East Asian World Revolutions?
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Manjing Gao
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside
The White Lotus Society
Draft v. 11/17/19 8586 words
To be presented at the annual conference of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, November 21-24, 2019
* Thanks to Hiroko Inoue and E.N. Anderson for help with dating the expansion of the East Asian system.
This is IROWS Working Paper #131 available at http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows131/irows131.htm
Abstract: The idea of “world revolutions” comes from studies of the Europe-centered (“modern”) world-system, referring to periods in which protests, rebellions and revolutions broke out in the same decades in different parts of the system. We propose to evaluate the world revolution hypothesis as it may have operated in the East Asian world-system since the Bronze Age. We will examine the timing of protest and rebellion events to see if they cluster in time and across space. We consider economic and political contexts, synchronies of rebellions, and connections among those that rebelled and among those that sought to repress or ameliorate the rebellions. And we will eventually quantitatively test hypotheses about the interactions among within-state and between state conflicts, the role of rebellions in dynastic cycles and the relationships between rebellions and changes in the scale of polities and cities in the East Asian world-system.
The Comparative Evolutionary World-Systems Perspective
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) reconfigured the world-system perspective that emerged to study the modern Europe-centered system by making some of the theoretical concepts more flexible. This enabled comparisons between spatially small world-systems with medium-sized regional systems and the now-global world-system of today. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) defined world-systems as systemic interaction networks that link settlements[1] and polities[2] in reciprocal interaction networks that condition the reproduction and change of local social structures.[3] The word “world” here refers to the world of systemic interactions (exchange, warfare, diplomacy, communication, intermarriage, etc.) that reproduce the social structures and institutions of human groups. In this sense “worlds” were small when transportation and communication technologies imposed a tyranny of distance that constrained the consequences of interaction to extend relatively short distances. These were the small social worlds in which people lived (see also Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998 and Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2017).
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) noted that different kinds of systemic interaction often have different spatial scales. Bulk goods (food) networks (BGNs) were usually smaller than political/military networks (PMNs) in which independent polities were making war and security alliances with one another. And, these political/military networks were smaller than prestige goods trade networks (PGNs) in which goods that were very valuable relative to their weight were traded in down-the-line exchange networks[4] or carried by long-distance traders. The spatial bounding of world-systems must choose a focal locale and then use the principal of “fall-off” to determine the distances from that point to the outer edge of the interaction system (Renfrew 1975, 1977). This is usually at most two or three indirect (non-contiguous) links in small world-systems. Systemic networks in which individual settlements are linked with other settlements typically cross the borders between independent polities (so they are “international.”)
Once one has spatially bounded the interaction networks starting from a focal settlement, then the issue of core/periphery relations can be examined. The modern core/periphery hierarchy is often discussed in terms of the Global North and the Global South. The Global South is composed of small, poor and relatively powerless peripheral countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and larger semiperipheral countries (i.e. Mexico, Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Russia), or smaller countries at middle levels of economic development (i.e. Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, South Africa) that are in the present-day semiperiphery. The contemporary core is composed of most of the national societies in Europe and North America, but also Japan and Australia. But core/periphery relations may also be studied in earlier world-systems.[5] Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) distinguish between “core/periphery differentiation,” which exists when polities with different degrees of population density[6] systemically interact with one another, and “core/periphery hierarchy” which exists when some polities exploit and dominate other polities. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 5) also propose that the phenomenon of “semiperipheral develop” is an important cause of sociocultural evolution[7] in which polities in semiperipheral positions often are the agents of increases in the scale and complexity of world-systems.[8] Notably, social movements have often emerged from the non-core.
Social Movements in the Long Run
We contend that social movements have been important causes of social change since the Stone Age. Most scholars who study social movements[9] contend that they are a modern phenomenon that emerged in the context of the European Enlightenment. The main idea used to justify not studying premodern social movements is the claim that premodern or primitive movements were “reactive, backward and parochial”, whereas modern movements are “proactive” (e.g Hobsbawm 1957). This is usually conflated with distinctions between those movements that are deemed to be “functional” because they involve one or another version of secular humanist ideology as distinct from those that employ ideas based on religion.[10] “Proactive” movements are deemed to be rational efforts to engage and modify political institutions, especially states, whereas reactive movements are more expressive and concerned with ideologically inspired identities. Ho-Fung Hung’s (2011: Introduction) careful and insightful study of protests during the mid-Qing dynasty in China provides a useful overview of the teleological distinction between modern and pre-modern social movements from Marx and Weber and including the work of many of the leading lights in the sociological social movement literature. Charles Tilly’s studies of the structural roots of contentious behavior in the West are very valuable, but Tilly excuses ignoring the non-West and premodern social movements based on the distinction between reactive vs. proactive movements (Tilly and Wood 2013). The problem here is that many Western and recent social movements are reactive in the sense that they do not rationally propose institutional solutions to problems, and many non-Western and premodern movements engaged with states and proposed changes in state institutions. So, this distinction as applied to earlier periods and other world regions, is specious. It is a poor excuse for ignoring the phenomena of collective behavior and social movements in non-Western and premodern world history and prehistory.
