Comparing World-Systems:

Empire Upsweeps and Non-core marcher states Since the Bronze Age*

Targaryen Marcher Lord

Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Álvarez, E.N. Anderson,

Kirk Lawrence, Teresa Neal, Dmytro Khutkyy,

Sandor Nagy, Walter DeWinter and Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside
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National Science Foundation Grant #:  NSF-HSD SES-0527720

To be presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Oakland, CA , 

 March 30-April 2, 2016 Marriott Downtown City Center  draft v. 4-1-16, 11479  words.

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

Appendix: Classification of Empire Upsweeps https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/appendices/semipmarchers/semipmarchersapp.htm

*Thanks to Rein Taagepera, a prodigious and pioneering coder of the territorial sizes of polities.

Need more on the 17th and 18th Egyptian dynasties,

      Abstract: This research examines one of the implications of the hypothesis of semiperipheral development: that major increases in the sizes of polities have been accomplished mainly by conquests carried out by semiperipheral or peripheral marcher states. We use the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective to frame our study of twenty-one upsweeps in the territorial size of the largest polities in four regional world-systems and in the expanding Central Political/Military Network since the Bronze Age. We seek to determine whether or not each of these twenty-one upsweeps were instances in which a semiperipheral or peripheral marcher state produced the polity size upsweep by means of conquest. The hypothesis of semiperipheral development holds that polities that are not in the core have been, and continue to be, unusually fertile locations for the implementation of organizational and technological innovations that transform the scale and the developmental logic of world-systems. This is because semiperipheral and peripheral polities have less invested in older institutional structures and than do core polities and they also have greater incentives to take risks on new technologies and organizational forms. One important manifestation of semiperipheral development is the marcher state phenomenon: a recently founded sedentary polity out on the edge of an older core region conquers the older core polities and puts together a core-wide empire that is significantly larger than earlier polities have been. This phenomenon has occurred repeatedly, but it is not the only way in which large empires have emerged.  We find that over half of the twenty-one identified empire upsweeps were likely to have been produced by marcher states from the semiperiphery (10) or from the periphery (3). We also investigate those upsweeps that did not involve non-core conquest to determine what caused them.

            This paper is a part of a larger project that is studying the growth/decline phases and upward sweeps of settlement and polity sizes in order to test explanations of long-term patterns of human socio-cultural evolution. We use the comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective first outlined by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1993,1997) as our orienting theoretical approach. The focus is on interpolity systems (world-systems) rather than on single polities.[1] We study how sociocultural evolution occurred in systems of interacting polities. We propose a somewhat revised definition and typology of semiperipherality based on our study of empire upsweeps. The main focus of this article is on the evolutionary significance of semiperipherality since the period in the early Bronze Age in which states first emerged.

Figure 1: Rein Taagepera’s  (1979:118) East Asia Graph 600 BCE to 600 CE

 

Regions, Political-Military Networks and Upward Sweeps

          There has been a long-term upward trend in which human polities have grown in population and territorial size while the total number of sovereign polities has decreased (Carneiro 1978).[2] Human polities have evolved from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states and then to empires. This long-term trend has occurred in a series of events that we call upward sweeps (upsweeps).  Upsweeps are defined as those instances in which a polity emerges that is at least 1/3 larger in territorial size than the average of the three previous peaks of polity size (Inoue et al 2012).

            All hierarchical world-systems have experienced a cycle of centralization and decentralization in which a large polity in an interpolity system emerged and then declined. This sequence of rise and fall is seen in interpolity systems composed of chiefdoms (Anderson 1994), states, empires and modern hegemons. In such cycles most of the upward phases result in a polity that is nearly the same size as the one that existed at the previous peak of polity size. This we call a “normal rise.” An upsweep involves a significant increase in the size of the largest polity relative to the previous peak. These upsweeps are much less frequent than are normal rises.  But they are the events that instantiate the long-term trend toward larger polities and so they are very important for the evolution of sociocultural complexity.

             The Settlements and Polities (SetPol) Research Working Group at the Institute of Research on World-Systems[3] has quantitatively identified twenty-one such polity upsweeps in five world regions since the early Bronze Age (Inoue et al 2012). In order to identify these polity upsweeps we have mainly used Rein Taagepera’s (1978a, 1978b, 1979, 1997) estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest states and empires in four world regions and in the interpolity system that David Wilkinson (1987) has called “Central Civilization.”[4]

Figure 2:  Largest polities in the Mesopotamian PMN, 2800 BCE-1500 BCE (Square Megameters)[5]

            Figure 2 shows the territorial sizes of the largest polities in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian political-military network (PMN) between 2800 BCE and 1500 BCE. A political-military network is a set of fighting and allying polities. This is equivalent to what International Relations Political Scientists call “the international system” except that they rarely study such systems before the treaty of Westphalia in 1648 CE.  Figure 2 illustrates the difference between empire upsweeps and normal rises. Lagash carried out an upsweep because it became significantly larger than the largest earlier polities had been. The Akkadian Empire was a gigantic upsurge. The Babylon/Mitanni upsweep was not as big as the Akkadian had been, but it was more than 1/3 larger than the average of the three previous peaks and so qualifies as an upsweep. Around 1500 BCE the Mesopotamian and Egyptian PMNs merged to become what we call the Central PMN.

