The Historical Evolution of World-Systems (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

The Historical Evolution of World-Systems The Evolutionary Processes in World Politics Series Series editor:William R...

Author: Christopher Chase Dunn | E.N. Anderson

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The Historical Evolution of World-Systems

The Evolutionary Processes in World Politics Series Series editor:William R.Thompson, Indiana University The Historical Evolution of World-Systems, edited by Christopher ChaseDunn and E.N. Anderson (2005) Puzzles of the Democratic Peace: Theory, Geopolitics and the Transformation of World Politics, by Karen Rasler and William R.Thompson (2005)

Abstract This book analyses the historical evolution of world-systems.The chapters consider various aspects of the rise and fall of great powers as seen in particular cases from early time periods. Taken together, they advance our understanding of the regularities in the dynamics of empire and economic expansion since the Bronze Age. The authors all share a world historical systems perspective on large-scale social change.They analyze the expansion and contraction of cross-cultural trade networks and systems of competing and allying states. In premodern times, these ranged from small local trading networks (even the very small ones of hunting-gathering peoples) to the vast Mongol world-system (Genghis Khan’s empire and the much larger area it affected deeply). Within such systems, there is usually one, or a very few, hegemonic powers (again, the range is from the overwhelming dominance of the Mongols under Genghis down to such things as the brief and tenuous hold of the Portuguese on power at the start of the modern world-system). A great deal of scholarship has been engaged in recent years on the questions of how such systems change, and how certain powers achieve varying degrees of dominance within them.The chapters in this book review several recent approaches and present a wealth of new findings. Two of the chapters address the rise of the West and the recent debates over why the European powers were eventually able to outpace the complex societies of South and East Asia. And one of the chapters addresses the political ecology of hegemonic competition within the modern world-system. The book is aimed primarily at scholars in history and the social sciences, but may also have a broader appeal. It will be of interest to those who care to understand the rise and fall of empires and the regularities in historical processes over space and time; it could thus have a wide readership. It should also prove useful in advanced college courses in world history, world-systems theory, and human ecology.

The Historical Evolution of World-Systems

Edited by

Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF WORLD-SYSTEMS

© Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6590–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The historical evolution of world-systems / editors, Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson. p. cm.—(Evolutionary processes in world politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6590–0 1. Social evolution. 2. Social history. 3. Social change—History. I. Chase-Dunn, Christopher K. II. Anderson, Eugene N. (Eugene Newton), 1941– III. Series. HM626.H57 2004 306⬘.09—dc22 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

2004053385

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures About the Authors Preface One

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers E. N. Anderson and Christopher Chase-Dunn

Two

Eurasian C-Wave Crises in the First Millennium B.C. William R.Thompson

Three From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae: Dark Ages, Political–Economic Declines, and Environmental/Climatic Changes 2200 B.C.–700 B.C. Sing C. Chew Four

Five

Six

vii viii x 1 20

52

Power is in the Details: Administrative Technology and the Growth of Ancient Near Eastern Cores Mitchell Allen

75

Power and Size: Urbanization and Empire Formation in World-Systems Since the Bronze Age Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti

92

Lamb, Rice, and Hegemonic Decline: The Mongol Empire in the Fourteenth Century E. N. Anderson

113

Seven The Rise of European Hegemony:The Political Economy of South Asia and Europe Compared, A.D. 1200–A.D. 1500 Eric Mielants

122

vi

Contents

Eight Contentious Peasants, Paternalist State, and Arrested Capitalism in China’s Long Eighteenth Century Ho-Fung Hung

155

Nine Space, Matter, and Technology in Globalization of the Past and Future Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell

174

Index

211

LIST

OF TABLES

AND

FIGURES

Tables 2.1 Chernykh’s seven great migration crises 2.2 Origins and dates of overseas artifacts found on Crete, 1110–600 B.C. 2.3 Eurasian interland turmoil in the long first millennium B.C. 3.1 Cool and Warm Periods: Anatolia and Adjacent Regions 5.1 Mesopotamian largest empires and cities 5.2 Regional correlations between city and empire sizes 5.3 Temporal correlations among largest and second largest cities 5.4 Partial correlations for largest and second largest empires controlling for year

22 28 43 63 99 102 107 108

Figures 1.1 Emergence of the Central Political/Military Network 1.2 Rise and Fall of Large and Powerful Polities Within Regional Interpolity Systems 1.3 Unicentric versus Multicentric Core 2.1 Meat Consumption in Languedoc, 800–1B.C. 5.1 Southern California/Northwestern Mexico Conurbation 5.2 Largest Mesopotamian Cities and Empires 5.3 Largest Egyptian Cities and Empires 5.4 Largest Cities and Empires in Mesopotamia 5.5 West Asian Largest Cities and Empires 5.6 Largest Cities and Empires in Europe 5.7 Largest and Second Largest Cities in East Asia 5.8 Largest and Second Largest Empires in East Asia