The East Asian World-System
The unit of analysis for our proposed study is the East Asian world-system. We use the approach developed by David Wilkinson (1987, 1999a, 1999b) for estimating the spatio-temporal boundaries of this systemic interaction network. Wilkinson focusses mainly on what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) call the political-military network (PMN), an international system of allying and fighting states. The geopolitics of security is a systemic feature of all world-systems, but we also wish to consider the possibility that prestige goods exchange (PGN) may have constituted a systemic link between East Asia and the West prior to the time that the two regions became durably linked by political/military interaction during the 19th century (the Opium Wars). Figure 1 is a diagram that portrays what we think happened regarding the waves of expansions and contraction of what Wilkinson calls Central Civilization[11] and the East Asian system of states since the emergence of cities and states in each region.
Figure 1: The Expanding East Asian and Central Systems Since the Bronze Age
Figure 1 displays a stylized representation of the expansions and interconnections between the Eastern and Western world-systems. The Central System was formed out of a merger between two relatively autochthonous, but adjacent, state systems that emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt. And the East Asian system emerged in the valley of the Yellow River (Huang He) and then became connected with and adjacent state system in the Yangtze River Valley. Both systems had two points of origin and a merger between the states and cities of two river valleys. Because the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers are less distant from one another than are Mesopotamia and Egypt the merger occurred more quickly. The East Asian and Central systems are also different regarding what happened subsequently. They both expanded but the center of the East Asian system did not move much from its area of origin while the center of the Central system migrated further and further West from Western Asia/North Africa to Europe to North America. This study focusses mainly on the hypothesis of world revolutions in East Asia but eventually we will want to compare what we find with research on the world revolutions of the Central System.
The expansion of the East Asian political-military network started with the emergence of cities and states in the Yellow River valley. The rise and fall of Chinese dynasties produced larger and larger polities which met and incorporated polities in the Yangtze and Pearl River Valleys, Central Asia, North Asia, Korea, Japan, Mainland Southeast Asia and Island South East Asia. So, the system we are studying kept getting larger before it was eventually incorporated into the expanding Central System in the 19th century CE.
The East Asian world-system in which states and cities first emerged in the Yellow River Valley expanded in a series of waves in which prestige goods exchange, political-military interaction and bulk goods exchange expanded. This is the spatio-temporal unit of analysis that we are studying.[12] In Table 1 we proposed estimated years in which these different kinds of spatial interaction became systemic in the sense that the linked polities had become dependent on the interactions for social reproduction. These estimates are based on our reading of the histories of trade and geopolitical interaction. Generally, a region has been already considering and making efforts to manipulate the geopolitical actions of foreigners prior to actual conquest of that region. David Wilkinson’s (1999: 502) definition of what we call the political-military network is as follows: “ …(a historically-autonomous political-military-diplomatic transactional network, not part of a larger such network.”
|
Connections from the Yellow River (Huang He) to: |
Prestige Goods and Communications Network |
Political-Military Network |
Bulk Goods Network |
|
Yangtze River Valley |
1100 BCE* |
600 CE* |
|
|
Pearl River Valley (Zhu Jiang) |
800 BCE* |
300 BCE# |
800 CE# |
|
Central and North Asia |
1000 BCE* |
325 BCE#^[15] |
1000 CE* |
|
Korea |
1000 BCE* |
400 BCE#[16] |
1200 CE* |
|
Japan[17] |
500 BCE* |
400 CE* |
1400 CE* |
|
Mainland Southeast Asia |
200 CE* |
200 BCE#[18] |
1100 CE* |
|
Island Southeast Asia[19] |
600 CE* |
1300 CE* |
1200 CE*[20] |
|
Tibet |
100 CE |
600 CE *[21] |
1900 CE |
|
South Asia |
600 CE* |
1300 CE*[22] |
1900 CE* |
|
Central System |
200 BCE*[23] |
19th century CE^ |
20th century CE* |
Table 1: Connections of the interaction networks of the East Asian World-System
* = merger; # = engulfed and ^ = engulfed by.
Interaction connections can be non-systemic or systemic. In Table 1 the dates indicate when substantial interaction has emerged, but it may not yet be system in the case of prestige goods exchange and communications. On the other hand, Political-Military interaction (the highlighted column in Table 1) is always systemic. The years chosen indicate what David Wilkinson calls “durable” connections. In most cases there were previous episodic connections, but these are not deemed to have risen to the high bar of systemic connectedness. There were also different kinds of connection. Following Wilkinson, we distinguish between mergers, in which two different systems come together based on interaction at the edges, versus engulfment in which one system conquers all or a large part of another. And there are two kinds of engulfment: getting engulfed by another system or engulfing another system. In Table 1 we use these symbols to distinguish between these different kinds of connection: * = merger; # = engulfed and ^ = engulfed by.
Our estimates in Table 1 allow one degree of separation, If China and Korea were interacting geopolitically, and Korea and Japan were interacting geopolitically we include Japan in the East Asian state system. South Asia and East Asia became connected through Mainland Southeast Asia indirectly at the point at which there were systemic connections between Mainland Southeast Asia, China and South Asia. All the regions in Table 1 were incorporated by either colonialism or clientelism into the modern world-system in the 18th and 19th centuries of the Common Era. We will include the Asian regions, including South Asian in the modern system after 1830 CE.