          We contend that interaction networks, rather than homogenous cultural or ecological regions, are the best way to bound evolving human systems for the purposes of studying the causes of socio-cultural evolution (Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson 2003)[6].  But one problem with using interaction networks is that they expand (and contract) over time, which can make the results of comparisons dependent on the decisions one has made about the timing of changes in the spatial boundaries of networks. Our project uses four world regional political-military networks (PMNs) and one expanding PMN – what we call, following David Wilkinson (1987), the Central PMN (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Chronograph the expansion of the Central PMN and its engulfment of regional PMNs since the Bronze Age. [revised from Wilkinson (1987);  the PMNs studied here are underlined]

 

The four regional PMNs are Mesopotamia, Egypt, East Asia and South Asia. The Central PMN, a network of allying and warring states and empires, is bounded following Wilkinson.[7] It begins around 1500 BCE when the formerly separate Egyptian and Mesopotamian interpolity systems merged and it then expanded to eventually become the contemporary global international system (see Figure 3). Long-distance trade in prestige goods linked the East Asian PMN with the Central PMN since the time of the Roman and Han empires, but East Asia had a substantially separate interpolity system (PMN) until China was surrounded and penetrated by the European powers in the 19th century.[8] 

Core/Periphery Relations

            The notion of core/periphery relations has been a foundational concept in both the modern world-system perspective (Wallerstein 1974) and in the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1993, 1997; Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2014). World-systems are systems of interacting polities and they often (but not always) are organized as interpolity hierarchies in which some polities exploit and dominate other polities. Chase-Dunn and Hall redefined and expanded the core/periphery concept to make it more useful for comparing the modern world-system with earlier regional world-systems. The core/periphery distinction is a relational concept. In other words, what coreness, peripherality and semiperipherality  are depends on the larger context in which they occur – the nature of the polities that are interacting with one another and the nature of their interactions.

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

The distinction between civilization and barbarism (and savagery) has a long history as polities have engaged in “othering” and in social science. We seek to replace disparaging terminologies with less loaded concepts, but our search for empirical evidence of core/periphery distinctions often encounters documents in which othering plays an important part, and it is best to be aware of these issues in order to make the best judgments about what was really going on.

            For comparing different kinds of systems it is also helpful to distinguish between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy.  “Core/periphery differentiation” means that polities with different population densities are interacting with one another. As soon as we find village dwellers in sustained interaction with nomadic neighbors we have core/periphery differentiation.  “Core/periphery hierarchy” refers to the nature of the relationships between polities.  Interpolity hierarchy exists when some polities are exploiting and/or dominating the people in other polities. Well-known examples of interpolity domination and exploitation include the British colonization and deindustrialization of India, or the conquest and subjugation of Mesoamerica by the Spaniards. But core/periphery hierarchy is not unique to the modern Europe-centered world-system of recent centuries. Roman and Aztec imperialism are also famous.[9]

Distinguishing between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy allows us to deal with situations in which larger and more population dense polities are interacting with smaller ones, but are not exploiting them. It also allows us to examine cases in which smaller, less dense polities were exploiting larger and denser polities such as occurred in the long, and consequential, interaction between the nomadic horse pastoralists of Central Asia and the agrarian states and empires of China and Western Asia. The most famous case was that of the Mongol Empire of Chingis Khan, but confederations of Central Asian steppe nomads managed to extract tribute from agrarian states long before the rise of Mongols (Barfield 1989).[10] 

The question of core/periphery status also should be considered with regard to different spatial scales of interaction. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1993,1997) point out that regional world-systems often were composed of important interaction networks that had different spatial scales. They use a “place-centric” approach to spatially bounding systemic interaction networks that estimates the fall-off of interaction effects from a focal settlement or polity (Renfrew 1975). The network is spatially bounded by deciding how many indirect links (degrees of separation)  are result in the fall-off of regular and two-way interactions that have an important impacts on the reproduction or transformation of institutions at the focal locale (Chase-Dunn et al 2016). Bulk goods networks (in which everyday foods and raw materials were exchanged) were usually smaller in extent relative to political-military networks (PMNs) of allying and fighting polities. Prestige goods networks (in which high value per weight goods were exchanged) usually were larger than PMNs, as were Information Networks. Systems vary in terms of how important the exchange of prestige goods and/or information are for the reproduction of social institutions.  The issue of core/periphery status always needs to be asked for both the bulk goods and political-military networks and should also be considered for prestige goods and information networks when they are systemic.

Semiperipheral Development

            The semiperiphery concept was also originally developed for the study the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1976). But it too has been expanded for the purposes of comparing world-systems. For Immanuel Wallerstein the semiperiphery is a middle stratum in the global hierarchy that helps to reduce the strains that emerge from polarization. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 5) contend that semiperipheral polities are often the “seedbeds of change” because some of them implement new technological and organizational features that allow them to successfully compete with core polities. This is thought to account for the phenomenon of uneven development and the movement of core regions from their original locations (Chase-Dunn and Grell-Brisk 2016)..

            Hub theories of innovation have been popular among world historians (McNeill and McNeill 2003; Christian 2004) and human ecologists (Hawley 1950). The hub theory holds that new ideas and institutions tend to emerge in large and central settlements where information cross-roads bring different ideas into interaction with one another. The hub theory is undoubtedly partly correct, but it cannot explain some of the long-term patterns of human sociocultural evolution, because if an information cross-road was able to out-compete all contenders then the original information hub would still be the center of the world. But that is not the case. We know that cities and states first emerged in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is now Iraq. It had 100% of the world’s largest cities and the most powerful polities on Earth in the Early Bronze Age (Morris 2010, 2012). Now it has neither the largest cities nor the most powerful polities. Most of the regional world-systems have undergone a process of uneven development in which the old centers were eventually replaced by new centers out on the edge.

            Chase-Dunn and Hall contend that it is often polities out on the edge that transform the institutional structures and accomplish the upsweeps. This hypothesis is part of a larger claim that semiperipheral polities often play transformative roles that cause the emergence of complexity and hierarchy within polities and in world-systems. This is the most important justification of the claim that world-systems, rather than single polities (or societies), are a necessary unit of analysis for explaining human sociocultural evolution. [11]

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

            The phenomenon of semiperipheral development has taken various forms: semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, semiperipheral marcher states, semiperipheral capitalist city-states, the semiperipheral position of Europe in the larger Afroeurasian world-system, modern semiperipheral nation-states that have risen to hegemony, and contemporary semiperipheral societies that are engaging in novel and potentially transformative economic and political activities that may change the nature of the contemporary global system.

