was more important than Rome, in large part because southeast
Asia was so undeveloped in Roman times that it could not serve as a major
throughput zone. However, after 600, the
southeast Asian cities managed a good deal of throughput trade and voyaging,
bringing such goods as “frankincense, storax…,
myrrh,…dragon’s blood [resin], glassware,…ivory, gems,…rosewater and dates” (Heng 2009:32).
The first
known city-state in the region was called Funan in
modern Chinese, representing what was originally probably the Khmer word Phnom,
as in Phnom Penh. This kingdom was more
or less the modern Khmer area: Cambodia and far south Vietnam. It was evidently Khmer-speaking, and had ties
with India, beginning the heavy influx of Indian high culture to the area. It flourished ca. 100-600 CE. Meanwhile, China was conquering northern
Vietnam, bringing its own influences.
This was the beginning of the cultural mix that led to the region being
called “Indo-China.” The city Oc Eo was a trading city in the
southern area of Funan, and probably a key trading
city. The whole kingdom seems to have
depended on rice agriculture, but also on the India-China trade and on
Southeast Asian trade with both. Almost
completely unknown city-states south of it are barely recorded in Chinese
records from China’s time of disunion in the 3rd-7th
centuries.
Later, there were countless local trade-based
states and city-states, mostly in the area from southernmost Vietnam and
Cambodia through Malaya to Sumatera and Java, with outliers (late, mostly) in
the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Moluccas. There were similar city-states (mostly much
earlier) in south India.
Interestingly, East Asia never had trade-based
city-states. The nearest approach was
the Ryukyu kingdom with its capital at Naha, but even the Ryukyus
were agrarian, producing a wide variety of foodstuffs. The Chinese world always privileged
agriculture over trade. The lowest
farmer was theoretically superior to the highest merchant, though in reality
“money talked.” Chinese and
China-influenced East Asian polities were all agrarian, based on land rents (in
the broad sense, including taxes) from large hinterlands.
Shadowy
references to “polities” (small city-states, quasi-independent cities, or local
tribal groups) exist from the 600s, with Chinese names like Holotan,
Pota, Pohuang, Holing and Shepo assigned to them (Heng
2009:23-5). More identifiable is Malayu, which at least has its own name—it developed into Srivijaya. The
general Chinese term for the region, or part of it, was kunlun, confusingly the same as
the name of a mountain range in central Asia.
Srivijaya flourished from the 7th to the 13th
centuries and included Sumatera, much of Java, and the coasts of Malaya. Srivijaya was an
expansion of the Palembang city-state in the 600s or thereabouts. It lasted, with migration of the capital to Malayu-Jambi, till around 1300, and even after that
Palembang and Malayu-Jambi survived as trading
cities. It seems to have been a sort of
Venice of Indonesia: holding maritime lands but basically a trading urban
complex (see also Wilkinson 2015).
At its peak it conquered the coastal areas of
most of today’s Indonesia, and it is thus hailed as an ancestor of
Indonesia. It developed and spread the
Malay language. It was trade-based and
centered on port cities, especially Jambi (the early capital) and Palembang
(later capital, and major city) on the southern east coast of Sumatera across
from (and south of) modern Singapore.
The capital later reverted to Jambi (Malayu). This was a very powerful empire and a major
player in world trade. It had very
extensive trade connections with the Tang and Song Dynasties. (It became Sanfoqi
in modern Chinese, reflecting a medieval pronunciation something like Samfokay.) In spite
of its theoretically large landholdings it qualifies as a trade-based
city-state empire, the way Venice in the 15-17th centuries
does. Its success had much to do with
its lack of coherence and monolithic rule; it could adapt, contract or expand,
change, delegate local authority to local rulers, and otherwise live an
amoeboid life (Lieberman 2009:779). Even
after it fell, Malayu-Jambi continued as an important
trade city.
Contemporary was Mataram,
in Java, but it was land-based and a more normal (for the time) agrarian
state. It was replaced by Majapahit, based in Java, which lasted around 1293-1600 and
included basically the modern Indonesia (less New Guinea but including also at
least some influence over Malaya and neighboring areas of Thailand, and also up
into the Philippines). Its last
dwindling power fell to Europeans. Its
successor state, Mataram (the second; fl. 1580-1670),
was like its predecessor of the same name in being a land-based state centered
on interior Java.
