The Development of World-Systems
Emperor Bonaparte
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Hiroko Inoue,
Teresa Neal and Evan Heimlich
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California, Riverside
An
earlier version was presented at the Fourth European Congress on World and
Global History,
September
6, 2014, École Normale Supérieure, Paris.; draft v. 9-16-14, 10590 words
This is
IROWS Working Paper #86 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows86/irows86.htm
v.
1-1-15, 10422 words
Abstract: This essay discusses conceptual issues that arise from the study of
human social change. The comparative and
evolutionary world-systems perspective is explained as a theoretical research
program for studying long-term social change. This approach employs an
anthropological framework of comparison for studying world-systems, including
those of hunter-gatherers. Problems of spatially bounding whole human
interaction networks are addressed and the utility of a comparative approach to
the study of hierarchical relations among human polities (core/periphery
relations) is examined. The hypothesis of semiperipheral development is
explained and criteria for empirically identifying semiperipheral regions are
specified. World history and global history are the most important evidential
bases, along with prehistoric archaeology, for the comparative study of
world-systems. Getting the grounds of comparison right by correctly
conceptualizing the spatial units of analysis and paying careful attention to
core/periphery relations are crucial issues in the effort to comprehend and
explain the development of world-systems.
The
sociology of development, broadly construed, is the study and explanation of
human social change in general, including the emergence of social complexity
and hierarchy during, and since, the Stone Age. Most of the social science
literature has focused on the transition from “tradition” to “modernity,” which
are usually understood as characteristics of national societies such as urbanization,
industrialization, and the demographic transition. The rise of globalization
studies has shifted the focus to an emerging world society in which
nation-states are understood as interacting organizations that claim
sovereignty over a delimited territory and national societies are seen to be
highly interdependent on the larger global system. The world-systems perspective on modernity
claims that this high degree of interdependence is not a recent phenomenon and
that an important dimension of the global system has been, and continues to be,
its stratification structure that is organized as a core/periphery hierarchy in
which some national societies have far more power and wealth than others.
The world-systems
perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 and the anti-war
movement that produced a generation of scholars who saw the peoples of Global
South (then called the “Third World”) as more than an underdeveloped backwater.
It became widely understood that a global power structure existed and that the
peoples of the non-core had been active participants in their own liberation.
The history of colonialism and decolonization were seen to have importantly
shaped the structures and institutions of the whole global system. A more
profound awareness of Eurocentrism was accompanied by the realization that most
national histories had been written as if each country were on the moon. World
history courses had introduced high school and college students to the stories
of non-European civilizations and global history. The nation state as an
inviolate, pristine unit of analysis was now seen to be an inadequate model for
the sociology of development.
This awareness of
a larger global context spread widely as globalization itself became a focus of
public and scholarly discourse. Some versions claimed that the world was now
flat, and that international hierarchy is a thing of the past that has been
transcended by instantaneous communication and the world market. Some of the global historians have claimed,
along with the theorists of a new global stage of capitalism, that the world
had, in the last decades of the twentieth century, transitioned from a set of
weakly linked national economies to a recently emerged single global economy.
Instead, the world-systems perspective sees waves of integration
(globalization) that have occurred throughout human history (Chase-Dunn 1999;
Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2014) and the contemporary reproduction of global
inequalities that continue to make global collective action extremely
difficult. We agree with most of Michael Mann’s (2013:3) criticisms of the
“hyperglobalizers” who see a recent radical transformation to a completely
different kind of global social order. Mann’s (2013) analysis of four
inter-related but relatively autonomous strands of political, military,
economic and ideological globalization since 1945 is substantially accurate
despite his metatheoretical presumption that there is no single integrated
global system.
In this essay we
intend to clear up several common misunderstandings about the world-systems
perspective[1] and we
introduce and discuss the conceptual basis for comparing the contemporary
global system with earlier small and middle-sized regional world-systems. It is our contention that the world-systems
perspective is a still-emerging theoretical research program that has great
potential for enhancing our comprehension of the causes of long-term social
change and also as a framework that will be useful to world citizens who are
trying to deal with the problems that our species has shaped for itself in the
21st century.
The two main conceptual issues we shall consider
are:
·
core/periphery relations, and
·
the spatial bounding of whole world-systems
The comparative
world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining social change that
focuses on whole interpolity systems rather than single polities. The main
insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows,
alliances, and fighting) have woven polities and cultures together since the
beginning of human sociocultural evolution.[2] Explanations of
social change need to take whole interpolity systems (world-systems) as the
units that evolve. But interpolity interaction networks were rather small when
transportation was mainly a matter of carrying goods on one’s back or in small
boats. Globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification of
larger interaction networks, has been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly
and in waves (Chase-Dunn 2006; Beaujard 2010; Jennings 2010).
World-systems are
whole systems of interacting polities and settlements.[3] Systemness means that these polities and
settlements are interacting with one another in important ways – interactions
are two-way, necessary, structured, regularized and reproductive. Systemic interconnectedness exists when
interactions importantly influence the lives of people and are consequential
for social continuity or social change. All premodern world-systems extended
over only parts of the Earth. The word “world” refers to the importantly
connected interaction networks in which people live, whether these are
spatially small or large.