8 13 14 30 97 100 101 103 104 104 105 105

ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

Mitchell Allen is Publisher of AltaMira Press, a publisher of scholarly books in archaeology and other fields, and a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Santa Clara University. He has presented extensively on world-systems analysis of the Ancient Near East. E. N.Anderson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. His major interest is in the area of cultural and political ecology, with a focus on how people understand and use plant and animal resources. He has done research in Hong Kong, Malaysia, British Columbia, Mexico, and elsewhere. His publications include The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988) and Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996). His most recent major work is Paul Buell, E. N. Anderson and Charles Perry, A Soup for the Qan (Kegan Paul International, 2001). Stephen G. Bunker studies the social ecology and the political ecology of natural resource extraction and trade. Much of this work has focused on extractive economies in the Amazon. He is currently working with Paul Ciccantell on how local characteristics of locally discrete extractive economies shape the world-system and its ongoing globalization. Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. The National Science Foundation has supported his studies of economic and political globalization in the modern worldsystem. Chase-Dunn is the founder and coeditor of the electronic Journal of World-Systems Research. Sing C. Chew is Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University. He is completing the second volume of World Ecological Degradation 3000BC–AD2000 that covers ecological degradation, climate changes, and system transformations. Paul S. Ciccantell studies the socioeconomic and environmental impact of raw materials extraction and the organizational sociology of raw materials, transport, and electricity industries. He is currently working with Stephen Bunker on how local characteristics of locally discrete extractive economies shape the world-system and its ongoing globalization.

About the Authors

ix

Ho-Fung Hung is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He researches on peasant resistance and globalization in early modern and contemporary China. His recent works include “Early Modernities and Contentious Politics in Mid-Qing China, c. 1740–1839” (forthcoming in International Sociology), “Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East–West Differences from 1600 to 1900” (Sociological Theory vol. 21, no. 3), and “The Politics of SARS or, containing the Perils of Globalization by more Globalization” (forthcoming in Asian Perspective), among others. Eric Mielants is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah and Research Associate at the Maison de Science de l’Homme, Paris. He has published articles and essays on sociological theory, historical sociology, contemporary migration issues, and the sociology of knowledge. He is currently finalizing his book manuscript entitled “The Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West Revisited.” William R. Thompson is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His most recent books include the edited Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics (2001) and the coauthored Trade, Growth and Systemic Leadership (2004). Other books in progress focus on the democratic peace, interstate rivalries, the evolution of war, the history of European power balancing, the origins of the world system, and globalization and global history. Alexis A´lvarez is a graduate student in the Department of Socialogy at the University of California, Riverside. He is conducting research on the rise and fall of Islamic states in world history. Daniel Pasciuti is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He is conducting research on the population sizes of the world’s largest cities over the past 3000 years.

PREFACE

Earlier versions of the chapters of this book were presented at a conference on “hegemonic declines: past and present” held at the Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California-Riverside in 2002.The conference focused on the decline of power in “hegemonic” states (states that exercise a highly disproportionate share of control over trade and politics within a world-system). The conference examined the rise and decline of great powers in the modern world-system, especially comparing the current era with the earlier Dutch and British periods of international ascendance and decline. Several sessions were devoted to the study of world power in premodern world-systems, as well as studies of global elites, indigenous people, the environment, globalization of labor, terrorism and East/West issues.1 The chapters in this book consider various aspects of the rise and fall of great powers and the historical evolution of world-systems as seen in particular cases since the Bronze Age. Taken together, they advance our understanding of the dynamics of empires, the rise and fall of cities and states, and the historical evolution of world-systems. The perspective employed in most of the chapters is that of the worldsystems perspective made famous by Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Samir Amin.The world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining social change that focuses on whole intersocietal systems. The main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, alliances, conflict, etc.) have woven polities and cultures together since the beginning of human social evolution, and so the explaining of social change needs to take intersocietal systems (world-systems) as the units that “develop.” Intersocietal interaction networks are termed “world-systems,” but only in very recent centuries have any of them actually involved the whole world; in premodern times, they ranged from small local trading networks (even the very small ones of hunting-gathering peoples) to the vast Mongol world-system (Genghis Khan’s empire and the much larger area it affected deeply).Within such systems, there is usually one, or a very few, hegemonic powers (again, the range is from the overwhelming dominance of the Mongols under Genghis down to such things as the brief and tenuous hold of the Portuguese on power at the start of the modern world-system).

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The world-systems perspective looks at human institutions over long periods of time and employs the spatial scale that is required for comprehending whole interaction systems. Single societies have always interacted in consequential ways with neighboring societies, and so intersocietal interaction must be studied in order to understand social change.This does not mean that all the important processes causing social change are intersocietal, but rather that enough of them are so that it is usually disastrous to ignore intersocietal relations. The world-systems perspective is neither Eurocentric nor core-centric, at least in principle. The main idea is simple: human interaction networks have been increasing in spatial scale for millennia as new technologies of communications and transportation have been developed. Since the emergence of ocean-going transportation in the fifteenth century the multicentric Afroeurasian system incorporated the Western Hemisphere. Before the incorporation of the Americas into the Afroeurasian system there were many local and regional world-systems (intersocietal networks). Most of these became inserted into the expanding European-centered system largely by force, and their populations were mobilized to supply labor for a colonial economy that was repeatedly reorganized by the changing geopolitical and economic forces emanating from the European and (later) North American core societies. This whole process can be understood structurally as a stratification system composed of economically and politically dominant core societies (themselves in competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral regions, a few of which have been successful in improving their positions in the larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their relative positions. This structural perspective on world history allows us to analyze the cyclical features of social change and the long-term trends of development in historical and comparative perspective.We can see the development of the modern world-system as driven primarily by capitalist accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one another for power and wealth. Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral peoples to domination and exploitation from the core. In the modern world-system the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful countries in the Third World (e.g. Mexico, India, Brazil, China) as well as smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic development (e.g. the East Asian NICs). It is not possible to understand the history of social change in the system as a whole without taking into account both the strategies of the winners and the strategies and organizational actions of those who have resisted domination and exploitation. It is also difficult to understand why and where innovative social change emerges without a conceptualization of the world-system as a whole. New organizational forms that transform institutions and that lead to upward