Major Malayan ports including Tambralingga, Ligor, Langkasuka, Kelantan, Trengganu,
Pahang, and Temasik (now Singapore) were
theoretically under Srivijaya, at least most of the
time (see map, Heng 2009:105). Some of these probably spoke Mon-Khmer
languages rather than Malay. They must
have operated fairly independently most of the time, given the difficulties of
shipping. On the other hand, we know
from records and wrecks that shipping was incredibly well-developed, both
technologically and economically, in those centuries. It was very far ahead of European shipping in
terms of marine technology, with fore-and-aft rigging, stern rudders,
watertight compartments, outriggers, efficient rigging management, possibly the
compass, and other advanced things not known in the west. The extent of trade is shown by the fact that
a local outbreak of violence in Guangzhou in the 9th century led to
the deaths of thousands of traders from an “Arab” trading settlement thought to
number 200,000 people; most were local Chinese or southeast Asians, but there
were indeed very large numbers of Arabs and Persians.
Later
independent city-states included Singhapura
(Singapore) and Melaka (fl. 1377-1511, then a Portuguese colony, then Dutch,
then English).
Marco Polo came home to Italy by the sea route,
and considered it a routine trip; Buddhist monks had left earlier records,
showing that travel was very difficult in the early 7th century but
had become routine and fairly safe by the 8th.
Meanwhile,
many independent city-states and river-basin statelets
flourished in Malaya and elsewhere.
Melaka (Malacca) in particular rose around 1400 and lasts to this day,
after various conquests and wars. It is
now basically a tourist city. When
co-author E.N. Anderson was there in 1971 it was a fascinating town—a sleepy
backwater that preserved the glorious architecture of the 16th-19th
centuries. It was a real time-warp.
The other
states of West Malaysia are also based on old trade centers: Johore, Kelantan, Trengganu,
Pahang, Perak, Perlis, Kedah. The only
exceptions (of sorts) are Penang, developed by the British, and Negri Sembilan, populated by relatively recent immigrants
from Sumatera—but they were following trade routes. In Indonesia, Aceh, now a terrible thorn in Indoesia’s side because of its Islamic extremism and
constant rebelliousness, was a major trade center, being the first port that
Arab and Indian traders would hit when they sailed east. Aceh was a major player in Southeast Asian
politics for centuries, and without its extreme brand of Islam might have been
the great modernizing force in the islands.
(Instead, Minangkabau came nearest to having that distinction.) Aceh’s resistance to the Dutch was one of
the most incredible stories in the annals of colonialism; total unity, superb
guerrilla competence, dauntless courage, incredible ability to maneuver
politically, and undying hatred of outside interference kept it independent
during a 25-year war that was one of the costliest and bloodiest ever faced by
the Netherlands. The Dutch were fought
to a draw; they occupied Aceh but never managed to govern the place
effectively. The great Dutch Islamist Snouck Hurgronje (1906) wrote a
book at the time about Aceh and the war; it is fascinating because Hurgronje could not help doing a thorough job and showing a
grudging admiration for Aceh courage, but at the same time his pen literally
dripped hate because of what the Acehnese had done to his country and some of
his friends. This fascinating read in
totally UN-objective history has just been issued in a new version (2009-10).
Surabaya, Banda, Jakarta, and other major
coastal cities of western Indonesia all have trading heritages. The Riau-Lingga
islands, now inconsequential, were a center of activity for a time, because of
their centrality on trade routes. In the
Philippines, Manila developed as a center of Chinese trade, and had hundreds or
thousands of Chinese traders when the Spanish took the islands in 1571.
The scope
of trade in these cities was incredible.
They sent countless vast ships around the islands, and carried on active
trade in huge ships and flotillas with India, China, and even farther
afield. Arab and Indian traders swarmed
to them. Chinese began to settle in the
“Nanyang” (“Southern Ocean,” i.e. the areas bordering
the South China Sea and Indonesian waters) in the Song Dynasty or earlier, and
this turned to a flood in Ming, following the great fleets led by Zheng
He. Settlements of thousands of Chinese
were in the area by 1600, and continued to grow and thrive. Bangkok is probably largely Chinese by
descent, and tens of millions of people of Chinese descent live in Vietnam,
Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. In
Indonesia the Chinese tended to marry into the local societies, the resulting
population being the Peranakan (“those who have
become children [of the land]”).