Philippe Beaujard (2005:239) makes the point that core/periphery relations often involve co-evolution. Even when exploitation and domination of the non-core by the core occurs, polities in both zones are altered and co-evolve. In many systems in Afroeurasia and the Americas interactions between hunter-gatherers and farmers led to the emergence of polities that specialized in pastoralism (Lattimore 1940; Barfield 1989; Honeychurch 2013; Hamalainen 2008). Some of the pastoralists were exploited and dominated by core polities but others turned the tables and were able to extract resources from agrarian states.

            There are several possible processes that might account for the phenomenon of semiperipheral development. Randall Collins (1981) has argued that the phenomenon of marcher states conquering other states to make larger empires is due to the geopolitical “march land advantage.” Being out on the edge of a core region of competing states allows more maneuverability because it is not necessary to defend the rear. This geopolitical advantage allows military resources to be concentrated on vulnerable neighbors. Peter Turchin (2003) argued that the relevant process is one in which group solidarity is enhanced by being on a “metaethnic frontier” in which the clash of contending cultures produces strong cohesion and cooperation within frontier societies, thus promoting state formation and empire formation (see also Turchin 2009). Turchin focuses especially on relations between polities that face each other on a transition boundary between steppe and irrigated agricultural ecological zones. His  (2009) mirror-empires model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists often resulted in an autocatalytic process in which both nomadic and farming polities scaled up their polity sizes.

Carroll Quigley (1961) distilled another version of the semiperipheral development hypothesis from the works of Arnold Toynbee. Another factor affecting within-group solidarity is the different degrees of internal stratification usually found in premodern systems between the core and the semiperiphery. Core societies often have old, crusty and bloated elites who rely on mercenaries and “foreigners” as subalterns, while semiperipheral leaders are more often charismatic individuals who attract strong loyalty from their soldiers. Less stratification can mean greater group solidarity. And this may be an important part of the semiperipheral advantage in systems in which within-polity inequality is greater in the core than in the non–core.

            But Arnold Toynbee (1946) also suggested another way in which the peoples of semiperipheral regions might be motivated to take risks with new ideas, technologies and strategies. Semiperipheral polities are often located in ecologically marginal regions that have poor soil and little water or other natural disadvantages. Patrick Kirch relies on this idea of ecological marginality in his depiction of the process by which semiperipheral marcher chiefs were most often the conquerors that created island-wide paramount chiefdoms in the Pacific (Kirch 1984). It is quite possible that all these features combine to produce what Alexander Gershenkron (1962) called “the advantages of backwardness” that allow some semiperipheral societies to transform and to dominate regional world-systems.

            Those new technologies and organizational forms that transform the logic of development and allow world-systems to get larger, more complex and more hierarchical, are often invented and implemented by semiperipheral polities. Innovation and implementation are separate, but connected issues. Owen Lattimore (1980) contended that non-core polities are often the locus of important innovations. But it is obvious that innovations occur within core societies as well. What are perhaps more important are the decisions to implement and invest in new ideas and organizational changes. While some innovations may emerge from non-core polities, it is perhaps more important that polities out on the edge have a greater incentive to take the risks involved in implementing new technologies and organizational forms.

            Semiperipheral polities are often involved in processes of rapid internal class formation and state formation and they do not have large investments in, and commitments to, doing things the way they have been done in older core polities. They do not have institutional or infrastructural sunk costs. So they are freer to implement new institutions and to experiment with new technologies.

 There are several different ways to be semiperipheral (see below) and semiperipheral polities not only sometimes transform systems but they also sometimes take over and become the new predominant core polities.  We have already mentioned semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms. The chiefdoms that conquered and unified a number of smaller chiefdoms into larger paramount chiefdoms were usually from semiperipheral locations.  Peripheral peoples did not usually have the institutional and material resources that would allow them to implement new adaptive strategies or to take over older core regions.  It was in the semiperiphery that core and peripheral social characteristics could be recombined in new ways.  Sometimes this meant that more adaptive and competitive techniques of power were strongly implemented in semiperipheral polities. 

Much better known than semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms is the phenomenon of semiperipheral marcher states. Many of the largest empires in all world regions were assembled by conquerors who came from semiperipheral polities.  The most famous examples are the Achaemenid Persians, the Macedonians led by Alexander[12], the Romans, the Islamic Caliphates, the Ottomans, the Manchus and the Aztecs.

But some semiperipheries transform institutions, but do not take over the interpolity system of which they are a part. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states operated on the edges of the tributary empires where they bought and sold goods in widely separate locations, encouraging farmers and craftsmen to produce a surplus for trade (Chase-Dunn et al 2015).  The Phoenician cities (e.g. Tyre, Sidon, Biblos, Carthage, etc.), as well as Malacca, Venice, Genoa and the cities of the Hanseatic League, spread commodification and expanded markets by producing manufactured goods and trading them across great regions.[13]  In this way the semiperipheral capitalist city-states helped to commercialize the world of the tributary empires without themselves becoming core powers.

The modern world-system has experienced a sequence of the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. The Dutch, the British and the U.S. were countries that had formerly been in semiperipheral positions relative to the modern core/periphery hierarchy.  And indeed the rise of Europe within the larger Afroeurasian world-system was also a case of semiperipheral development, one in which a formerly peripheral and then semiperipheral region eventually rose to become a new core and to bring all the regions into a now-global interpolity system (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2014).[14]

Indicators of Semiperipherality

            The main purpose of this article is to determine which, and how many, of the twenty-one quantitatively identified empire upsweeps were brought about by semiperipheral marcher states. In order to do this we need to specify what we mean by semiperipherality. This is not a simple task because, as we have mentioned above, world-system positions (core, periphery, semiperiphery) are relational concepts. In other words, what semiperipherality is depends on the larger context in which it occurs – the nature of the polities that are interacting with one another and the nature of their interactions. The most general definition of the semiperiphery is: an intermediate location in an interpolity core/periphery structure. The minimal definition of core/periphery relations, as mentioned above, is that polities with different degrees of population density are interacting with one another. This is what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have called “core/periphery differentiation.” The idea of “core/periphery hierarchy” is more stringent. It requires interpolity domination and exploitation. In this study we will be looking for evidence that a polity that conquered other polities and was responsible for an upward sweep in territorial size was semiperipheral relative to the other polities it was interacting with before it started on the road to conquest. We will use four main empirical indicators to make such determinations:

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

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

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

·                     relative ecological marginality.