xii

Preface

mobility most often emerge from societies in semiperipheral locations. Thus all the countries that became hegemonic core states in the modern system had formerly been semiperipheral (the Dutch, the British, and the United States).This is a continuation of a long-term pattern of social evolution that Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall (1997) have called “semiperipheral development.” Semiperipheral marcher states and semiperipheral capitalist city-states had acted as the main agents of empire formation and commercialization for millennia. This phenomenon arguably also includes organizational innovations in contemporary semiperipheral countries (e.g. Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that may transform the now-global system. A great deal of scholarship has been expended in recent years on the questions of how such systems change, and how certain powers achieve varying degrees of dominance within them. The chapters in this book review several recent approaches and present a wealth of new findings.They show, among other things, that periods of empire building and periods of disunion (“dark ages”) are roughly correlated over all Eurasia, with the possible exception of the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, such periods alternate on a cycle of 500–600 years.The papers chronicle these and advance various explanations. Finally, since the medieval period, trade increased worldwide, but only Europe developed full-blown capitalism—an anomaly that has obsessed many writers. The chapters in this book consider new findings on that problem in the light of the cycles of rise and decline. The book is aimed primarily at scholars in history and the social sciences, but will also have a broader appeal to those who are interested in the rise and fall of empires and the regularities in historical processes over space and time. In chapter 1, the editors (Anderson and Chase-Dunn) explicate Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of states and discuss other factors that have influenced the growth and decline of states, empires, and world-systems. Chapter 2, by William R. Thompson, shows that Soviet archaeologist E. N. Chernykh’s theory of long cycles of union and disunion works for Eurasia during the first millennium B.C. This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book, much of which treats of these cycles of rise and decline, or—put another way—centralization and decentralization of power. During centralized periods, large empires with large cities control vast areas. During the times of disunion, migrations involve vast numbers of people; cities are small, and some are deserted; centers of power are diffuse and shifting (often with the migrations).The classic stereotype is of “nomad invasions,” but the reality is more complex. Chapter 3, by Sing Chew, is titled “From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae: dark ages, hegemonial shifts, and environmental/ climatic changes 2200 BC–700 BC.” Sing Chew’s thesis is that “dark ages” ensue when a system reaches environmental limits within its existing economy and cannot find ways to adapt fast enough to prevent a systemic decline. Often, if not always, system decline results in part from overuse or

Preface

xiii

mismanagement of key natural resources. Dark ages then provide a respite, especially for overstretched ecosystems—the land and water can recover from heavy use. The economy can then, ultimately, recover. The chapter summarizes Dark Age chronologies in major Eurasian areas, tracing out synchronies. In chapter 4, Mitchell Allen holds that “Power is in the details.” Allen argues that the Assyrian Empire developed a number of innovations in the art and science of ruling, including several that allowed it to make use of trade systems, networks, and institutions.Assyria was able to hold the Levant and parts of Arabia, and to expand power there, by drawing on existing know-how among traders, and by using them as implements of rule while taxing their trade (to the hilt) as a way of maximizing revenues. Christopher Chase-Dunn,Alexis A´lvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti, in chapter 5, look at “Power and size: urbanization and empire formation in worldsystems.” They study the temporal relationships between urban size and empire size in several different regions of Afroeurasia. In several regions cities become large during the same periods in which empires do.And their research shows that largest and second largest cities (and empires) in each region grow and decline in the same periods, indicating that regions go through phases of general growth and contraction. In chapter 6, “Lamb, rice, and Mongol hegemonic decline,” E. N.Anderson deals with the representation of hegemonic rise and decline in food ways. The Mongol Empire, even after its breakup into khanates under Genghis Khan’s heirs, consciously reflected its world domination through great feasts that displayed foods from the entire Mongol world. With the decline of Mongol power, local regionalisms reasserted themselves. Chapter 7, by Eric Mielants, concerns “The origins of European hegemony: the political economy of South Asia and Europe compared (ca. A.D. 1200–A.D. 1500).” Mielants discusses possible reasons for the failure of South Asia to develop capitalism, or at least something similar, when Europe did. Cultural explanations (caste, ideology) are shown to be inadequate. Difficulties of conquering and holding empire, problems with foreign invasion, and other factors may be relevant. Chronic and critical, however, is the tendency of rural landowning nobility to rule and control, suppressing merchants and urban development and dooming much of the country to chronic war and plunder. Broader questions of the rise and nature of capitalism are observed through this lens. Chapter 8, by Ho-Fung Hung, brings us to the questions of “Contentious peasants, paternalist state and arrested capitalism in China’s ‘long eighteenth century.’ ” China is another case of the nondevelopment of capitalism. China had, according to some authors,“sprouts of capitalism” as early as A.D. 1000, but the sprouts never grew tall. The eighteenth century saw the overwhelming dominance of the Qing state—imperial power triumphant and successful. By joining with the working classes against the nascent middle or gentry class, Qing was able to survive, flourish, and even