There
is also the question of endogenous (internal) systems versus exogenous
(external) impacts. The notion of systemness requires distinction between
endogenous processes that are regularly interactive and systemic, on the one
hand, and exogenous impacts that may have large effects on a system, but are
not part of that system. The diffusion of genetic materials and technologies
can have profound long distance effects even though there are no regularized or
frequent interactions. But single events that have such consequences should not
be considered to be part of a sociocultural system. Climatic changes often have important impacts
on human societies, but we do not try to include them as endogenous variables
in our models of social systems until climate change becomes anthropogenic.
Analogously collision with large asteroids have had huge consequences for
biological evolution, but biologists do not include these as endogenous factors
in biological evolution. Similarly, long distance diffusion of ideas,
technologies, plants and animals is an important process that needs to be
studied in its own right, and its impact on local systems must be acknowledged
and understood, but models of sociocultural change must distinguish between
endogenous processes and exogenous impacts.
Endogeniety vs. exogenous factors is the basic theoretical and empirical
issue that must be sorted out in specification of systemic wholeness.
Only the modern world-system has become a global
(Earth-wide) system composed of national societies and their states. It is a
single global economy composed of international trade and capital flows,
transnational corporations that produce products on several continents, as well
as all the economic transactions that occur within countries and at
local levels. The whole world-system is more than just international relations.
It is the whole system of human interactions. The world economy is now all the
economic interactions of all the people on Earth, not just international trade
and investment.
The modern
world-system is structured politically as an interstate system – a system of
competing and allying states. Political Scientists commonly call this the
international system, and it is the main focus of the field of International
Relations. Some of these states are much more powerful than others, but the
main organizational feature of the world political system is that it is multicentric.
There is, as yet, no world state. Rather there is a system of states. This is a
fundamentally important feature of the modern system and of most earlier
regional world-systems as well.
When we compare
different kinds of world-systems it is important to use concepts that are
applicable to all of them. “Polity” is a general term that means any
organization with a single authority that claims control over a territory or a
group of people.[4]
Polities include bands, tribes and chiefdoms as well as states and empires. All
world-systems are composed of multiple interacting polities. Thus we can
fruitfully compare the modern interstate system with earlier interpolity
systems in which there were tribes or chiefdoms, but no states.[5]
So the modern
world-system is now a global economy with a global political system (the modern
interstate system). It also includes all the cultural aspects and interaction
networks of the human population of the Earth. Culturally the modern system is
composed of: several civilizational traditions, (e.g. Islam, Christendom,
Hinduism, Confucianism, etc.), nationally-defined cultural entities -- nations
(and these are composed of class and functional subcultures, e.g. lawyers,
technocrats, bureaucrats, etc.), and the cultures of indigenous and
minority ethnic groups within states. The modern system is multicultural in the
sense that important political and economic interaction networks connect people
who have rather different languages, religions and other cultural aspects. Most
earlier world-systems have also been multicultural.[6]
But the modern
system also has a single geoculture that has been emerging since the late 18th
century in the context of the
multicultural situation depicted above (Wallerstein 2011b; Meyer 2009). This
geoculture is most importantly structured by the core, but it has also evolved
in the context of a series of world revolutions in which the peoples of the
non-core have contested the global power structure, and these have had
important effects on the content of the geoculture.
One of the
important systemic features of the modern system is the rise and fall of
hegemonic core powers – the so-called “hegemonic sequence” (Wallerstein 1984;
Chase-Dunn 1998). A hegemon is a core state that has a significantly greater
amount of economic power than any other state, and that takes on the political
role of system leader. In the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic performed
the role of hegemon in the Europe-centered system, while Great Britain was the
hegemon of the nineteenth century, and the United States has been the hegemon
in the twentieth century. Hegemons provide leadership and order for the
interstate system and the world economy. But the normal operating processes of
the modern system – uneven economic development and competition among states –
make it difficult for hegemons to sustain their dominant positions, and so they
tend to decline. Thus the structure of the core oscillates back and forth
between unipolar hegemony and a situation in which several competing core
states have roughly similar amounts of power and are contending for hegemony –
i.e. multipolar hegemonic rivalry (see Figure 1).
Figure
1: Unipolar Hegemony and Multipolar Hegemonic Rivalry in the Core Zone
So the modern world-system is composed of states that are linked to
one another by the world economy and other interaction networks. Earlier
world-systems were also composed of polities, but the interaction networks that
linked these polities were not intercontinental in scale until the expansion of
the Indian Ocean centered system and then European expansion to the Americas in
the long sixteenth century CE. Before that world-systems were smaller regional
affairs. But these had been growing in size with the expansion of trade
networks and long-distance military campaigns for millennia (Bentley 1993;
Beaujard 2005).
Core/Periphery Relations
The notion of
core/periphery relations has been a central concept in both the modern
world-system perspective (Wallerstein 2011a) and in the comparative
world-systems perspective (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). 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.[7] Chase-Dunn and
Hall (1997) redefined the core/periphery distinction to make it more useful for
comparing the modern world-system with earlier regional world-systems.
The intent of
using the word “core” rather than “center” is to clearly signal the awareness
that most interpolity hierarchies are multicentric. There is a region or zone
at the top layer of the hierarchy that is occupied by a set of allying and
competing polities. All hierarchical world-systems go through a cycle of rise
and fall in which a most powerful polity in the core grows and then
declines. But most systems remain
multicentric. The exceptions are what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997, see also
Scheidel 2009) call “core-wide empires” in which a single polity conquers and
rules an entire core region. These have been rare. Large empires that claim to
control the universe rarely control all the core polities in their interaction
system. Even the Roman Empire never conquered the Parthian Empire.