Regarding core/periphery relations in the early East Asian system (500 BCE) Wilkinson (1999: 517) quotes Eberhard “The Far Eastern system remained polycultural: ‘there was a very small area in which only Chinese lived, and a large area surrounding it [but within the "Chinese' states] that was. occupied by non-Chinese," Liao hunters, Yao hunters, Yueh sailors, Tai rice growers, Tibetan sheep breeders, Turkish horse-breeders, Mongol cattle-breeders, Tungus pig-breeders’ (Eberhard, 1967, 18-22).”
Regarding states and interstate systems in Southeast Asia around 550 CE, Wilkinson (1999:551) says: “In the second half of this century the Funanese vassal kingdom of Chenla, (proto Cambodia) rebelled and began the conquest of Funan. (Coedes, 61, 65-68.) David Chandler (1996: 26-27) doubts the might, centralization, extent and durability of Chenla, which he sees, following Claude Jacques, as a collection of small entities only sometimes led by one leader. This is in a sense old news, since evidently the same could be said of "China" at most moments after its inception, and a fortiori of the steppe khaganates and other semi-peripheral formations. But the duration of unity is worth problematizing in principle at the "state" level, as well as at the system level, despite the practical problems that will normally preclude extensive analysis of both problematic levels
simultaneously.”
The World Revolution Hypothesis
In the modern world-system there has been a spiral of interaction between world revolutions and the evolution of global governance. World revolutions are periods in world history in which many rebellions break out across the world- system, often unconnected with one another, but known, and responded to, by imperial authorities. Since the Protestant Reformation in Europe
such constellations of rebellions and social movements have played an important role in the evolution of global governance in the Europe-centered system because the powers that could best handle collective behavior challenges were the ones who succeeded in competition with challenging elites. It is possible that similar phenomena existed in other prehistorical and historical world-systems, such as East Asia. Oscillations in the expansion of trade networks, the rise and fall of chiefdoms, states and empires, and increasing synchronization of trade and political cycles may have been related to waves of social unrest that occurred in the same time periods among polities that were interacting with one another (world revolutions). Indeed, something of this kind has been suggested by Ravi Palat (2018):
Asian social movements are an especially interesting topic because the Taiping Rebellion, the first Indian War of Independence (the Sepoy Mutiny), the religious disturbances in the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire all occurred roughly around the same time and can be linked to the reversal of the flows of gold and silver between Asia and Europe and its consequences to the regional linkages within Asian empires.
The idea of “world
revolution” is a broad notion that encompasses all kinds of acts of resistance
to hierarchy, regardless of whether they are coordinated with one another, but
that occur relatively close to one another in time. Usually the idea of
revolution is conceptualized on a national scale as an overthrow of a regime
and the reorganization of social relations within a national society. Several
changes are required in order to use the revolution concept at the world-system
level. In the modern (Europe-centered) world-system there is a global polity, a
world order, or what Immanuel Wallerstein[i] calls the “geoculture.” World
orders are those normative and institutional features that are taken for
granted in large-scale cooperation, competition and conflict. The world polity,
and its context in the world economy, is the arena of contestation within which
world revolutions have occurred and that world revolutions have restructured.
Baidu Peasant Uprising Atlas https://baike.baidu.com/pic/
Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) focused on those constellations of local, regional, national and transnational rebellions and revolutions that have had long-term consequences for changing the world orders of the modern system. The designation of world revolutions in the Europe-centered system has employed years that symbolize the totemic events that indicate the nature of the complex events that are world revolutions. For the modern world-system the world revolutions after the Protestant Reformation have been symbolized by the years 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968 and 1989.[24] Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein (1989) analyzed the world revolutions of 1848, 1917, 1968 and 1989. They observed that the demands put forth in a world revolution did not usually become institutionalized until a later consolidating revolt had occurred. The revolutionaries appeared to have lost in the failure of their most radical demands, but enlightened conservatives who were trying to manage subsequent hegemony ended up incorporating some of the reforms that were earlier radical demands into the current world order to cool out resistance from below. It is important to tease out the differences as well as the similarities among the world revolutions. Both the contexts and the actors have changed from one world revolution to the next.[25]
Before local and regional social movements began communicating and aiding one another they were indirectly linked through the hierarchical structures of the world-system – mainly the colonial empires of the core powers. Though local rebels in the far-flung colonies of the British Empire did not usually know about one another, the Home Office knew when local rebellions broke out and prepared plans and policies to accommodate or repress them. Thus were the rebellions indirectly connected with one another through the hierarchical institutions of the system.