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win considerable popular support, but in the process it inhibited mercantile dynamism. A highly centralized, landlord-based empire arose, hostile to seafaring and not supportive of trading. In chapter 9, Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell examine “Matter, space and technology in past and future hegemonies.” This chapter is a comprehensive survey of the procurement and transportation of bulk raw materials from the seventeenth century onward, under Dutch, English, American, and Japanese power. The chapter renews interest in this basic, often-forgotten aspect of world trade and the control thereof by leading powers.The bottom line for any aspiring hegemon is its ability to get and ship large amounts of raw material cheaply. Constraints on future increases in returns to scale in mining and transportation have important implications for the future of hegemony. Perhaps we have seen the last of the hegemons. Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson Note 1. See also Friedman and Chase-Dunn (2004) and Reifer (2004). Abstracts of papers presented at the Pews02 conference are available at

Bibliography Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO:Westview. Friedman, Jonathan and Christopher Chase-Dunn (eds.). 2004. Hegemonic Declines: Present and Past. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Reifer,Thomas E. (ed.). 2004.“Hegemony, Globalization and Antisystemic Movements.” Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers E. N. Ande r son and Christophe r Chase-Dunn

This chapter explicates Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of states and discusses its relevance for understanding classical and contemporary social cycles.We also present an overview of the comparative world-systems approach to bounding social systems and conceptualizing the rise and fall of large polities within systems of competing and allying polities. The question of the rise and decline of states, empires, and civilizations has concerned humanity since those entities were invented. Countless individuals have tried to explain the causes of decline. Probably the most popular and longest-lasting theory is one that ascribes the deterioration of civilization to loss of respect for one’s elders and betters. This explanation goes back to the dawn of history. Ipu-wer, contemplating the first decline of Ancient Egyptian power around 2200 B.C.E., wrote:“Why really, the land spins around as does a potter’s wheel.The robber is (now) the possessor of riches . . . Why really, all maidservants make free with their tongues.When their mistresses speak, it is burdensome to the servants . . . Behold, the owners of robes are (now) in rags . . . All these years are civil strife: a man may be slain on his (own) roof . . .” (Wilson 1951:107). And Nefer-rohu agreed: “. . . I show thee the son as a foe, the brother as an enemy, and a man killing his (own) father. Every mouth is full of ‘Love me!’ and everything good has disappeared . . . I show thee the undermost on top . . . It is the paupers who eat the offering-bread, while the servants jubilate . . .” (Wilson 1951:107–108). In ancient Sumer, too, teenage boys were denounced as falling away from the good old ideals (see Kramer 1959:12–16). Apparently the younger generation has been declining steadily since, for Ipu-Wer’s lines could be matched from almost any generation from which a significant literature remains. All senior professors hear the same litany in almost every faculty meeting: Students have gotten steadily worse; their preparation is terrible; the university lets in just anybody; why, in MY day . . . However, the scholar must (reluctantly?) conclude that this explanation leaves something to be desired. If each generation were indeed worse than

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E. N. Anderson and Christopher Chase-Dunn

the last, one could predict a steady decline from Ipu-Wer onward. In fact, cultures and states cycle endlessly. States rise and fall, empires expand and wither, civilizations flower and disappear—all on what seems to be an endless treadmill.The ancient Greeks had already worked this out.They saw it as driven by a political process: democracy gave way to autocracy, which stiffened into tyranny; this leads to rebellion, which produces democracy, and the cycle starts again. Ibn Khaldun’s Theory of Rise and Fall Countless variations on and elaborations of this model climaxed in the work of Ibn Khaldun (1958), a Tunisian historian of the fourteenth century. Tunis being a town conscious of its past, Ibn Khaldun’s house survives, on a back street of the old city; it is still inhabited, and in better repair than many a California subdivision house built months ago. Walking the lanes, pausing at the house, and visiting the tiny mosque down the street where Ibn Khaldun first studied and lectured, one receives a dramatic sense of the world from which his theory sprang. Since Ibn Khaldun’s theory is not only the oldest, but still one of the best, theories of cycles, it is worth investigating in detail. Later theories usually draw on it or recapitulate it, at least in part.1 Ibn Khaldun’s theory,2 in briefest outline, is as follows.A marginal tribe— desert dwelling in Ibn Khaldun’s world—is characterized by a Spartan lifestyle in which people have to depend on each other for survival. Such a situation forces people to be tough, self-sacrificing, courageous, hardy, and used to hard work under harsh conditions.They are held tightly together by links of kinship. Loyalty, solidarity, and group feeling (asabiyah) are strong. Ibn Khaldun anticipated Thomas Hobbes (1950/1657) in concluding that a typical human “will stretch out his hand for whatever he needs and . . . take it, since injustice and aggressiveness are in the animal nature. The others, in turn, will try to prevent him. . . . This causes dissention. (Dissention) leads to hostilities, and hostilities lead to trouble and bloodshed and loss of life, which (in turn) lead to the destruction of the (human) species. . . . People, thus, cannot persist in a state of anarchy and without a ruler . . .”3 Thus, even asabiyah is not enough, at least if a group grows beyond the status of a small, tight kin-group. A ruler must emerge.This does not mean a Hobbesian totalitarian monarch, however; Ibn Khaldun saw desert-nomad leaders as more or less fair, open, and democratic. Such a group is well adapted for conquering larger but weaker populations. This requires a leader good enough to develop real loyalty in his followers, through generosity, personal charisma, and appeal to links of kin, locality, friendship, and shared culture. The leader who can develop the largest group of truly loyal fighters is obviously likely to win the wars. It is important to see that asabiyah does not somehow magically appear from the tribal state. It draws on kinship (1958:265ff.). It does not stop there, however.To form a sizable polity, kinship is inadequate. Asabiyah has