            Core polities usually hold to best locations in terms of soil and water. The semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms of the Pacific Islands were typically from the dry side of the island where land was steeper and soil was thinner (Kirch 1984). Of course, which land is better depends on the kind of resources that are being used and the technologies available for appropriating resources. But ecological marginality is often an important aspect of semiperipherality. Polities in ecologically marginal regions have a powerful incentive for taking the risks of conquest.

The Aztecs are a proto-typical example of a semiperipheral marcher state. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who migrated into the valley of Mexico and settled on an uninhabited island in Lake Texcoco. There had already been large states and empires in the valley of Mexico for centuries. The Aztecs hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers, developed a class distinction between nobles and commoners and claimed to have been descended from the Toltecs, an earlier empire. Then they began conquering the older core states of the valley of Mexico, strategically picking first on weak and unpopular states, until they had gathered enough resources to “roll up the system.” The Aztec story has all of the elements specified above that we will use in examining our upsweep cases.

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

Philippe Beaujard (2005) makes good use of the semiperiphery concept in his study of the emergence of a world-system surrounding the Indian Ocean. Beaujard (2005:442) mentions instances in which the emergence of regional settlements that connected hinterlands with core areas were facilitated by the presence of merchants and religious elites who were migrants from core regions.  Beaujard’s study of the emergence of unequal exchange between the coastal Swahili cities and the interior of the East African mainland notes that immigrants from the Arabian core helped to form commercial ties, intermarried with local elites, and converted locals to Islam, thereby promoting a process of class-formation that led to the emergence of semiperipheral polities along the coast (see also Fleischer et al 2015). Beaujard also affirms our point that innovations sometimes occur in semiperipheral polities (445).

We have mainly focused on the world-system positions of polities, but Beaujard’s analysis of East Africa suggests that core/periphery relations may be involved in important processes of social change even when individuals and families are not in control of whole polities. We are interested in all the ways in which core/periphery relations may be connected with social change.

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

            We should also note that some large empires have been formed by internal revolt in which a subordinate ethnic group or caste revolted and took power in an existing state and then carried out an expansion by conquest. The slave-soldiers of the Mamluk Sultanate are an obvious example, and Norman Yoffee (1991) has contended that the Akkadian empire was the result of an ethnic revolt (but see our decisions about the Akkadian Empire in the Appendix). And some territorial upsweeps have been generated by dynastic changes that were generated by processes mainly internal to the polity that carried them out. A dynastic coup can lead to a territorial upsweep. The point here is that there are possible alternatives to the semiperipheral marcher state route to an empire upsweep.  We will also note cases in which core/periphery relations are in some way involved even though it is not a case of a semiperipheral marcher state.

We mentioned Beaujard’s (2005) study of how migrants from the core to the semiperiphery led to social changes. In the Sui-Tang upsweep discussed below Turkic generals from the frontier led military coups that produced dynastic changes and territorial upsweeps.  And Peter Turchin’s  (2009) mirror-empires model implies that an upsweep could be caused by tensions generated along a steppe/sown edge that is not a result of conquest of the sown by the steppe, but rather the expansion of the sown polity that is a result of external threats from the steppe.

Demographic structural cycles [also called “secular cycles” by Turchin and Nefadov (2009)] are processes of demographic growth and increasing population pressure within polities that cause class conflict and state break-down. Turchin and Nefedov explicated Jack Goldstone’s (1991) model of the secular cycle, an approximately 200 yearlong demographic cycle, in which population grows and then decreases. Population pressures emerge because the number of mouths to be fed and the size of the group of elites get too large for the resource base, causing conflict and the disruption of the polity. Turchin and Nefedov (2009) tested their formulation on a number of agrarian empires, confirming the principle that cycles of population growth and elite overproduction led to sociopolitical instability and regime transitions within states.

The demographic structural cycle is understood to occur almost entirely within polities, but the origin of this kind of model stems from Ibn Khaldun’s theory of both state formation and state breakdown – dynastic cycles. Ibn Khaldun was a Tunisian Arab from an Andalusian family.  In the 14th century CE he argued that dynasties typically lasted three or four generations.  A dynasty would get old and corrupt, and “barbarians” (what we call semiperipheral marcher states) would take over.  The leader of a “barbarian” marcher polity had to be generous, charismatic, and a brilliant and sophisticated war leader as well as a good manager of men in order to inspire his warriors and get their support.  His followers thus developed asabiyah, basically loyalty, but more than loyalty -- an obligation formed by the leader’s generosity (they owed him for feasting, presents, etc.) and by respect for his ability and success.  Thanks to genius and asabiyah, a particular marcher polity could take over and start a new dynasty.  The first generation went well.  The leader was the charismatic founder.  There was lots of land and loot, to say nothing of women and slaves, captured from the former dynasty.  The warriors were duly rewarded for their asabiyah by getting tons of goodies.  They settled down, but they were still warlike enough to hold the state against all comers.

            The second generation was often a Golden Age, with the dynasty ruling over a realm of peace and prosperity.  Wealth derived from using the land and other resources, producing taxes which were used to support brilliant culture, science, and literature.  The empire tended to expand at the expense of neighbors and the population grew.

            The third generation was a time of decline.  The land filled up with people.  Production declined because of environmental degradation and taxes also declined.  The rulers therefore had to extort more to keep going.  Military expansion hit a limit -- war now costs more than it is bringing in. The ratio of war expenses to captured loot declined because of expanding frontiers and more enemies.  Meanwhile the court is now far from its charismatic founder.  The royal family has expanded, and there are countless supernumerary princes running around desperate for wealth.  The bureaucracy has expanded to try to control the mess.  Princes and bureaucrats fall prey to corruption. How else can they keep up their lifestyle?  This means still more taxes on a population that has expanded and thus is faced with a shrinking land base per capita.