This view of the modern world-system as constituting an arena of economic and political struggle over the past several centuries includes the idea that global civil society has existed all along (Kaldor 2003). Global civil society includes all the actors who consciously participate in world politics. In the past of the Europe-centered system global civil society was mainly composed of statesmen, military leaders, religious leaders, scientists, financiers, international merchants, cosmopolitan literary figures[26] and the owners and top managers of chartered companies such as the Dutch and British East India Companies. This rather small group already saw the global arena of political, economic, military and ideological struggle as their arena of contestation. Transnational political organizations and elite movements have existed in the Western system at least since the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, these can be thought of as global political parties (Chase-Dunn and Reese 2011). The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was an explicitly internationalist organization formed to advance the counter-reformation Movements from below have been increasingly transnational since the world revolution of 1789. Politics in the modern system can be analyzed as contention between a left and right, both influencing the center and these all co-evolving (Nagy 2017).
World Revolutions in the East Asian System?
East Asia saw periodic eruptions of popular heterodox religious movements and peasant rebellions. (Anderson 2019). Owen Lattimore’s (1940:531) description of the Chinese dynastic cycle serves as a stylized depiction that includes these rebellions.
Although the social outlook of the Chinese is notable for the small honor it pays to war, and although their social system does not give the soldier a high position, every Chinese dynasty has risen out of a period war, and usually a long period. Peasant rebellions have been as recurrent as barbarian invasions. Frequently the two kinds of war have been simultaneous; both have usually been accompanied by famine and devastation, and peace has never been restored without savage repression. The brief chronicle of a Chinese dynasty is very simple: a Chinese general or a barbarian conqueror establishes a peace which is usually a peace of exhaustion. There follows a period of gradually increasing prosperity as land is brought back under cultivation, and this passes into a period of apparently unchanging stability. Gradually, however, weak administration and corrupt government choke the flow of trade and taxes. Discontent and poverty spread. The last emperor of the dynasty is often vicious and always weak -- as weak as the founder of the dynasty was ruthless. The great fight each other for power, and the poor turn against all government. The dynasty ends, and after an interval another begins, exactly as the last began, and runs the same course.
While this model does not apply equally well to all the early and late dynasties and it contains tropes that the Chinese continue to believe about themselves (that they are relatively peaceful) the description is reminiscent of Ibn Khaldun’s model of the foxes and wolves in the dynastic cycles he studied and of the Turchin and Nefadov (2009) model of the “secular cycle.” What remains is to add world-system level variables including the hypothesis of world revolutions.[27]
It was in a period of high
peasant landlessness and poverty during the Han dynasty that large numbers of
poor people were drawn to worship the Queen Mother of the West who grew
longevity peaches that, once eaten, made people immortal (Hill 2015). The Queen
Mother lived in a mythical palace on a mountain somewhere in the West. This
idea seems to have been present as early as the Shang Dynasty, but recurrent
eruptions of the worship of the Queen Mother corresponded with periods in which
there were large numbers of landless peasants. The attraction of stressed
masses to “pie in the sky when you die” reoccurs in world history. The White
Lotus movement was another heterodox popular movement that first emerged during
11th century CE and became powerful during the Yuan dynasty. Ming
dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang was an adept. It had ideological elements such as
gender equality, vegetarianism and egalitarianism that reappeared in the gigantic
Taiping Rebellion in the middle of the 19th century (Michael 1966; Spence
1996). The Taiping rebellion was part of an interesting confluence in which the
East Asian dynastic cycle was becoming entwined with the world revolutions of
the West. The Taiping founder and leader, Hong Xiuquan, read
a pamphlet about God and Jesus that a Christian missionary from Tennessee had
had translated into Chinese. After failing the imperial examination Hong had a
dream in which it was revealed to him that he was Jesus’s brother. The movement
began peacefully as a ritual and vegetarian dinner society, but when local
authorities were threatened and engaged in repression it mushroomed into a
military organization that conquered and held Nanjing for several years. As many
as thirty million people died as the Qing dynasty fought for decades to
extinguish this movement.
Baidu Peasant Uprising Atlas https://baike.baidu.com/pic/
Ho-Fung Hung (2011) found that proactive movements that confronted local authorities and engaged with the imperial center, often led by local gentry, emerged in waves during the Qing dynasty. He contends that there was a cycle in which proactive movements and reactive movements oscillated during the mid-Qing dynasty. He argues that the Western emergence of proactive movements focusing on popular sovereignty (rather than filial loyalty) was unidirectional, leading to the establishment of parliamentary democracies in the West. This is somewhat of an oversimplification of the contentious nature of the emergence of “centrist liberalism” in the West (Wallerstein 2011). The world history of the first half of 20th century (two world wars, Bolshevism and Fascism) surely contradicts the idea of a smooth transition to capitalist democracy in which rational proactive movements fine-tuned the ability of human institutions to meet the needs of the people. Identity movements, religious fundamentalism and populist nationalism in the 21st century strongly suggest that the modern world-system has not risen above reactive social movements. But Hung is probably right that the different ideological constructions (filial piety vs. popular sovereignty) as well as different degrees of importance of millenarianism (present but less important in Asia) have been responsible for the somewhat different trajectories of politics and economics in the East and the West.