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

3

to be extended, through fictive-kin links, religious links, and an ideology and tradition of mutual support. Also, people raised together develop it, with or without relatives (1958:374). Leaders have to do more than be good fighters and good kinsmen. As the fighting force extends beyond close kin links, it involves people who are not related, and thus apt to desert any leader not generous and attentive enough, and sell their services to a better master—or, alternatively, to usurp the leading position themselves. A leader must overcome too-narrow asabiyah, always a risk (1958:416).To do this, he must be expert at building wider and wider solidarity. An Arab proverb has it: “I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, our cousin, brother and I against our village, and our village against the world!” A leader must build along such lines of segmentary opposition, and must actively prevent his polity from breaking down again along the same lines. To do this, he must be socially skilled, generous, and just. He is well advised to be seen as a champion of true religion; zealous troops prevail over flaccidly religious foes, other things being equal (1958:319ff.). Ibn Khaldun knew many such stories from Arab history. The model of kinbased forces expanded and welded together by generosity and personal charisma is beautifully confirmed by sources as diverse as the medieval Irish epics Tain Bo Cuailnge (Kinsella 1970) and Acallam na Senórach (Dooley and Roe 1999), Pacific Northwest Coast Native histories (e.g. Barbeau et al. 1987), and the Chinese Warring States history Chan-kuo Ts’e (Crump 1970). It was clearly a reality for chiefdoms and early states. A kingdom is thus likely to begin with good values. To be sure, sometimes someone wins by sheer brutality and terror, but at the least there will be courage and loyalty among the ranks. Such a group will conquer feeble neighbors, and gradually take over the best and richest realms—the central realms to which the group was, formerly, marginal. They thus come into possession of great wealth and abundant land—the wars having thinned out the population.The leader naturally distributes the land and wealth with a lavish and reasonably fair hand. With land and capital, the people work hard, and wealth is amassed.The state expands for a generation. In modern terms, life is a positive-sum game: everyone who plays can win, or at least can gain. One might say that this is a time when economics dominates; being concerned with wealth, which can always be increased, economics can be a positive-sum game if political systems allow it to be. People’s hopes and aspirations are, therefore, high.They will not only still have asabiyah; they will see, out of the purest rational self-interest, that their best chance lies with cooperating to build a better world. Many, if not all, will act accordingly. The next generation still has the values of the initial leader, but not his actual experience of growing up and living in camps and tents.The empire reaches a peak of power—it extends as far as it can.The number of people on which the leader can depend sets the limits on the amount of asabiyah he can cultivate. Meanwhile, the land is filling up. The king can no longer

4


deliver booty and new fields with such a lavish hand. Poverty is emerging as some lose their land and capital to others.The game becomes neutral-sum. Following this comes decline. The empire has to keep fighting, but by the third or fourth generation it is militarily overextended; years of war have taken it as far as it can go (1958:329). Eventually, the most remote links of personal loyalty are being maintained only by reward or loot. At this point, the less successful state crumbles; the more successful one succeeds in hiring fresh lots of nomads or other marginal people used to hard fighting. This may keep the empire going for some time, as it did for the Abbasid caliphate. But in the end these troops realize they are so much tougher than their effete employers that they have no reason not to take over (1958:314ff.). Meanwhile, the land has filled up, but taxes to sustain the military have increased. Above all, the expenses of the court and government have risen. Ibn Khaldun called this “luxury,” and indeed a great deal of it usually was luxury consumption in the old Near East. However, the Tunisian was wise enough to realize that bureaucracies take on a life of their own, and, also, that governments must put on a fine show of “luxury” to impress their people and their neighbors. He saw the rise of luxury as partly due to decadence.The third generation (both elite and mass) has no experience with the Spartan life of the camps. However, he realized it was more than that. Concern with comfort and conspicuous consumption was inevitable for an urban, settled polity. More serious than luxury is corruption, an inevitable concomitant of a government that is bigger and bigger, but farther and farther from its grassroots (1958:293ff.). The ultimate cause is the concentration of more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.The real problem with power concentration lies in the extremely dramatic increase in corruption and oppression that usually accompanies it.4 As the empire becomes polarized between rich and poor, the poor begin to rebel, and the rich repress them. The game has become negative-sum. The government pays a heavy cost to make the rebellious poor pay an even heavier one. The rich become cruel and corrupt in the process. It is an age of politics; one definition of politics holds that politics is concerned with relative power and status, and by this definition politics is necessarily a zerosum game (or negative-sum, if one takes down oneself while taking down enemies). In any case, the economy is shrinking because of warfare and corruption, so economics too is now an increasingly desperate struggle for diminishing slices of a shrinking pie. People’s hopes and aspirations change accordingly. They can no longer hope to succeed by cooperating and building. Their only realistic hope is to save what they can while they can. Many will conclude that this can be done only by acting more viciously and amorally than the rest. By this time, the state is so rotten that it begins to shed outlying territories (1958:331). It cannot maintain military control or prevent local satraps from simply breaking away. The state soon falls to invaders—the latest wave of marginal people.The cycle starts over again.