Figure 2: The Structure of a Core/Periphery Hierarchy
The modern
world-system has been, and is still, importantly structured as a core/periphery
hierarchy in which some regions contain economically and militarily powerful
states while other regions contain polities that are much less powerful and
less developed. The countries that are called “advanced,” in the sense that
they have high levels of economic development, skilled labor forces, high
levels of income and powerful, well-financed states, are the core powers of the
modern system. The modern core includes the United States, and the countries of
Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
In the
contemporary periphery we have relatively weak states that are not
strongly supported by the populations within them, and have little power
relative to other states in the system. The colonial empires of the European
core states dominated most of the modern periphery until waves of
decolonization swept away the colonial empires starting in the late 18th
century. Peripheral regions are economically less developed in the sense that
the economy is composed of relatively less capital-intensive forms of
agriculture and industry. Some
industries in peripheral countries, such as oil extraction or mining, may be
capital-intensive, but these sectors are often controlled by core capital.
In the past, peripheral
countries have been primarily exporters of agricultural and mineral raw
materials. But even when they have developed some industrial production, this
has usually been less capital intensive and using less skilled labor than
production processes in the core. The contemporary peripheral countries are
most of the countries in Africa and many of the countries in Asia and Latin
America – for example Bangladesh, Senegal, Haiti and Bolivia.
Figure 3: The contemporary global hierarchy of national societies: core, semiperiphery and periphery (Source: Bond 2013)
The
core/periphery hierarchy in the modern world-system is a system of
stratification in which socially and ecologically structured inequalities are
reproduced by the institutional features of the system. The periphery is not
“catching up” with the core. Rather both core and peripheral regions are
developing, but most core states are staying well ahead of most peripheral
states. Though there is some upward and downward mobility, the overall structure
of inequality has remained quite stable.
There is also a stratum of countries that are in between the core and
the periphery that is called the semiperiphery. The semiperiphery in the
modern system includes countries that have intermediate levels of economic
development or a balanced mix of developed and less developed regions. The
semiperiphery includes large countries that have political/military power as a
result of their large size (e.g. Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, China, India), and
smaller countries that are relatively more developed than those in the
periphery (e.g. South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, see Figure 3).
The exact
boundaries between the core, semiperiphery and periphery are unimportant
because the main point is that there is a continuum of economic and
political/military power that constitutes the core-periphery hierarchy. It does
not matter exactly where we draw lines across this continuum in order to
categorize countries. Indeed we could as well make four or seven categories
instead of three. The categories are only a convenient terminology for pointing
to the fact of international inequality and for indicating that the middle of
this hierarchy may be an important location for processes of social change.
There have been a
few cases of upward and downward mobility in the core/periphery hierarchy,
though most countries simply run hard to stay in the same relative positions
that they have long had. The most spectacular case of upward mobility in the
modern core/periphery hierarchy is the United States. Over the last 300 years
the territory that became the United States moved from being outside of the
Europe-centered system (a separate continent containing several regional
world-systems), to the periphery in the colonial era, to
the semiperiphery in the first half of the 19th century, to the core
by 1880, and then to the position of hegemonic core state in the 20th
century, and now its hegemony is slowly declining. An example of downward
mobility is the United Kingdom of Great Britain -- the hegemon of the
nineteenth century and now just another core society.
The contemporary
global stratification system is a continuum of economic and political-military
power that is reproduced by the normal operations of the system. In such a
hierarchy there are countries that are difficult to categorize. For example,
most oil-exporting countries have very high levels of GNP per capita, but their
economies do not produce high technology products that are typical of core
countries. They have wealth but not development. The point here is that the
categories (core, periphery and semiperiphery) are just a convenient set of
terms for pointing to different locations on a continuous and multidimensional
hierarchy of power. It is not necessary to have each case fit neatly into a
box. The boxes are only conceptual tools for analyzing the unequal distribution
of power among countries.
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.
In
order to do this it is helpful to distinguish between core/periphery
differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy. “Core/periphery differentiation” means that
societies with different degrees of population density, polity size and
internal hierarchy are interacting with one another. As soon as we find village
dwellers interacting with nomadic neighbors we have core/periphery
differentiation. “Core/periphery
hierarchy” refers to the nature of the relationships between societies. This kind of hierarchy exists when some
societies are exploiting or dominating other societies. Examples of
intersocietal domination and exploitation would be the British colonization and
deindustrialization of India, or the conquest and subjugation of Mesoamerica
and the Andean region by the Spaniards. Core/periphery hierarchy is not unique
to the modern Europe-centered world-system of recent centuries. Both the Roman
and the Aztec empires conquered and exploited peripheral peoples as well as
adjacent core states.
Distinguishing
between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy allows us
to deal with situations in which larger and more powerful societies are
interacting with smaller ones, but are not exploiting them. It also allows us
to examine cases in which smaller, less dense societies may be exploiting or
dominating larger societies. This latter situation definitely occurred in the
long and consequential interaction between the nomadic horse pastoralists of
Central Asia and the agrarian states and empires of China and Western Asia. The
most famous case was that of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, but
confederations of Central Asian steppe nomads managed to extract tribute from
agrarian states long before the rise of Mongols (Barfield 1993; Honeychurch
2013).
The
question of core/periphery status also needs to be considered with regard to
different spatial scales of interaction. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) note that
regional world-systems may have important interaction networks that have different
spatial scales (see below). They adopt a “place-centric” approach to spatially
bounding interaction networks that begins from a focal settlement or polity.