We plan to use the spatio-temporal chronograph of the expansion of the East Asian system presented in Table 1 to look for the existence of world revolutions in East Asia. This will involve coding social unrest events – rebellions, revolutions, civil wars, coups, riots, protests and demonstrations – what Charles Tilly and Sydney Tarrow (2015) call contentious events. In principle we would like to include both small and large events. In practice we know that the recording of historical contentious events is incomplete. When a dynasty is strong and organized records are more likely to be systematically kept. When there is chaos or only small-scale polities the occlusions are greater. This introduces measurement error in the record of contentious events that is related to one of the things we are also studying -- the rise and fall of dynasties. This source of error needs to be kept in mind when we are interpreting findings. In principle we would like to know about all the contentious events in all the areas we are studying as shown in Table 1. That is a high bar that we know we cannot attain, especially for the earlier periods. We are also interested in interpolity warfare and interstate conflicts and are coding that separately for East Asia so that we can examine its relationship with contentious events (Cioffi and Lai 1995, 2001; Chase-Dunn et al 2018). These forms of conflict often overlap, but for the purposes our study we will try to separate them.
We will code the timing and location of all the contentious events we can find out about from the Shang dynasty until the early 19th century of the Qing dynasty in China, Central and North Asia, Korea, Japan and mainland and island Southeast Asia. Here is our coding scheme for contentious events:
1- Coup A (successful)
2- Coup B (unsuccessful)
3- Secession struggle
4- Rebellion A- internal- against a state of which one is a part
5- Rebellion B- against an external state that has conquered one’s region.
6- Succession Struggle
7- Revolution
8- Civil War
9- Bandits
10- Labor Strikes
Each event may have more than one of these scores.
Regarding chronology, there is much more scholarly consensus regarding calendar years for Bronze Age China than there is for other world regions we have studied but there are still big disputes among scholars regarding calendar years of events in the Bronze Age (Wilkinson 1999:508; Keightley 1978).
After we have compiled this data set we will be able to see how contentious events are distributed across space and time. The idea of world revolutions suggests clustering of contentious events in time and in different locations. But, as has been the case for the Europe-centered system, the events may not break out in all regions of the system. The spatial distribution of contentious events in the Europe-centered system has varied from world revolution to world revolution, and this may also turn out to be the case in the East Asian system.
Our first foray into the coding of East Asian contentious events is using lists of rebellions that we find in English and Japanese Wikipedia and the Baidu Peasant Uprising Atlas.[28] We also searching for studies like that of Ho-Fung Hung’s (2011) that have used archival evidence to code protest events.
David Zhang and Harry Lee and their colleagues are pioneers in the long-range study of East Asian conflict and its relationships with climate change (Zhang et al. 2006, 2007, 2015a and b; Lee 2018). They built on the earlier research of J. S. Lee (1931, 1933), who studied the relationship between “internal wars” and climate change in China.
The Zhang et al. (2006) findings for the number of rebellions from 1000 to 1911, counting events per decade, is shown in Figure 2. Zhang et al. (2006) said, “We . . . categorized wars on the basis of types of participants, particularly the leaders of the two sides in the armed conflicts, as either “rebellion” or “others” (state and tribal wars) (405). The rebellions were predominantly peasant uprisings induced by famine and heavy taxation, since farmers were always the first to suffer from declining agricultural production. The three outstanding peaks of warfare were dominated by peasant uprisings. Wherever they occurred rebellions are always significantly correlated with temperature . . ..”
Figure 2: Rebellions in China 1000 CE to 1911CE: Source Zhang et al 2006: 406, Figure 2d.
In the appendix to their 2015 article, Zhang et al. (2015b) say more about the relationship between climate and conflict: “What caused the cycles of nomadic invasion and retreat or the expansion and shrinkage of agriculturist empires? Lee (1933) conjectured that the power of nature was the answer. Some scholars have found strong statistical relationships between climate change, war, population and dynastic cycles in Eurasia and the world by using high-resolution temperature reconstructions and fine-grained historical datasets.”
This study decomposed history into different time domains and found that the multi-centennial geopolitical changes are associated with climate change, but the short-term changes (less than 200 years) do not exhibit any rhythmic pattern. This implies that those short-term geopolitical changes might be associated with social and political changes that are nonlinear and irregular (no continuous frequency). The results indicate that a complex system may be controlled by different factors at different spatial and temporal scales. When a selected factor has a characteristic time-scale which is adequate to the scale of the considered process, while all the other factors have significantly different time-scales, we can consider the selected factor as the most evident one that controls the process (Korotayev et al. 2006). In this study, we could infer our eco-geopolitical hypothesis by the fact that the long-term geopolitical and precipitation frequencies were strongly coherent in China at the multi-centennial scale, but the short-term geopolitical changes, even if they were of lower magnitude, might have been controlled by other, unknown factors (Zhang et al. 2015b: 15-16).