5

Typically, the cycle should take three to four generations. Ibn Khaldun figured 36 years to a generation (1958:339ff.).5 Thus, a state’s typical lifespan is almost exactly that of the longest-lived human. Of course, actual dynasties vary in their tenure or survival. Some last only a few years, usually because the rulers are brutal and inept; tyrants are soon displaced (1958:383). Some lucky dynasties last a few centuries if the rulers have inspired so much support that they can conquer widely and then hire mercenary or client troops.Alternatively, some dynasties or regimes last because there are still branches of the ruling group that are living under harsher conditions, and can take over as the central branch weakens and fails.This saved the day for some Persian dynasties, among others (1958:297–298). Students of China will be reminded of the several revivals of Han and of the Yongle takeover of Ming (Tsai 2001). The successive waves of conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, notably the Almoravids and Almohads, gave Ibn Khaldun examples of the typical case. The Abbasid Caliphate provided him with the principal example of a dynasty that lasted longer but eventually went the usual way (1958:314–319). Exceptionally successful, long-lived regimes, from the Abbasids to the great Chinese dynasties, can be seen in the graphs presented in chapter 5 of this book. History since 1200 C.E. also tends to confirm an expanded version of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. In China, desert and steppe nomads had invaded and conquered in regular Ibn Khaldun cycles for centuries, climaxing in the Mongol takeover of north China in 1234 and the whole empire in 1279 (Barfield 1989). Mongol power gave way to Chinese rebellion and the Ming Dynasty in 1368. There were dynastic crises in 1403 (the takeover by the Yongle Emperor; see Tsai 2001), 1449 (when nomads came within a hair of a classic Ibn Khaldun victory against the effete Ming), and the “strike” by the Shenzong Emperor that brought the empire almost to its knees by 1620; Ming finally collapsed in 1630 (Mote 1999).The Manchus finally invaded to unite the country under the Qing Dynasty in 1644. Crises nearly brought down Qing in the rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681) and the Taiping Rebellion (1844–1846). The dynasty fell in 1911. The anomalously stable peace of “China’s long eighteenth century” stands out as a startling exception to almost everyone’s theories; this is ably discussed by Hung (chapter 8 in this volume). In general, however, Ibn Khaldun cycles are widely identifiable. Longer reigns, similar to the Abbasids’, are exemplified by several major dynasties around the world. Besides Ming and Qing, there were the Romanovs in Russia, who profited from the constantly expanding economic opportunities presented by the conquest of Siberia.The Tokugawas in Japan appear to have survived through sheer competence at ruling. Also, they were careful to maintain a figurehead Emperor to whom they were nominally, but not actually, subservient. The Hapsburg/Windsor lineage in England weathered two world wars, among other challenges, but was hardly the real ruling body of the country; more generally, it is impressive

6


to note that England has had no really epochal change of government since the Glorious Revolution (a euphemism for a Dutch takeover!) in 1689. The Yi Dynasty of Korea lasted longer than any other actually ruling dynasty in modern history, but its reign was punctuated by several crises and internal coups at properly Khaldunian intervals. The Soviet Union required seventy-two years to go through a classic Ibn Khaldun cycle (1917–1989). The United States has suffered three major changes of government philosophy and style at fairly regular intervals: the Republican Party victory and Civil War in 1861–1865; the Great Depression (1929) and consequent New Deal (1932); and, now, the emerging triumph of the radical right. The intervals between these changes had all the characteristics of classic Ibn Khaldun cycles, though of the “internal revival” sort (similar to the Persian dynasties noted above).As yet, no desert nomads have taken over the nation. However,Arabs of recent desert-nomad background had much to do with the last of these cyclic events! Ibn Khaldun would feel confirmed, but would hardly accept Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam; as a proper Malikite judge, he correctly held that “the religious law . . . censures the evils . . . such as tyranny, injustice, and pleasureseeking. Here, no doubt, we have forbidden evils . . .” (1958:391). The decline of whole world-systems is most likely to follow Ibn Khaldun’s cycle when a given system is totally dominated by one great empire. This was the case in East Asia through much of history, with China’s centrality guaranteeing that its cyclic collapses would affect everyone from the Amur to the Mekong.The decline and fall of Rome and the breakup and subsequent slow decline of the Mongol Empire(s) represent other instances of this sort. It may be the case that the declines of modern hegemons do not cause as much general dislocation in the larger world-systems of which they are a part than did the declines of empires in premodern systems. Many world-systems have involved a number of more or less equipotent states. Europe, the Near East, and Southeast Asia offer many examples over history. A very tightly linked economic system may act like a single polity from an Ibn Khaldunian point of view. In other cases, climatic change is a factor in rises and declines. The Maya world seems to have succumbed to drought (Gill 2000). It is likely that the situation was complex; simple lack of rain is inadequate to explain the pattern (Webster 2002). A highly plausible model of Mayan system implies that decline was not so much in the driest areas as in those dependent on the control and storage of water for maintaining highly elaborate and competitive kingdoms (Lucero 2002). Yet, major climatic worsening failed to daunt Europe when it rose to power during the Little Ice Age. The cold was so savage that Europe’s northern fringe collapsed (notably Greenland; McGovern et al. 1996), but the coldest centuries were precisely those in which Europe moved toward world rule. Certainly, there was great incentive to escape Europe and occupy or colonize warmer lands. On the other hand, ecological devastation may be, and almost certainly is, a reason for regional collapse (Chew 2001; Ponting 1991). It may even