(First-generation Chinese were called Totok,
in contrast.)
The local states were, however, mainly involved
in exporting local luxury items.
Especially important were many types of plant gum and wood used for
incense: sandalwood, gharuwood, Barus
camphor (named for the port of Barus in western
Sumatera), eaglewood, aloeswood, etc. Other items included tin (generally mined by
Chinese immigrants), rhinoceros horn, local ivory, gems (including rubies and
sapphires from Burma—late, at least), hornbill casques,
animal pelts, and, later at least, edible birds’ nests (from Collocalia swiftlets), sea cucumbers, specialty fish, and other foods
(Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011). In return, there was an enormous import of
silks and porcelain from China, and all sorts of fabrics from India, along with
some metal goods. Fabrics were the great
luxury and art form in island southeast Asia, and imported fabrics were the
symbols of wealth. (This is recognized
in the wry Malay proverb on poverty:
“Even though ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their
tails.”) China’s rather inferior, but
cheap, cast iron was popular (Heng 2009:106). So were its copper coins. Porcelain from China, Thailand, and Vietnam
flowed everywhere in the region, especially in the 14-16th
centuries. The extent of this trade has
been revealed only recently, as shipwrecks have been found; it is now known
that ships loaded with many tons of ceramics were regular on the seas of the
area. Even the east African coast has
turned up many early Ming sherds.
The Ming Dynasty pulled steadily back on trade
after 1420, but could not stop it. The
fall of Ming and the chaos from 1630 to 1644 (and even after) slowed trade, but
it revived in the 18th century.
However, by then, Europeans were out-competing local people.
The common thread of all these city-states and
local empires is that they were the antithesis of Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam or
London. They never innovated or
developed much economically. Majapahit and presumably
Srivijaya were amazing cultural centers; the last
faint gasps of Majapahit glory, in Jogyakarta and Surakarta, were as aesthetically brilliant
as Venice in its glory. But this did not
translate into new science or technology.
Why did the Southeast Asian city-states and thalassocra tic empires not anticipate Venice, Genoa, and
Amsterdam, and invent capitalism? Early
European observers of the Indonesian city-states had no doubts. Marsden (1966, orig. ca. 1800) and Raffles
(1965, orig. ca. 1820) both have long, thoughtful, well-supported analyses of
why southeast Asia was behind the times, and they both concluded that the
problem was the heavy-handed, top-down control by kings and bureaucrats. This had also stifled China’s trade. The rulers in southeast Asia (like the
emperors of China) were more interested in maximizing their take of wealth by
gouging the merchants, and in maintaining their power by keeping merchants and
other independent souls down. Of course one
might argue that European monarchs tried this too, and sometimes
succeeded. As far as the southeast Asian
cities were concerned, the real difference, the “story behind the story,” lies
in the nature of the trade: luxuries
from the rainforest, as opposed to state-of-the-art manufactured goods. They imported everything requiring much
knowledge and skill. China, then as now,
could and did beat out everyone else at producing consumer goods cheaply and
efficiently.
The
European city-states generally were in the position that China occupied in
Asia: trading manufactured goods for raw materials from the periphery. Value-added always wins the game. Anybody can farm, and anyone with a
rainforest can extract precious woods and gums, but only a developed state with
a major institutional, educational, and physical infrastructure can indulge in
cheap mass production of manufactured goods.
It will thus have an advantage.
The more value added, other things being equal, the more the
advantage. The southeast Asian
city-states drew on tributary states and undeveloped hinterlands for forest
products. They were at the very bottom
of the value-added chain.
The costs
of being a primary-products exporter are serious. It makes sense for the elites to keep the
people as backward, ignorant, and divided as possible. This makes them easy to exploit, and prevents
them from getting ideas—such as progress, or freedom, or rebellion. The “resource curse” is well known in modern
societies, and it was, if anything, worse a thousand years ago, when local
rulers had a freer hand and primary production was really primitive
technologically in southeast Asia. (It
was already sophisticated in China by that time.) The only advantage the ordinary poor people
had a thousand years ago was that the implements of repression were not so
developed as now, and the elites depended on a fair number of educated and
fairly free-to-act courtiers, clerks, and local headmen as well as on a large
minimum-wage labor pool. They thus could
not indulge in genocide, mass political murders, and other traits of the modern
primary-production state. (Some states
outside Southeast Asia tried, and quickly fell.