The network is spatially bounded by considering how many indirect links are
needed to include all the interactions that have an important impact on the
reproduction or transformation of institutions at the focal place. Bulk goods
networks, which were usually relatively small, and political-military networks
(interpolity systems), which were usually somewhat larger, were important in
all systems, and prestige goods networks, which were often much larger, were
important in some systems but not others. The issue of core/periphery status
always needs to be asked for the bulk goods and political-military networks,
and also for the prestige goods level if prestige goods played an important
role in socio-cultural reproduction or change.
Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems
Whole interaction networks are composed of
regular and repeated interactions among individuals and groups. Interaction may
involve trade, communication, threats, alliances, migration, marriage, gift
giving or participation in information networks such as radio, television,
telephone conversations, and email. Conflict is also an important form of
sociation both within and between polities. Warfare, ranging from ritual
contests to ethnocide, has been an important player in the group selection
process that produces sociocultural evolution (Morris 2014, Turchin 2011).
Important interaction networks are those that affect peoples’ everyday lives,
their access to food and necessary raw materials, their conceptions of who they
are, and their security from, or vulnerability to, threats and violence.
World-systems are fundamentally composed of interaction networks.
One big
difference between the modern world-system and earlier systems is the spatial
scale of different types of interaction networks. In the modern global system
most of the important interaction networks are themselves global in scale. But
in earlier smaller systems there was a significant difference in spatial scale
between networks in which food and basic raw materials were exchanged and much
larger networks of the exchange of prestige goods or luxuries. Different kinds of important interaction had different spatial
scales. Food and basic raw materials we call “bulk
goods” because they have a low value per unit of weight. It is uneconomical to
carry bulk foods very far under premodern conditions of transportation.
Imagine that the
only type of transportation available is people carrying goods on their backs
(or heads). This is a situation that actually existed everywhere until the
domestication of beasts of burden. Under these conditions a person can carry,
say, 30 kilograms of food. Imagine that this carrier is eating the food as s/he
goes. So after a few days walking all the food will be consumed. This is the
economic limit of food transportation under these conditions of transportation.
This does not mean that food will never be transported farther than this
distance, but there would have to be an important reason for moving it beyond
its economic range.
Prestige goods are items that have great value
and small size or items that can easily be transported long distances intact
and typically hold or increase their value in transit (e.g. spices, jade,
jewels or bullion). Prestige goods have a much larger spatial range than do
bulk goods because a small amount of such a good may be exchanged for a great
deal of food. This is why prestige goods networks are normally much larger than
bulk goods networks. A network does not usually end as long as there are people
with whom one might trade. Indeed most early trade was what is called
“down-the-line” trade in which goods were passed from group to group. For any
particular group the effective extent of its
trade network is that point beyond which nothing that happens will
affect the group of origin.
In order to bound
interaction networks we need to pick a place from which to start – the so-called
“place-centric approach.” If we go looking for actual breaks in interaction
networks we will usually not find them, because almost all groups of people
interact with their neighbors. But if we focus upon a single settlement, for
example the indigenous village of Onancock on the Eastern shore of the
Chesapeake Bay before the arrival of the Europeans in the 17th
century CE (near the boundary between what are now the states of Virginia and
Maryland in the United States), we can determine the spatial scale of the bulk
goods interaction network by finding out how far food moved to and from our
focal village.[8]
Food came to Onancock from some maximum distance. A bit beyond that were groups
that were trading food to groups that were directly sending food to Onancock.
If we allow two indirect jumps we are probably far enough from Onancock so that
no matter what happens (e.g. a food shortage or surplus), it would not have
affected the supply of food in Onancock. This outer limit of Onancock’s
indigenous bulk goods network probably included villages at the very southern
and northern ends of the Chesapeake Bay.
Onancock’s
prestige goods network was much larger because prestige goods move farther
distances. Indeed, copper that was in use by the indigenous peoples of the
Chesapeake may have come from as far away as Lake Superior. In between the size
of bulk goods networks (BGNs) and prestige goods networks (PGNs) are the
interaction networks in which polities make war and ally with one another.
These are called political-military networks (PMNs). PMNs
are interpolity (interstate) systems. In the case of the Chesapeake
world-system at the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth
century Onancock was part of a district chiefdom in a PMN of multi-village
chiefdoms. Across the bay on the Western shore were at least two larger
polities, the Powhatan and the Conoy paramount chiefdoms (Rountree 1993). These
were core chiefdoms that were collecting tribute from a number of smaller
district chiefdoms. Onancock was part of an interchiefdom system of allying and
war-making polities. The boundaries of that network included some indirect
links, just as the trade network boundaries did. Thus the political-military
network (PMN) of which Onancock was the focal place extended to the Delaware
Bay in the north and into what is now the state of North Carolina to the
south. Information, like a prestige good, is light relative to its value.
Information may travel far along trade routes and beyond the range of goods.
Thus information networks (INs) are usually as large, or even larger, than
Prestige Goods nets (PGNs).
A general picture
of the spatial relationships between different kinds of interaction networks is
presented in Figure 4. The actual spatial scale of important interaction needs
to be determined for each world-system we study, but Figure 4 shows what is
generally the case – that BGNs (bulk goods nets) are smaller than PMNs
(political-military nets), and these are in turn smaller than PGNs (prestige
goods nets) and INs (information nets).