            The fourth generation is overpopulated, corrupt, and broke.  The population naturally begins to rebel, or at best they are disloyal to their rulers.  The stage is set for the next set of barbarians to take over.  The whole cycle takes 75-100 years (generations are typically 25 years). Buildup of population and rural poverty, failure of food production to keep up, environmental deterioration worse in final decades than in earlier ones, corruption increases and military adventuring becomes overstretched. 

            A very sophisticated model of state formation is  presented by Victor Lieberman (2003, 2009; see also Turchin 2015) that combines both internal and external factors to explain waves of cultural integration and how these played out somewhat differently in regions of Eurasia depending on how exposed they were to nomadic or seaborne invaders. While the demographic structural approach focusses on state breakdown, Lieberman focusses on state-building projects and their consequences for cultural integration and the emergence of national identities. From his vantage point as an historian of Burma he focusses on mainland Southeast Asia, and then, in a refreshing version of positionality, uses his model to examine similar developments in other regions of Eurasia.

            Lieberman’s approach is relevant to our study of upsweeps of polity size and non-core marcher states because he contends that the processes of integration differed because some regions were less exposed to invasion than others.  What he calls the six “protected rimlands” of Eurasia were regions that were on the edges of earlier civilizational complexity, and that were less exposed to conquest because of geographical barriers to nomadic or seaborne invaders. The six protected rimlands are Burma, Siam, Vietnam, Russia, France and Japan. Because these areas were less exposed to marcher states and incursions they were able to forge strong states and strong national cultures. On the other hand, China, much of Southwest Asia, the Indian subcontinent and island Southeast Asia were vulnerable to maritime or nomadic invaders and so integration was slowed down because of conquest by culturally different people (Lieberman 2003: 79).

            Lieberman (2003: 44-5) presents a model of the causes of integration, but he is also careful to note that:

External and domestic factors remained influential throughout the period under study, but their relative weights and interconnections varied widely by time and place. I therefore argue less of a single lockstep pattern than for a loose constellation of influences whose local contours must be determined empirically and without prejudice.

            His model is described thus (Lieberman 2003: 44-5) :

                        …: External, including maritime, factors enhanced the economic and military advantages of privileged lowland districts. In reciprocal fashion, multicausal increases in population, domestic output, and local commodification aided foreign trade, while widening further the material gap between incipient heartlands and dependent districts. So too, by stimulating movements of religious and social reform and by strengthening transportation and communication circuits between emergent cores and outlying dependencies, economic exchange enhanced easch core’s cultural authority. As warfare between cohering polities grew in scale and expense, and as the subjugation of more alien populations aggravated problems of imperial control, those principalities that would survive were obliged systematically to strengthen their patronage and military systems, to expand their tax bases, and to promote official cultures over provincial and popular traditions.  Insofar as sustained warfare increased popular dependence on the throne, it heightened the appeal of ethnic and religious patterns championed by the capital. Pacification and military reforms also had a variety of unplanned economic and social effects generally sympathetic to integration. ….

 

And he presents a diagram that also shows the effects of climate change and epidemic diseases (Lieberman 2003:65):

            Lieberman’s model is probably relevant for earlier waves of political integration and state expansion of the sort we are considering in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the early Central PMN. His contention that external invasions slow down integration is somewhat supported by the case of Egypt, where there relatively fewer incursions. China, despite being exposed to Central Asia steppe nomads and forest conquerors from Manchuria, managed to have some upsweeps that were caused by internal dynastic processes.  And the Khmer Empire never really recovered after its first charter floration because its stronger and better integrated neighbors (Siam and Vietnam) were able to prevent the reformation of a strong Cambodian state. Lieberman’s model, when combined with the factors of the demographic structural approach that explain state breakdown, provides us with the best overall model for explaining waves of political consolidation, but it does not explain well the rise of the West and the huge upsweep that was the  British Empire. Though Lieberman is careful to consider the effects of economic integration and commodification on local integration, he does not explain how centrality in global circuits of trade and investment could eventually lead to the modern hegemonies.

Types of Upsweeps

So we find five different kinds of upsweeps:

1.      semiperipheral marcher state (SMS), a polity that is in a semiperipheral position within a regional system conquers a large area and produces a territorial upsweep;

2.      peripheral marcher state (PMS), in which a polity that is peripheral in a regional system conquers the core, (e.g. the Mongol Empire).

3.      mirror-empire (ME), in which a core state that is under pressure from a non-core polity carries out a territorial expansion

4.      internal revolt (IR), a state formed by an internal ethnic or class rebellion, such as what Yoffee (1991) argues for the Akkadian Empire, or the Mamluk Empire

5.      internal dynastic change (IDC),  a coup carried out by a rising faction within  the ruling class of a state leads to a territorial expansion.[15]  The first three types involve relations among polities, whereas the last two are mainly due to processes operating within polities.

Our review of the upsweeps also suggests that there have been different kinds of semiperipheral marcher states that have different combinations of the features discussed above. The summary of our efforts to find evidence for each case is contained in the Appendix for this article.[16]  The effort to locate evidence in favor of, or against, the semiperipheral origins of the upsweeps has been more difficult for the earlier cases because evidence for them is circumstantial or lacking. Thus the categorization of the origins of upsweeps must be qualified in terms of the degree of certainty.

            Table 1 shows the twenty-one cases identified as empire upsweeps in our quantitative study (Inoue et al 2012).  It also shows the results of our effort to categorize each of these upsweeps into the five types of polity upsweeps outlined above.

The Mongol empire is shown twice in Table 1 because it was important for both the East Asian and the Central PMNs, but it is not counted twice in Table 2 below. The first three upsweeps in Table 1 are from the Mesopotamian regional world-system (see also Figure 2 above).