7

be the main reason. It clearly works in tandem with climate change on occasion. The Roman Empire is frequently thought to have hastened its decline through deforestation, soil erosion, marsh creation (leading to spread of malaria), salting up of dry land irrigation systems, and the like. Other ancient empires and regional world-systems no doubt did the same. Deforestation was very possibly part of the cause of the fall of the Maya (see references in Webster 2002). Increasingly serious difficulties in providing food clearly impact whole systems, but outright famine was so constant in premodern times, and usually so local, that it rarely had systemic effects. On a nation-state scale, it could even shore up government power, if the government made a major point of providing famine relief. Qing China bought legitimacy and support in this way (Will and Wong 1991). Another factor is disease (McNeill 1976).The permanent loss of relative power by the Near East after 1300 was almost certainly due in part to plague (Dols 1977), though regional shifts in ecology and economic power were probably more important (see e.g. Braudel 1972).Yet, usually, disease seems to be a trivial factor. Europe was hit with endlessly recurrent plague sieges from 1346 to 1667, as well as other epidemics. China had recurrent epidemics, yet no one seems to have linked them credibly to dynastic collapses. There was a plague somewhere in old China essentially every year, yet the empire survived. War, also, was so common and usually so local that it impacted whole world-systems only when the whole system collapsed into chaos or when a particularly powerful conqueror could sweep through old lands and replace their ruler with new ones. As so often, the Mongols provide the most dramatic example. Perhaps more important were shifting trade links. By definition, this usually is a phenomenon within world-systems, but sometimes a whole system stands or falls on the basis of trade. This is clearest in the great shift from land trade to sea trade in the fifteenth century and afterward. As marine travel became steadily easier, the great caravan routes across the Sahara, the Middle East, and central Asia declined into insignificance, and with them entire regions or even local “world”-systems dependent on them.The Mongol Empire was the last and greatest of the empires that arose along, and because of, the Silk Road and the steppe routes across Asia. Strategically positioned between the Near East and China, the Mongols could conquer both. After 1400, the steppe world could never rise again; control over the critical central part of the Silk Road simply did not matter any more. A similar fate befell the great West African empires. Mali, Songhay, and medieval Ghana had no significant successors (except briefly and locally, e.g. Usuman dan Fodio’s empire in the western Sahel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). This was because sea trade, and the rampant slaving that accompanied it, ruined the caravan trade (and, eventually, most of west Africa). West Africa was never a world-system on its own, but it came close at times, and its fall was far more than a mere local decline.

8


Spices were vital to world trade at various times, eclipsed at others. The “triangular trade” in sugar, rum, slaves, and the like dominated the Atlantic for a couple of centuries. A long footnote in the rise of the modern world-system is provided by the increasing need for people to wake up, as clocks and deadlines came to dominate life; tea, coffee, chocolate, and other awakeners remade the entire world. Producing them is a vital part of the economy in over a dozen nations (Anderson 2004). Less linked to specific commodities were the fluctuating fortunes of trade in the Mediterranean (Braudel 1972), the Indian Ocean, and the South China Seas. In these situations, major changes in local systems could be highly contingent on the military fortunes of areally small city-states (Genoa, Venice . . .) or even pirates’ nests (Riau Islands in the Indian Ocean trade, the southern Philippines in the old China Sea). Expansion of the Central System To make a long story short, it seems that the commonest fate of a worldsystem was to be engulfed into the expanding Central System chronographed by David Wilkinson (1986) (see figure 1.1). Collapse of states and declines of trade networks occurred, but whole interaction networks did not usually disappear. Rather the state-based system that began in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago eventually incorporated the whole globe 3000 BCE

??

M i s s i s s i p p i a n P M N

A e g e a n

??