Figure 4: The Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems
Defined in the way that we have above,
world-systems have grown from small to large over the past twelve millennia as
polities, and interpolity systems have gotten larger, more complex and more
hierarchical.
This spatial growth of systems has involved the
expansion of some and the incorporation of some into others. The processes of
incorporation have occurred in several ways as systems distant from one another
have linked their interaction networks. Because interaction nets are of
different sizes, it is the largest ones that come into contact first. Thus
information and prestige goods link distant groups long before they participate
in the same political-military or bulk goods networks. The processes of
expansion and incorporation brought different groups of people together and
made the organization of larger and more hierarchical societies possible. It is
in this sense that globalization has been going on for thousands of years.
Using the conceptual apparatus for spatially
bounding world-systems outlined above we can construct spatio-temporal
chronographs for how the interaction networks of the human population changed
their spatial scales to eventuate in the single global political economy of
today. Figure 5 uses PMNs as the unit of analysis to show how a "Central"
PMN, composed of the merging of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian PMNs in about
1500 BCE, eventually incorporated all the other PMNs into itself.
Figure 5:
Chronograph of PMNs [adapted from Wilkinson (1987)]
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod’s important 1989 study
of the multicentric Eurasian world-systems of the l3th century was a very
valuable and inspiring contribution. The most important theoretical issue
brought forth by Abu-Lughod’s study concerns differences between her approach
and that of Immanuel Wallerstein (2011a [1974]) regarding the spatial bounding
of world-systems (see Boles 2012). Abu-Lughod used interaction networks, mainly
long-distance trade, whereas Wallerstein uses a hierarchical regional division
of labor (see Wallerstein 1995). The upshot of this dispute is that both
conceptual approaches have proven to have productive uses for explaining the
causes of world-systems evolution. Wallerstein’s (2011a: Chapter 6) fascinating
analysis of why Russia was an “external arena” in the sixteenth century despite
that it was exporting the same goods to Europe as were being exported by
peripheralized Poland, is a fascinating case in favor of his method of
bounding. But Abu-Lughod’s focus on
trade, especially when combined with a consideration of geopolitical
interaction among polities (see Wilkinson 1987; Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson 2003),
is also a fruitful method that facilitates the comparative study of regional
world-systems small and large. Another
way in which Abu-Lughod helped to clear the way forward in world-systems
analysis was by rejecting the idea of the ancient hyperglobalists that there
has always been a single global (Earth-wide) system (ala Frank and Gills
1994; Modelski 2003 and Lenski 2005). She agreed with Wallerstein that as we go
back in time there were multiple regional whole systems that should be studied
separately and compared. Things would be much simpler if it made sense to use
the whole Earth as the unit of analysis since the humans came out of Africa.
The ancient hyperglobalists are correct that there has been a single global
network for millennia because all human groups interact with their neighbors
and so they are indirectly connected with all others. But this ignores the
issue of the fall-off of interaction effects discussed above. Frank
and Gills (1994) contended that there had been a single global system since the
rise of cities and states in Mesopotamia, though later they admitted that the
Americas were largely disconnected from Afroeurasia before 1492 CE. But if we
read Frank and Gills as studying the important continuities of the Central PMN
and the Eurasian PGN, as discussed above, much of their analysis of
core/periphery relations is quite valuable. They also raised the important
issue of the evolution of modes of accumulation, claiming that their had been a
“capitalist-imperialist” mode in the Bronze Age with alternating periods in
which tribute-taking and market based profit-making had been predominant (see
also Eklhom and Friedman 1982). This debate is far from over.
World-system Cycles: Rise-and-Fall and Pulsations
Comparative
research reveals that all world-systems exhibit cyclical processes of change.
There are two major cyclical phenomena: the rise and fall of large
polities, and pulsations in the spatial extent and intensity of trade
networks. "Rise and fall" corresponds to changes in the degree
of centralization of political/military power in a set of polities – an
“international” system. It is a question of the relative distribution of power across a set of interacting polities.
All world-systems
in which there are hierarchical polities experience a cycle in which relatively
larger polities grow in power and size and then decline. This applies to
interchiefdom systems as well as interstate systems, to systems composed of
empires, and to the modern rise and fall of hegemonic core powers (e.g. Britain
and the United States). Though very egalitarian and small scale systems such as
the sedentary foragers of Northern California do not display a cycle of rise
and fall, they do experience exchange network pulsations (Chase-Dunn and Mann,
1998:140-141).
All systems,
including even very small and egalitarian ones, exhibit cyclical expansions and
contractions in the spatial extent and intensity of exchange networks. We call
this sequence of trade expansion and contraction pulsation. Different
kinds of trade (especially bulk goods trade vs. prestige goods trade) usually
have different spatial scales. In the modern global system large trade networks
cannot get spatially larger because they are already global in extent. But they can get denser and more intense
relative to smaller networks of exchange. A good part of what has been called
globalization is simply the intensification of larger interaction networks
relative to the intensity of smaller ones. This kind of integration is often
understood to be an upward trend that has attained its greatest peak in recent
decades of so-called global capitalism. But research on changes in the level of
trade and investment globalization shows that there have been two and ½ recent
waves of integration, one in the last half of the nineteenth century and the
most recent since World War II (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000).
The simplest
hypothesis regarding the temporal relationships between rise-and-fall and
pulsation is that they occur in tandem. Whether or not this is so, and how it
might differ in distinct types of world-systems, is a set of problems that are
amenable to empirical research.