The Zhang (2006) paper shows that there have been cyclical waves of rebellions in China from 1000 until 1911. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the East Asian world-system experienced world revolutions, but further research is needed to include rebellions in Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and to examine the relationships between these and dynastic cycles and upsweeps of polity and settlement sizes. The question as to why cold spells should cause increased conflict is complicated. Regarding peasant rebellions Zhang et al. argue that it was declining agricultural production, famine, and taxation that stimulated rebellions. The studies by Zhang et al. usually found a two or three-decade lag between cold peaks and the onset of conflict. Harry Lee (2018) suggests that a bad climate and decline in agricultural productivity often sets the stage for natural disasters (floods) or sociocultural catastrophes (famines, epidemics) that serve as the proximate causes of the outbreak of rebellions.
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Janet Lippman 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 New
York: Oxford University Press.
Almeida, Paul and Christopher Chase-Dunn 2019 Global Change and Social Movements. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Anderson, E. N. 2019 The Mandate of Heaven: Climate and Dynastic Change in the East Asian World-
System. Berlin: Springer Verlag
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein 1989 Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden 2003 The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year perspectives. London: Routledge
Baidu Peasant Uprising Atlas https://baike.baidu.com/ protests in China from dynasty Qin to Qing.
Barfield, Thomas J. 1989 The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell
Batten, Bruce L. 2003 To the Ends of Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Beaujard, Philippe 2010. “From Three possible Iron-Age World-Systems to a Single Afro-Eurasian World-System.” Journal of World History 21:1(March):1-43.
Beck, Colin J. 2011 “The world cultural origins of revolutionary waves: five centuries of
European contestation. Social Science History 35,2: 167-207.
Beckwith, C. I. 2009 Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the
Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bishop, C. W. 1932 “The Chronology of Ancient China” Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol. 52, No. 3 :232-247 https://www.jstor.org/stable/593028?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Chase-Dunn, C. 2016 “Social movements and collective behavior in premodern polities” IROWS Working Paper #110 http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows110/irows110.htm
Christopher Chase-Dunn and E.N. Anderson (eds.) The Historical Evolution of World-Systems. London: Palgrave.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Alexis Alvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti. 2005. "Power and Size; urbanization and empire formation in world-systems" Pp. 92-112 in C. Chase-Dunn and E.N. Anderson, eds., The
Historical Evolution of World-Systems. New York: Palgrave.
Chase-Dunn, C. Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Alvarez, Rebecca Alvarez, E. N. Anderson and Teresa Neal 2015 “Uneven Political Development: Largest Empires in Ten world Regions and the Central International System since the Late Bronze Age” IROWS Working Paper #85 available at http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows85/irows85.htm
Chase-Dunn, C., Thomas D. Hall, Richard Niemeyer, Alexis Alvarez, Hiroko Inoue, Kirk
Lawrence, and Anders Carlson 2010 “Middlemen and Marcher States in Central Asia
and East/West Empire Synchrony.” Social Evolution and History 9:1(March):1-29.
Chase-Dunn, C. and Thomas D. Hall. 2011“East and West in world-systems evolution” Pp. 97-
119 in Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills (eds.) Andre Gunder Frank and Global
Development, London: Routledge
Chase-Dunn, C. and Ellen Reese 2011 “Global party formation in world historical perspective” Pp.
53-91 in Global Party Formation ed. Katarina Sehm-Patomaki and Marko Ulvila. London: Zed Press
Chase-Dunn, C. and B. Lerro 2014 Social Change: Globalization From the Stone Age to the Present.
London: Routledge
Chase-Dunn, C and Kelly M. Mann 1998 The Wintu and their Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in
Northern California. Tucson,AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Chase-Dunn, C. and Hiroko Inoue 2019 Systemic Boundaries: Time Mapping Globalization since
the Bronze Age. New York: Springer Verlag
Chase-Dunn, .C Hiroko Inoue, Levin Welch, Manjing Gao and Emilia Filipini 2018 “Comparing
World-Systems: Power, Size and warfare” Presented at the annual meeting of California
Sociological Association, Riverside, CA. November 10
Chew, Sing C. 2014 “The Southeast Asian connection in the first Eurasian world economy,
200 BC- AD 500” Journal of Globalization Studies, Vol. 5 No. 1: 82–109
Chinese Text Project https://ctext.org/
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio and David Lai 1995 “War and Politics in Ancient China, 2700 to 722 B.C.:
Measurement and Comparative Analysis” Journal of Conflict Resolution 39(3) 467–494.
____________________________ 2001 “Chinese Warfare and Politics in the Ancient East
Asian International System, ca. 2700 B.C. to 722 B.C.” International Interactions 26(4) 2: 347–
378.
Coe, Michael D. 2003 Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. New York: Thames and Hudson.
Di Cosmo, Nicola 1999 “State formation and periodization in Inner Asian history” Journal of
World History 10,1: 1-40
Elvin, Mark. 1973. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fitzpatrick, John. 1992. "The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot
of History." Review XV, 3 (Summer): 477-521
Flynn, Dennis O. 1996 World Silver and Monetary History in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Brookfield, VT: Variorum.
Frank, Andre Gunder 1998 Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Hall, Thomas D., Christopher Chase-Dunn and Richard Niemeyer. 2009 “The Roles of
Central Asian Middlemen and Marcher States in Afro-Eurasian World-System
Synchrony.” Pp. 69-82 in The Rise of Asia and the Transformation of the World-System,
Political Economy of the World-System Annuals. Vol XXX, edited by Ganesh K.