Mesopotamia 2800 BCE to 1500 BCE

Peak Year

Peak Size

(Sq. Megameters)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

size

Polity name

Type of Upsweep

              -2400

0.05

Lagash

 probably an IDC

-2250

0.8

Akkadian

SMS and  IR

-1450

0.3

Mitanni

SMS

 

Egypt     2850 BCE to 1500 BCE

Peak Year

Peak Size

(Sq. Megameters)

Polity name

Type of Upsweep

-2400

0.4

Egyptian 2nd to  5th Dynasties

probably an IDC

-1850

0.5

Egyptian12th Dynasty

IDC

-1650

0.65

Hyksos

SMS and IR



Central PMN 1500 BCE to 1991AD

Peak Year

Size

Sq. Megameters

Polity name(s)

Type of Upsweep

-1450

1

Egyptian18th Dynasty

 IDC

-670

1.4

Neo-Assyrian

 ME

-480

5.4

Achaemenid Persia

SMS

117

5

Rome

SMS

750

11.1

Islamic Empires

SMS

1294

29.4

Mongol-Yuan

PMS

1936

34.5

British

SMS

 

 

East Asia 1300 BCE to 1830 AD

Peak Year

Size in Sq. Megameters

Polity name(s)

Type of Upsweep

-1050

1.25

Shang/Western Zhou (Chou)

Probably SMS

-176

4.03

Qin/Western Han/Xiongnu

 *

Qin=SMS; Western Han=IDC; Xiongnu=PMS

-50

6

Western Han

 may have been an ME

100

6.5

Eastern (Later) Han

IDC

624

4

E. Turk

PMS

660

4.9

Sui-Tang

IDC with coups carried out by non-core generals

1294

29.4

Mongol-Yuan (same as above in Central System. Counted only once)

PMS

1790

14.7

Qing

SMS

South Asia 420 BCE to 1008 AD

Peak Year

Size

Sq. Megameters

Polity name

Type of Upsweep

-260

3.72

Mauryan

Probably SMS

*The Qin/Western Zhou/Xiongnu was a composite upsweep produced by three polities with three different original world-system positions.

Table 1: World-system position origin of those polities that produced territorial upsweeps

            Table 1 shows the results of our efforts to determine whether or not each of the twenty-one polity size upsweeps were the result of the rise of a non-core (semiperipheral or peripheral) marcher state. In the case of Lagash we have not been able to find any hard evidence regarding the world-system position origins of this polity upsweep, but our best guess is that it was not a semiperipheral marcher state (see the Appendix for the review of evidence).  For the rest of the cases we have been able to find enough evidence to determine with a fair degree of certainty whether or not they were non-core marcher states.

 

Semiperipheral Marcher State (SMS)

Probably an SMS (Shang, Mauryan)

SMS and Internal Revolt (IR)

Peripheral Marcher State (PMS)

Mirror

Empire

Internal Revolt

(IR)

Internal

Dynastic

Change

6 1/3*

2

2

2 1/3*

2

0

6 1/3*

Table 2: Count of the 21 upsweep cases in Table 1 with regard Type of Territorial Upsweep

*Combined upsweeps that involved polities using different upsweep types are counted as portions of an upsweep. Thus The East Asian Qin/Western Zhou/Xiongnu upsweep that peaked in 176 BCE was a composite upsweep produced by three polities using three different types of upsweep. Each of these is counted as 1/3 in Table 2. 

 

The nine polity size upsweep cases that were not non-core conquests were (probably) all core states before the upsweep, but we would like to know what happened that made the unusually large territorial expansion possible.  These nine are: Lagash (probably a core state); Egyptian 2nd-5th dynasty; Egyptian 12th dynasty; Egyptian 18th dynasty; Neo-Assyrian; Western Han (the first time, part of the Qin, Western Han, Xiongnu composite upsweep); Western Han (the 2nd time in 50 BCE); Eastern Han; and the Sui-Tang. None of the upsweeps were due to internal class or ethnic revolts that established a new dynasty without any involvement of core/periphery relations, but two cases (Akkadian Empire and the Hyksos conquest of Egypt) involved ethnic revolt with non-core aspects.

Here we will focus on the cases in which there were territorial upsweeps, but no apparent involvement of non-core polities.  The Lagash upsweep peaked in 2400 BCE. From 2600-2400 BCE Lagash was a city-state of major importance in the Sumerian confederation even though its priest-kings were not mentioned on the Sumerian king list. Lagash is known for major art works and the construction of a significant irrigation system. It was on a major trade route. It was probably an internal dynastic struggle that led to the emergence of Eanatum,  a battle king that was able to conquer neighboring city-states (see Appendix). It was not a SMS because it was not a border state, but a part of the Sumerian core.

The Egyptian 2nd- 5th dynasties[17] The increase in territorial size was based on that  wave of unification and state formation of Egypt that started toward the end of the 2nd dynasty. [18] Van de Mieroop’s (2011:50) review of the Old Kingdom literature on the causes of the unification of lower and upper Egypt presents different views, concluding that the most likely scenario was one in which “a regional elite expanded its power gradually over the entirety of the country by eliminating other elites…” He says that scholars agree that territorial unification happened, but no one explains well why it happened.  He contends that the most likely of the competing interpretations focusses on internal state formation processes that led to territorial expansion rather than external causes.  Increased state formation toward the end of the 2nd dynasty, and territorial and state expansion in the 3rd through 5th dynasties are indicated by architectural evidence of the enlarging monumental/mortuary buildings (see also Beaujard 2112:176). [19]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4: Largest states and empires in the Egyptian PMN, 2850 BCE-1500 BCE

Egyptian 6th-12th dynasty. The territorial upsweep that peaked during the 12th dynasty in 1850 BCE began during the 6th dynasty during the First Intermediate period.  And the peak was followed by the beginning of a decline that began during the 12th dynasty (see Egypt data in the Appendix). The 11th Dynasty restored order following the Intermediate Period, and that the 12th Dynasty succeeded in reproducing that hegemony and further developing the state’s prevalence in maritime trade with their neighbors in the Aegean, Nubia/Kush, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the Red Sea (Beaujard’s (2012: 179 – 181). Beaujard’s (179 – 180) account of the 12th Dynasty (which reigned a few centuries prior to the merging of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian PMNs) poses Egypt as consolidated. There were no notable internal contenders to power over the Nile. The 12th dynasty was a major player in trade and diplomacy with polities from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and as far to the north as Palestine and Syria. Beaujard reports on the administrative aspects of taxation and the growing private sector during and after the 12th dynasty. The Hyksos upsweep was a ethnic revolt with non-core roots.    