Chase-Dunn and
Hall (1997) have contended that the causal processes of rise and fall differ
depending on the predominant mode of accumulation. One big difference between
the rise and fall of empires and the rise and fall of modern hegemons is in the
degree of centralization achieved within the core. Tributary systems alternate
back and forth between a structure of multiple and competing core states on the
one hand and core-wide (or nearly core-wide) empires on the other. The modern
interstate system experiences the rise and fall of hegemons, but the efforts
that have been made to take over the other core states to form a core-wide
empire have always failed in the modern system. This is the case mainly because
modern hegemons are pursuing a capitalist, rather than a tributary form of
accumulation.
Analogously, rise
and fall works somewhat differently in interchiefdom systems because the
institutions that facilitate the extraction of resources from distant groups
are less fully developed in chiefdom systems. David G. Anderson's (1994) study
of the rise and fall of Mississippian chiefdoms in the Savannah River valley
provides an excellent and comprehensive review of the anthropological and
sociological literature about what Anderson calls "cycling" -- the
processes by which a chiefly polity extended control over adjacent chiefdoms
and erected a two-tiered hierarchy of administration over the tops of local
communities. At a later point these regionally centralized chiefly polities
disintegrated back toward a system of smaller and less hierarchical polities.
Chiefs relied
more completely on hierarchical kinship relations, control of ritual
hierarchies, and control of prestige goods imports than do the rulers of true
states. These chiefly techniques of power are all highly dependent on normative
integration and ideological consensus. States developed specialized
organizations for extracting resources that chiefdoms lacked -- standing armies
and bureaucracies. And states and empires in the tributary world-systems were
more dependent on the projection of armed force over great distances than
modern hegemonic core states have been. The development of commodity production
and mechanisms of financial control, as well as further development of
bureaucratic techniques of power, have allowed modern hegemons to extract resources
from far-away places with much less overhead cost.
The development
of techniques of power has made core/periphery relations ever more important
for competition among core powers and has altered the way in which the
rise-and-fall process works in other respects. Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997:Chapter 6) argued that population growth in interaction with the
environment, and changes in productive technology and social structure produce
sociocultural evolution that is marked by cycles and periodic jumps. This is
because each world-system oscillates around a central tendency due both to
internal instabilities and environmental fluctuations. Occasionally, on one of
the upswings, people solve systemic problems in a new way that allows
substantial expansion. We want to explain expansions, evolutionary changes in
systemic logic (Chase-Dunn 2014), and collapses. That is the point of comparing
world-systems.
The
multiscalar regional method of bounding world-systems as nested interaction
networks outlined above is complementary with a multiscalar temporal analysis
of the kind suggested by Fernand Braudel’s (1972,1984) work. Temporal depth,
the longue duree, needs to be combined with analyses of short-run and
middle-run processes to fully understand social change.
Figure
6 below depicts the coming together of the East Asian and the West
Asian/Mediterranean systems. Both the PGNs and the PMNs are shown, as are the
pulsations and rise and fall sequences. The PGNs linked intermittently and then
joined. The Mongol conquerors linked the PMNs briefly in the thirteenth
century, but the Eastern and Western PMNs were not permanently linked until the
Europeans and Euro-Americans established Asian treaty ports in the nineteenth
century.
Figure 6: East/West Pulsations and Merger
Semiperipheral Development
The semiperiphery
concept was originally developed to study the modern world-system (Wallerstein
2011). But it too has been expanded for use in comparing different kinds of
systems. For Wallerstein the
semiperiphery is a middle stratum in the global hierarchy that helps keep the
system from breaking down due to polarization. But Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997)
claimed that semiperipheral societies have often been agents of change in both
the modern and earlier systems.
Hub theories of
innovation have been popular among world historians (e.g. McNeill and McNeill
2003; Christian 2004) and human ecologists (Hawley 1950). These hold that new
ideas and institutions emerge in central settlements where information
crossroads are located. The mixing and recombination of ideas and information
facilitates the emergence of new formulations. The hub theory is undoubtedly
partly correct, but it cannot explain some of the long-term patterns of human
sociocultural evolution, because if a large 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 Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. Mesopotamia is now Iraq.
Mesopotamia had 100% of the world’s largest settlements and the most powerful
polities on Earth in the Early Bronze Age. Now it has none of these. All of the
regional world-systems have undergone a process of uneven development in which
the old centers were replaced by new centers out on the edge.[9]
Chase-Dunn and
Hall (1997) asserted it had most often been polities out on the edge (in
semiperipheral regions) that had transformed the institutional structures and
accomplished the upward sweeps. This hypothesis is part of a larger claim that
is people in semiperipheral locations that usually play the transformative
roles that cause the emergence of greater sociocultural complexity and
hierarchy within world-systems. This hypothesis of semiperipheral development
is an important justification supporting the claim that world-systems rather
than single polities are the right unit of analysis for explaining human
socio-cultural evolution.
The hub theory of innovation does not well account
for the spatially uneven nature of sociocultural evolution. The cutting edges
of power and scale move. Polities out on the edge that are able to conquer
large territories or to rewire networks and to expand their spatial scale often
transcend old centers. This is due to two things. Competitive success is not
only about where new and adaptive technologies, ideas and organizational forms
are created. It is also importantly about which polities invest in and
implement these innovations. Innovations do often emerge outside of large
networks nodes. New weapons, military techniques and religions often emerge
from peripheral or semiperipheral regions (e.g. Hamalainen 2008). But it is
implementation rather than innovation that is the more important aspect that
explains the phenomenon of semiperipheral development. Polities in semiperipheral
locations often implement innovations that originated elsewhere. This is an important part of the explanation
of semiperipheral development.