Trichur. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press.
Hill, John E. 2015 Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes, 1st to 2nd centuries CE. An
Annotated translation from the Hou Hanshu “The Chronicle on the Western Regions” Volume 1
Hobsbawm, Eric 1957 Primitive Rebels: studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th
centuries, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hui, Victoria Tin-Bor 2005 War and state Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
________________ 2004 "Toward a dynamic theory of international politics: Insights from
comparing ancient China and early modern Europe" International Organization, 58 (1): 175–
205
Hung, Ho-Fung 2011 Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots and Petitions in the Mid-
Qing Dynasty. New York: Columbia University Press
____________ 2018 “Confucianist Origins of Modern Chinese Politics: Grandfatherly State and
Grandchildrenly Protest in Chinas Long Eighteenth Century” Presented at the annual
meeting of the Social Science History Association, Phoenix, AZ, November 9.
Inoue, Hiroko, Alexis Álvarez, Kirk Lawrence, Anthony Roberts, Eugene N Anderson and
Christopher Chase-Dunn 2012 “Polity scale shifts in world-systems since the Bronze Age:
A comparative inventory of upsweeps and collapses” International Journal of Comparative Sociology
http://cos.sagepub.com/content/53/3/210.full.pdf+html
Inoue, Hiroko, Alexis Álvarez, Eugene N. Anderson, Andrew Owen, Rebecca Álvarez, Kirk
Lawrence and Christopher Chase-Dunn 2015 “Urban scale shifts since the Bronze Age:
upsweeps, collapses and semiperipheral development” Social Science History Volume 39 number
2, Summer
Inoue, Hiroko, Alexis Álvarez, E.N. Anderson, Kirk Lawrence, Teresa Neal, Dmytro Khutkyy,
Sandor Nagy, Walter De Winter and Christopher Chase-Dunn 2016 “Comparing World-Systems: Empire Upsweeps and Non-core marcher states Since the Bronze Age’ IROWS Working Paper #56
Inoue, Hiroko and C. Chase-Dunn 2018 “Spirals of sociocultural evolution within polities and in
interpolity systems” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association, Philadelphia, PA, August
Inoue, Hiroko 2018 “Trans-regional networks and resistance of piracy and peripheral actors in the
East Asian world-system” A paper presented at the Social Science History Association
annual conference, Phoenix, AZ Nov. 9.
Kaldor, Mary 2003 Global Civil Society, Malden: Polity Press
Kang, David C. Meredith Shaw, and Ronan Tse-min Fu. 2016. "Measuring War in Early Modern
East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources." International
Studies Quarterly. 60 (4): 766-777.
Keightley, David N. 1978 “The Bamboo Annals and Shang-Chou Chronology” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies Vol. 38, No. 2: 423-438
Korotayev, A. & Malkov, A. & Khaltourina, D. 2006 Introduction to social macrodynamics: secular cycles and millennial trends. URSS, Moscow.
Lattimore, Owen. 1940. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. New York: American Geographical Society,
republished 1951, 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lee, Harry F. 2018 “Internal wars in history: Triggered by natural disasters or socio-ecological catastrophes?” The Holocene, 28, 7: 1071-1081 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0959683618761549
Lee, J. S. 1931 “The Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China.” China Journal of Science
and Arts, Vol. 14, p. 114.
_________ 1933 “The periodic recurrence of internecine wars in China”. Studies presented to Ts'ai
Yuan p'ei on his sixty-fifth birthday (ed. by Fellows and Assistants of the Institute of History and
Philology), pp. 157–166. Vol. 1. Institute of History and Philology, Taipei.
Lieberman, Victor. 2003. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830. Vol. 1: Integration on the Mainland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
______________ 2009. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830. Vol 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liu, LI and Xingcan Chen 2003 State Formation in Early China London: Duckworth
Liu, Xinru and Lynda Norene Shaffer. 2007. Connections across Eurasia: Transportation,
Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Michael, Franz H. 1966 The Taiping Rebellion. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nagy, Sandor. 2017 "Global Swings of the Political Spectrum since 1789: Cyclically Delayed Mirror Waves of Revolutions and Counterrevolutions" IROWS Working Paper #124 at http://irows.urc.edu/papers/irows124/irows124.htm
Neal, Teresa 2019 “The Information Network in Premodern Hierarchical World-Systems” in C. Chase-
Dunn and Hiroko Inoue (eds.) Systemic Boundaries. New York: Springer Verlag
Needham, Joseph. 1986 Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, Part 3,
Civil Engineering and Nautics. Taipei: Caves Books
Nivison, David S. 1998 “The Key to the Chronology of the Three Dynasties: The ‘Modern Text’Bamboo
Chronicles. Stanford University. Typed manuscript.
Ownby, David 1999 “Chinese millenarian traditions: the formative age” American Historical Review
104,5:1513-1530.
Palat, Ravi 2015 The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and
Bazaars London: Palgrave
_________2018 “Revolutionary Transformations in Asia, 1840-1873: Changing Relational Flows,
Production Processes, and Social Upheavals” Presented at the annual meeting of the Social
Science History Association, Phoenix, AZ.