Southeast Asia, always tolerant and imbued with local and Buddhist
values, did not try, until postcolonial regimes imitated their former
masters.)
Conversely,
China, though much less free than post-Enlightenment Europe, had neither the
will nor the means to repress education and educated people. The empire depended on having a numerically
huge number of educated people, and did not have the tax revenues to create a
true autocracy—though that meant that it also did not have enough tax revenues
to hire many of the educated, or to do much to develop. In any case, China remained the metropole, and the Southeast Asian city-states were
classically peripheralized, like the east Baltic and
Black Sea cities in medieval and Renaissance Europe.
The evolution of economic institutions and the
transition from City-States to a World State
A
Polanyian perspective on the emergence of
capitalism depicts waves of deepening of commodification interspersed by
periods of decommofication. No human society has ever commodified
everything. The moral and political orders shelter some aspects of life from
market forces and privatization. But the history of the modern world-system has
seen waves of commodification that correspond with changes in the nature of
political power and the logics of exploitation and domination. The issue of when capitalism became the
predominant mode of accumulation is still contentious, but the notion of waves
of expansion and deepening reduces this to quibbles about when to call a whole
world-system capitalist. Commodification
expanded and deepened from the Stone Age on, and the modern Europe-centered
system has become increasingly capitalist in waves of commodification and decommodification since the 13th century
CE. These waves of capitalism
corresponded to the increasing size of the hegemonic core state, but also to
changes in the structure of interpolity
relations. The old form of tributary
empire that involved conquering adjacent territory and extracting tribute and
taxes became supplanted by the emergence of thallasocratic
colonial empires in which a “mother country” establish sovereignty over distant
colonies in order to facilitate competitive commodity production and
profit-making. Recall that colonial empires were pioneered by both Phoenician
and Greek city-states, so the modern colonial empires were replicating a
strategy that emerged in the Bronze Age, but was interstitial between the
tributary empires (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Evolution of forms of imperialism
Waves of decolonization since the late 18th
century have now transformed the system of colonial empires in to a system of
neocolonialism in which global power is exercised through International
Governmental Organizations, financial exchanges and property arrangements that
allow actors in rich and powerful countries to exploit, if not dominate,
non-core peoples. This demise of the
colonial empires creates a single global polity of formally sovereign
nation-states and a system in which economic power is stronger than it has ever
been at the level of a whole world-system. Such a system is ripe for the
emergence of a true world state, though that has not happened yet and may not
happen soon because the interstate system is highly institutionalized.
Figure
5 depicts Giovanni Arrighi’s schematic representation
of the evolution of economic and political institutions since the rise of the
modern world-system. He sees a transition from city-states (recall his analysis
of the key role of Genoa in the formation of the Europe-centered system) to
nation-states and then to an eventual future world state. He also notes an
oscillation in the forms of empire that may be analogous to earlier
oscillations between horizontal networks and more corporate forms of
organization noted by archaeologists, anthropologists, political scientists and
world historians (e.g. Blanton, Ekholm and Friedman,
and Wilkinson). And Arrighi’s
scheme also shows the deepening of commodification by the penetration of
regulation into the political economy with the waves of hegemonic rise and
fall.
Figure 5: Arrighi’s
evolutionary scheme of the deepening of commodification and forms of political
globalization. Source: Arrighi (2006: 206)
Arrighi’s scheme raises new
questions that are beyond our current focus on the importance of semiperipheral capitalist city-states, but it shows the
general direction which we intend to go in our analysis of the evolution of
institutions. We will eventually want to put our studies of semiperipheral
capitalist city-states in to a larger comparative work that examines
sociocultural evolution since the Paleolithic Age.
Testable hypotheses by the EmpCit project on the growth and collapse of empires and
cities since 4000 BCE are as follows:
(1 )cycles
of tributary empire strength and weakness interspersed with periods in which
there are more and larger capitalist city-states and capitalist empires.
(2)
Capitalist city-state expansion of trade networks makes it possible to
construct larger empires in the next round by strengthening transportation
networks and encouraging the production of surpluses for exchange.
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