Egyptian 18th dynasty. The upsweep that peaked twice during the 18th dynasty (in 1450 BCE and 1300 BCE at one square megameter) began during the Second Intermediate Period that followed the Hyksos upsweep. The trough of the Second Intermediate was from 1630 to 1570 BCE and the upswing began during the 17th dynasty.

More on 17th and 18th dynasties here

 Neo-Assyrian. Focusing on military technology Nefadov 2008 notes that the Neo-Assyrians adopted iron swords, helmets and armor from Urartu after 735 BCE while their Urartan rivals were subsequently smashed by the Cimmerians, who had cavalry.  The Neo-Assyrians invented a new three-line battle tactic using (line 1) shielded warriors (line 2) covered shooting bowmen, and then  heavy infantry with iron armor and weaponry (3rd line).). By 729 BCE they had captured lands from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. Later, in 7th century BCE, they conquered Egypt and  Elam as well. Neo-Assyrian King Tiglapatalasar III came to power through an anti-elite revolt that was supported by commoners, and introduced the principle of meritocratic promotion in the army and widened the state economy sector. War captives were settled on new lands (distant from their original homes), paid state taxes and could be drafted. All this stimulated the expansion of a centralized bureaucracy.  The Neo-Assyrians lost their military edge to the Scythians, who had cavalry, and from 623 BC were conquered by them.  So semiperipheral marcher Urartu fostered reactive and adaptive Neo-Assyrian technological and military innovations and organizational transformations.  The Neo-Assyrian upswing was stimulated by pressure from a semiperipheral marcher  state.  This is a variant of  Turchin’s “mirror empires” model discussed above (see https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/appendices/semipmarchers/semipmarchersapp.htm/#assyrian )

The first Western Han part of the composite upsweep that peaked in 176 BCE was not much of an upsweep. It was a takeover of the Qin Empire by one of the leading generals of Qin when the Qin Dynasty could not hold on and fell apart.  The two leading Qin generals fought it out for control and Liu An won and founded the Han Dynasty.  There was not a huge upsweep at first--they just took over Qin's territory. The biggest part of the upsweep was due to the Xiongnu peripheral marcher state.

Regarding the second upsweep carried out by the Western Han (peaking  in 50 BCE) the conquests began between 140 and 87 BCE when Han Emperor Wu Di conquered in all directions, taking much of the Xiongnu territory. This may have been an ME in which the expansion was stimulated by resistance from peripheral peoples.

Regarding the Eastern (Later) Han upsweep, there was not a big expansion at first, just reconquest of the Han Empire after a palace coup briefly launched a new dynasty (literally called that--Xin "new").  The Eastern (Later) Han finished the conquest of the Xiongnu, thus expanding the Han territory slowly and steadily but quite enormously.  This was an  IDC.

The Sui-Tang upsweep is a somewhat equivocal case.  The founder of Sui (which fell rapidly, lasting from 581 CE to 607CE) and the founder of Tang (which took over after the collapse of Sui, in 607) were both frontier generals of part-Turkic background.  The Sui and Tang generals were both marcher lords. They did not have their own states but did control the marchland armies. They had been running de facto independent fiefdoms in the wild northwest.  This is a case where non-coreness was involved in an upsweep, but not a classic semiperipheral or peripheral marcher state. Both Turkic marcher generals had been connected with the royal family of the Turkic Wei Dynasty of earlier centuries.[20]

Conclusions

We studied the twenty-one upsweeps in the territorial sizes of states and empires that account for the long-term evolutionary trend toward increasing size of polities. Of the twenty-one-upsweeps we found that 6 1/3 were definitely due to conquests by semiperipheral marcher states, two others were probably also SMSs and two involved a mix of semiperipheral marcher states and internal revolts. Two and 1/3 of the 21 territorial upsweeps were due to conquests by peripheral marcher states. The three peripheral marcher states (Xiongnu, Eastern Turks and Mongols) were Central Asian steppe pastoralist confederations that conquered large territories. 

So a total of 12 2/3 of the 21 probably involved the action of non-core polities. This is strong evidence for the importance of interpolity competition in processes of state expansion. But the theories of state formation that focus on internal (within polity) causes cannot be discarded. Both cases of internal revolt were found to have also involved SMSs, so none of the upsweeps was due solely to an internal revolt. Dynastic coups were the most frequent internal process that led to upsweeps. Six and 1/3 of the upsweeps were caused by internal dynastic shifts. The Sui-Tang upsweep was a dynastic coup carried out by Turkish generals leading armies from the Western edge of China, and so this instance involves an important element of semiperipheral relations even though it was not a semiperipheral marcher state conquest. The two cases that conform to Peter Turchin’s idea of Mirror Empires (MEs) also involved interstate competition, and so were not wholly internal processes.

            Despite that it is difficult to tell whether or not two of the upsweeps were due to the actions of semiperipheral marcher states  (Shang/Western Zhou and  Mauryan) there are enough fairly certain cases to demonstrate support for the hypothesis that over half of the polity upsweeps were the result of conquest by non-core polities. This is strong support for the idea that uneven develop and competition among polities are important causes of sociocultural evolution. 

            But 8 1/3 of the upsweeps were not due to the actions of a semiperipheral or peripheral marcher states.  This means that the theory of semiperipheral development does not explain everything about the events in which polity sizes significantly increased in geographical scale, but also that the semiperipheral development hypothesis cannot be ignored in any explanation of the long-term trend in the rise of polity sizes. 