Reid, Anthony 1988 Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Vol. I, The Lands below the
Winds. New Haven: Yale University Press.
____________ 1993 Vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Renfrew, Colin R. 1975. "Trade as Action at a Distance: Questions of Integration and Communication." Pp. 3-59 in J. A. Sabloff and C. C. Lamborg‑Karlovsky, eds., Ancient Civilization and Trade. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
____________. 1977. "Alternative Models for Exchange and Spatial Distribution." Pp. 71-90 in T. J. Earle and T. Ericson, eds., Exchange Systems in Prehistory,. New York: Academic Press.
Rozman, Gilbert. 1973. Urban Networks in Ching China and Tokugawa Japan. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
SESHAT : The Global History Data Bank http://seshatdatabank.info/
SetPol Project. The Research Working Group on Settlements and Polities, Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California-Riverside http://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html
Scheidel, Walter. 2009. “From the “great convergence” to the “first great divergence”:
Roman and Qin-Han state formation” Pp. 11-23 in Walter Scheidel (ed.) Rome and
China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires. New York: Oxford University Press.
Skinner, G. William 1971 “Chinese peasants and the closed community: an open and shut case”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 13:270-281.
Skinner, G. William 1985 “Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History” The Journal of
Asian Studies, 44(2), 271-292.
Snow, David A. and Sarah A. Soule 2009 A Primer on Social Movements New York: Norton.
Spence, Jonathan D. 1996 God’s Chinese Son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan . New York:
Norton.
Taagepera, Rein. 1978. "Size and duration of empires: growth-decline curves, 3000
to 600 BC" Social Science Research 7:180-196
Teggart, Frederick J. 1939. Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Tilly, Charles 1979 From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
___________ and Sydney Tarrow 2015 Contentious Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
___________ and Leslie Wood 2013 Social Movements, 1768-2012. Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Turchin, Peter 2009 “A theory for formation of large empires” Journal of Global History 4: 191–217
___________ 2011 “Strange Parallels: Patterns in Eurasian Social Evolution” Journal
of World Systems Research 17(2):538-552
Turchin,Peter 2011 . Strange Parallels: Patterns in Eurasian Social Evolution . Journal of World Systems Research 17(2):538-552.
______ . and Sergey Gavrilets 2009 “The evolution of complex hierarchical societies”
Social Evolution & History, Vol. 8 No. 2, September: 167–198.
______ . Thomas E.Currie, Edward A.L. Turner and Sergey Gavrilets 2013 “War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies” PNAS October vol. 110 no. 41: 16384–16389 Appendix: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/09/20/1308825110.DCSupplemental/sapp.pdf
Turchin, Peter and Sergey Nefadov 2009 Secular Cycles Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Walker, Richard Louis 1953 The Multi-State System in Ancient China. Hamden,Conn.: Shoe String
Press
Wallerstein, Immanuel 2011a [1974] The Modern World-System, Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
_________________ 2012 Volume 4 of The Modern World-System: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant,
1789-1914 Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whiteneck, Daniel 1996 “The Industrial Revolution and Birth of the Anti-Mercantilist Idea: Epistemic
Communities and Global Leadership” Journal of World-Systems Research Vol 2, Issue
2. https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/69/81
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Peasant_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rebellions_in_the_Han_dynasty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rebellions_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rebellions_in_Asia
Wilkinson, David. 1987. "Central Civilization." Comparative Civilizations Review 17:31-59.
____________ 1999 "Power Polarity in the Far Eastern World System 1025 BC--AD 1850: Narrative and 25-Year Interval Data " Journal of World-Systems Research no. 3 (Fall).
______________ 2002 “The Status of the Far Eastern Civilization/ World System: Evidence from City Data” Journal of World-systems Research, 8, 3, fall 2002, 292–328
Zhang, David D., Jim, C. Y., Lin, G. C. S., He, Y. Q., Wang, J. J., and Lee, H. F. 2006. “Climatic
Change, Wars and Dynastic Cycles in China over the Last Millennium” Climatic Change 76:
459–477. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-005-9024-z
_____________., Zhang, J., Lee, H.F. & He, Y.-Q. 2007 “Climate change and war frequency in
eastern China over the last millennium”. Human Ecology, 35, 403–414.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10745-007-9115-8
______________ Pei, Q., Lee, H. F., Zhang, J., Chang, C. Q., Li, B., Li, J. and Zhang, X. 2015 “The
pulse of imperial China: a quantitative analysis of long-term geopolitical and climatic cycles”
Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24: 87–96. doi:10.1111/geb.12247
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.12247/full
Appendix to Zhang et al 2015b Appendix S3 Further materials and methods. Appendix S4 References geb12247-sup-0001-si.docx
Zhongguo Junshishi [A military history of China] 1985 zhongguojunshishi
Editing Committee of China's Military History: 1985, Tabulation of Wars in Ancient China, People's Liberation Army Press, Beijing AUTHOR: Fu, Zhongxia ; Zhongguo jun shi shi. 2 volumes