Semiperipheral
development has taken various forms: semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms,
semiperipheral marcher states, semiperipheral capitalist city-states, the
peripheral and then semiperipheral position of Europe in the larger
Afroeurasian PGN, modern semiperipheral nation-states that have risen to
hegemony (the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States), and
contemporary peoples in semiperipheral locations that are engaging in, and
supporting, novel and potentially transformative movements.
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 largely due to the “marcher state advantage.” Being out on
the edge of a core region of competing states allows more maneuverability
because it is not necessary to defend the rear. This geopolitical advantage
allows military resources to be concentrated on vulnerable neighbors. Peter
Turchin (2003) has argued that the relevant process is one in which group
solidarity is enhanced by being on a “metaethnic frontier” in which the clash
of contending cultures produces strong cohesion and cooperation within a
frontier society, allowing it to perform great feats. Carroll Quigley (1961)
distilled a somewhat similar theory from the works of Arnold Toynbee. Another
factor affecting within-polity solidarity is the different degrees of internal
stratification usually found in premodern world-systems between the core and
the semiperiphery. Core polities develop old, crusty and bloated elites who
rely on mercenaries and “foreigners” as subalterns, while semiperipheral
leaders are often charismatic heroes who are strongly supported by their
soldiers and citizens. Less stratification often facilitates greater group
solidarity. And this may be an important part of the semiperipheral advantage.
But Quigley 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 geographical
disadvantages. Patrick Kirch relies on this idea of ecological marginality in
his depiction of the process by which semiperipheral marcher chiefs often are
the conquerors that unify 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 polities to transform and to dominate their world-systems.
As
we have already said, the hypothesis of semiperipheral development claims that
many of those innovations that make it possible for world-systems to get
larger, more complex and more hierarchical are created by peoples in
semiperipheral locations and that some semiperipheral polities invest in, and
implement, transformative innovations that are borrowed from core or peripheral
societies.[10]
Some semiperipheral polities are 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 reinvent themselves, to implement new institutions and to
experiment with new technologies.
There are several different important kinds of semiperipheries, and they not only transform systems but they also often take over and become the new hegemonic core polity. We have already mentioned semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms. The societies that conquered and unified a number of smaller chiefdoms into larger paramount chiefdoms were usually from semiperipheral locations. Peripheral peoples did not usually have the institutional and material resources that would allow them to implement new technologies or organizational forms or to take over older core regions, though there were also some well-known “peripheral marcher polities” (e.g. the vast steppe confederacy organized by Genghis Khan that produced the Mongol Empire). It was mainly in the semiperiphery that core and peripheral social characteristics were more likely to be recombined in new ways and where enough resources were available to allow significant investment in transformative instruments.
Much
better known than semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms is the phenomenon of
semiperipheral marcher states. Many of the largest empires were assembled by
conquerors who came from semiperipheral polities. Well-known examples are the Achaemenid
Persians, the Macedonians led by Phillip and Alexander, the Romans, the Islamic
Caliphates, the Ottomans, the Manchus and the Aztecs. (Alvarez et al
2013).
But
some semiperipheral peoples and polities 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 peoples near and far to produce
surpluses for trade. The Phoenician
cities (e.g. Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Carthage, etc.), as well as Malacca, Venice,
Genoa and the German Hanse cities, spread commodification by producing manufactured
goods and trading them across great regions. Some cities even in the Bronze Age
(e.g. Dilmun and Assur of the Old Assyrian city-state) specialized in
long-distance trade. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states were agents of
the development of markets and the expansion of trade networks, and so they
helped to transform the world of the tributary empires without themselves
becoming new core powers.[11] 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 (Chase-Dunn et al 2013).
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 farmes
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.
Indicators of Semiperipherality
The Settlements
and Polities (EmpCit) Research Working Group at the Institute for Research on
World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside uses quantitative
estimates of the population sizes of large cities and of the territorial sizes
of polities to identify instances of “upsweeps” in which city and polity sizes
significantly increased in scale ((Inoue et al 2012; Inoue et al
2015). We also determine how many of the urban and polity upsweeps so
identified were due to the actions of semiperipheral or peripheral marcher
states. This task requires greater
specificity about what is meant by semiperipherality. The core/periphery
distinction is a relational concept. In other words, what
semiperipherality is depends on the larger context in which it occurs – the
nature of the polities that are interacting with one another and the nature of
their interactions. The most general definition of the semiperiphery is: an intermediate
location in an interpolity core/periphery structure. The minimal definition of
core/periphery relations, as mentioned above, is that polities with different
degrees of population density and internal hierarchy and complexity are
interacting with one another. This is what we have called “core/periphery
differentiation.” We are looking for evidence that a polity that conquered
other polities and was responsible for an upward sweep was semiperipheral
relative to the other polities it was interacting with before it started on the
road to conquest.
The alternatives
to semiperipherality are coreness and peripherality. Core
polities are usually older, more stratified, have bigger settlements, and they
have had the accoutrements of civilization, such as writing, longer. Peripheral
societies are nomadic hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, hill people, or desert
people. If they are sedentary, their villages are small relative to the
settlements of those with which they are interacting. We have already noted that some conquest
empires were formed by peripheral marcher states. Other polity upsweeps were
caused by regime changes in old core states or by older civilizational cultures
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 and urban
upsweeps semiperipheral before they did this?