            By focusing on upsweeps we have chosen the most dramatic instances in which the territorial sizes of polities have increased. This is a small number of instances (21) and so it would be valuable in the future to also examine the processes that caused the much larger number of upswings (Chase-Dunn and Inoue 2016).

            The external versus internal types of upsweep causation discussed above are two somewhat different versions of the same processes that produce state expansion and collapse. The internal demographic structural model in which states expand and then collapse due to changes in population pressure and the size of the elite is the variant that occurs when external threats are not strong. The non-core marcher and mirror empire external versions happen when the weakness of an older core state corresponds with the rising strength of non-core challengers. This representation of dynastic cycles is very close to the Ibn Khaldun model described above. Victor Lieberman’s model of political and cultural integration adds important elements to the demographic structural model by combining external and internal factors.

The interesting questions that remain involve issues of the tipping points that cause states to get stronger and weaker and questions of the synchrony or see-sawing of demographic cycles within connected and competing polities. Lieberman’s (2009) portrayal of the emergence of synchronous waves of integration is an important contribution that should be the focus of careful quantitative studies. These empirical issues would be informed by the development of simulation models with different levels of interaction such as those produced by the resilience literature in ecology (Gunderson and Holling 2002).

 

Appendix: Classification of 21 Empire Upsweeps with regard to status as produced by semiperipheral marcher states https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/appendices/semipmarchers/semipmarchersapp.htm

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[1] We use the term “polity” to generally denote a spatially bounded realm of sovereign authority such as a band, tribe, chiefdom, state or empire. World-systems are defined as human interpolity interaction networks that link trading, fighting and allying polities.

 

                [2] The long-term trend is masked in recent centuries by the waves of decolonization of the great colonial empires

                that had been the predominant form of core/periphery relations in the Europe-centered world-system. The number of          sovereign polities increased greatly as the Global South transitioned from colonies to formally sovereign members of the        international system of states. But this was also part of the emergence of a more uniform system of global governance      that is a continuation of the long-term trend noted by Carneiro (1978).

[3] The project web site is at https://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html. IROWS collaborates with SESHAT: The Global History Data Bank. The project data archive will be included in the data section of the World-Systems Archive (http://wsarch.ucr.edu/), a publically available archive that has been housed at the University of California-Riverside since 2000 CE

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

[5] A megameter is a metric unit of distance equal to 1000 kilometers or about 621 miles.

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

[7] We would like to include the Mesoamerican and the Andean systems as well as others, but quantitative estimates of the territorial sizes of polities are not currently available over enough time and with sufficient temporal resolution for the study of cycles and upward sweeps in these. Documentary evidence is required for the estimation of the territorial sizes of polities. Archaeological evidence by itself cannot generally be used to determine the territorial sizes of polities with enough temporal resolution for the identification of polity size upsweeps.

[8] Conquest is not the only road to state formation, as is illustrated by the partial success of the process of European unification since World War II. This is important for thinking about the potential for future global state formation.

 

            [9] Less well known are instances in which core chiefdoms succeeded in extracting resources from distant polities such as         existed in the indigenous precontact Chesapeake Bay and the Pacific Northwest (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2014).

 

[10] See also Pekka Hamalainen (2008) on the rise of a successful Comanche steppe empire in North America.

[11] The intellectual history of the hypothesis of semiperipheral development is reviewed in Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 5).

12. While the empire conquered by Philip and Alexander of Macedon was definitely a semiperipheral marcher state, it was not a polity upsweep because its peak size in 311 BCE (4.4 square megameters) was the same as that of the Persian Empire in 335 BCE. An upsweep must be 1/3 higher than the average if the three earlier peaks. 

[13] Dilmun and the Old Assyrian City-State (Assur) functioned similarly in the Bronze Age. Malacca was such in Southeast Asia, and Osaka, though it was never had autonomous sovereignty, played a similar role in Japan. These were the first capitalist states in which state power was mainly used to facilitate profit making rather than the extraction of taxes and tribute.

 

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

[15] Other types of dynastic upswings are known from the state formation literature and would need to be added in a more complete study of upswings.  For example a core state restoration that involves the restoration of domination by an older core state that had been conquered by a semiperipheral or peripheral polity (e.g. the Third Dynasty of Ur -- a Sumerian restoration in Mesopotamia -- or the Ming Dynasty in China in which the Han Chinese threw out the Mongol Yuan rulers.  Wilkinson (1991) also notes the phenomenon of “shuttling” in which the dominant power in a core region shifts back and forth between two locations.  He notes this in both Mesopotamia and Egypt.

 

[16] Appendix: Classification of Empire Upsweeps https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/appendices/semipmarchers/semipmarchersapp.htm

 

[17] David Wilkinson’s (1991) coding and summary of the sequence of rises and falls and the movements of capitals in Egypt is

still the best structural overview of core shifts and shuttling in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

[18] We do not use Taagepera’s (1978b) territorial size estimates before 2850 BCE because there is no documentary evidence that can indicate the extent of political control. Earlier  waves of state formation in the predynastic period and may have involved interactions between horticulturalists along the Nile and steppe (sahel) pastoralists in the adjacent regions that had much greater rain fall in the fourth millennium BCE than now (Wengrow 2006)

 

 

[19] Peter Turchin (2014) interprets the pattern by which upper (southern) Egypt was the locus of state expansion in terms of his model of mirror-empire, in which a core state that is under pressure from a pastoralist steppe empire carries out a territorial expansion. If this is so core/periphery relations were involved even though it was not a classical semiperipheral marcher state conquest.

 

[20] The SetPol project also uses estimates of city population sizes to examine and compare different regional interaction systems (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Manning 2002; Inoue et al 2015).  We found a greater rate of urban cycles in the Western (Central) PMN than in the East Asian PMN, which supports the usual notion that the West was less stable than the East. And our finding that the Central PMN experienced two urban collapses while the Eastern PMN experienced downsweeps, but not collapses, also supports the idea of greater stability in the East. We also found that nine of the eighteen urban upsweeps that we identified were produced by semiperipheral development and eight directly followed, and were caused by, upsweeps in the territorial sizes of polities.