We use four main
empirical indicators to make such determinations:
ｷ
the geographical location of the polity relative to other
polities that have greater or lesser amounts of population density. Is it out
on the edge of a region of core polities?, and
ｷ
the relative level of development: population density, which
is usually indicated by the sizes of settlements, the relative degree of
complexity and hierarchy, the mode of production: e.g foraging, pastoralism,
nomadism vs. sedentism, horticulture vs. agriculture, the size of irrigation
systems, etc. Hunter-gatherers or pastoralists are usually peripheral to more
sedentary agriculturalists; and
ｷ
the recency of the adoption of sedentism, agriculture, class formation
and state formation, and
ｷ
relative ecological marginality.
The Aztecs
(Mexica-Culhua) 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 a lake. There had already been large states
and empires in the Valley of Mexico for centuries. The Aztecs hired themselves
out to older core states 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 in
the Valley of Mexico, strategically picking first on weak and unpopular ones
until they had gathered enough resources to “roll up the system.” The Aztec
story has most of the elements that we are using to examine our upsweep cases:
marginal geographical location, recency of sedentism, class formation and state
formation.
Another
indicator of semiperipheral location is relative environmental desirability.
Core societies usually hold the best locations in terms of soil and water.
Non-core polities hold ecologically marginal territories. The semiperipheral
marcher chiefdoms of the Pacific Islands were typically from the dry side of
the island where land was steeper, rainfall was less frequent and soil was
thinner.[12]
Another issue is “semiperipheral to what?” A polity may have different relationships with other polities in the same interpolity network. For example, Macedonia had one kind relationship with the other Greek states, and a different kind of relationship with the Persian Empire. Semiperipherality is relative to the system as a whole, but may also be affected by important differences between other states in a system and by the existence of different kinds of relations with those other states.
Philippe
Beaujard (2005) makes good use of the semiperiphery concept in his study of the
emergence of world-systems in 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. Beuajard’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 a
semiperipheral polities along the coast. Beaujard also affirms our point that
innovations sometimes occur in semiperipheral polities (445).
Results from Studies of Scale Changes of Polities and
Settlements
The EmpCit
studies use estimates of city sizes and the territorial sizes of empires to
examine and compare different regional interaction systems (e.g. Chase-Dunn,
Manning and Hall 2000; Chase-Dunn and Manning 2002; Inoue et al 2012;
Inoue et al 2015). We identify
those instances in which the scale of polities and settlements has greatly
increased. These are termed “upsweeps” (Inoue et al 2012; Inoue et al
2015). We have also identified
downsweeps and system-wide collapses in which the largest polities or
settlements declined below the level of the previous low point and stayed down
for more than one typical cycle. We found that, while the decline of individual
cities and empires is part of the normal cycle of rise and fall, there were few
system-wide collapses in which a downsweep was not followed rather soon by a
recovery.
We also 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 supports the idea of greater stability in the
East. We also found that nine of the eighteen urban upsweeps were produced by
semiperipheral development and eight directly followed, and were caused by,
upsweeps in the territorial sizes of polities.
We also identified twenty-two upsweeps of the
largest polities in four world regions and in the expanding Central PMN since
the Bronze Age and we examined these to determine whether or not they were the
result of semiperipheral marcher conquests (Álvarez et al 2013).[13] We found that over half of
the polity upsweeps were produced by marcher states from the semiperiphery (10)
or from the periphery (3). This means that the hypothesis of semiperipheral
development does not explain everything about the events in which polity sizes
significantly increased in geographical scale, but also that the phenomenon of
semiperipheral development can not be ignored in any explanation of the
long-term trend in the rise of polity sizes.
Conclusions
World-system
scholars contend that leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the
periphery as inert are grave mistakes, not only for reasons of completeness,
but also because the ability of core elites and their polities to exploit
peripheral resources and labor has been, and continues to be, a major factor in
deciding the winners of the competition among core contenders. The resistance
to exploitation and domination mounted by non-core peoples has played a
powerful role in shaping the historical development of world-systems since the
Bronze Age. Thus sociocultural development
cannot be properly understood without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy
and world-systems are a fundamental unit of analysis for explaining long-term
sociocultural evolution.
This said, the
world-systems theoretical research program is yet in its infancy. Alternatives
to the method proposed above for spatially bounding world-systems need to be
operationalized and pitted against one another to see which methods of spatial
bounding are more powerful for explaining the events that have caused the
long-term trends toward greater complexity, integration and hierarchy. And the
project to accurately estimate the sizes of settlements and polities needs
further work. Temporal resolution needs improvement, especially in the
Americas, in order to make it possible to identify upsweeps in the way that has
been done in Afroeurasia. More settlement and polity sizes will make it
possible to study changes in size distributions within regions and to examine
claims about the emergence of synchrony between regions. Geocoded data on
climate change, warfare, polity boundaries and trade networks will make it
possible to examine the causes of “normal” upswings and downswings as well as
the less frequent upsweeps and downsweeps. The scientific study of the
development of world-systems will have important implications for issues such
as human responses to climate change, ecological degradation, population
density, the changing nature of the global city system, the rise and fall of
hegemonic core powers, transitions from unipolar to multipolar power
situations, as well as resilience and systemic collapse.
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