?? P e r u v i a n PMN

M e s o a m e r i c a n P M N

W e s t A f r i c a n P M N

P M N

I r i s h PMN

E g y p t i a n PMN

Mesopotamian PMN

West Asian of Central PMN

Greco-Roman Phase of Central PMN Medieval Phase of Central PMN

?? I n d i c P M N

?? ?? I n d o n e s i a n P M N

E a s t ?? A s i a n P M N

J a p a n e s e

Western Phase of Central PMN Global Phase of Central PMN 2000 CE

Figure 1.1 Emergence of the Central Political/Military Network (PMN) (after Wilkinson 1986)


9

into a single integrated network. The rise and fall of states is a cycle that occurs in all world-systems big and small. The “PMNs” in figure 1.1 are political/military networks, interacting systems of polities (chiefdoms, states and empires) that make war and form alliances with one another. All world-systems are composed of multiple polities and this is one of the most important ways of spatially bounding world-systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) point out that other important interaction networks with potentially different spatial extents (trade and information) may also have important consequences for local groups, and so they should also be taken into account when spatially bounding a system. A new and dynamic power might come up in the dead space between two declining empires, and start everything over with a new center that evolves into a metropole.The most famous and well-studied case is the rise of the Arabs—eventually, the whole Islamic world—between Rome and Persia (Ibn Khaldun is, once again, the canonical source, but see Wheatley 2001 for more modern interpretations). Sometimes the old empires did not weaken on their own, but instead they were impacted by a far larger system—as when the expanding European world devastated the entire Western Hemisphere and destroyed its local systems between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Andean South America, this was only the latest in a series of such episodes.The Incas had done the same thing only a few decades before, wiping out local power and homogenizing the polity from Colombia to central Chile. There had been still earlier local expansions in the Moche, Titicaca, Mapuche, and other realms.The dramatic “Tiahuanaco horizon,” when a particular art style suddenly became dominant over most of highland Peru and Bolivia, was the most mysterious of these. The style may or may not have spread with empire. It rose suddenly and disappeared almost as suddenly. Many theories have arisen to account for it, but none seems satisfactory. Not long after Ibn Khaldun’s time, the sudden and unexpected rise of Europe transformed the world.A Martian visiting the earth in 1000 would surely have bet on China, India, or the core Near East to be the world leaders in future. Even Mexico and Peru, homes to great indigenous civilizations, might have looked more hopeful than the parts of Europe that eventually established hegemony over the world. By Ibn Khaldun’s time, Genoa and Venice were rising stars; soon after his death, Europe exploded outward, colonizing and appropriating. This led to the rise of yet a third view of history, previously found only in rare and tentative forms. European historians began to see history as “progress.” This view climaxed in the nineteenth century; faith in that mystical entity is now viewed with nostalgia and cynicism more often than with respect.Yet, it cannot be denied that all the endless cycles of rise and fall did not stop the human race from increasing its population, wealth, health, knowledge, and ability to turn “natural” resources into valued goods. Admittedly, the last of those processes has now reached apparent limits; but

10


increasing efficiency in use, and increasing ability to tap renewable resources like solar power, could still buy humanity out of its current traps. Since Ibn Khaldun, scholars have tended to focus on progress, sometimes under the name of cultural evolution (Sanderson 1999). However, there has also been much attention to rise and fall—far too much to summarize in this chapter. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1946, orig. 1782) is, of course, the locus classicus, and has spawned a large literature that still continues to grow. However, this literature was, until recently, usually more concerned with particular cases than with generalizing about the worldwide incidence of cycles. Giambattista Vico and Vilfredo Pareto are among the most important exceptions, developing Khaldun-like theories (Pareto 1968; Vico 1984/1744). More recently, world-systems theory has reintroduced the study of long-term business cycles and sequences of hegemonic rise and fall (Wallerstein 1976). To these theories we might add a modern ecological observation. In the early stages of a cycle, population is low relative to resources. Sometimes this is merely because war has thinned out the people. Sometimes, however, it is because such times are characterized by a ferment of discovery, exploration, and—especially, but not only, in the last 500 years—invention. They are times of science, of voyaging, of propagating useful knowledge. However, the land eventually becomes filled, through population increase and through the increase in consumption that Ibn Khaldun rather sourly termed “luxury.”A squeeze on resources cuts the budgets for explorers and scientists. Invention and application slows and stops. Even easily made changes that would increase production along with population are no longer seen as viable. Soon, a truly vicious cycle emerges: increasing military weakness abroad and unrest at home leads to more and more investment in the military—inevitably at the expense of investment in economically productive channels. Science and discovery are seen (perhaps correctly) as slow and uncertain in their payoffs. So is conservation and wise management of resources.These things are therefore defunded, guaranteeing the rapid collapse of the system. Most of the world today is facing some form of this problem. This first chapters of this book are concerned with the period when cycles were dominant: the age when states and civilizations dominated at least part of the globe, and when their cycles of rise and fall were more obvious and salient than the slow, if not imperceptible, emergence of social and cultural complexity. It is, exactly, the world from Ipu-Wer to Ibn Khaldun. Its time frame extends from the earliest cycle of ancient Egypt (on present evidence, the first true state) to the fourteenth century, when the fall of Mongol power and the rise of European voyager states ushered in a world inconceivable to the Tunisian scholar. Its space is similar to A. L. Kroeber’s “oikumene” (Kroeber 1948), the world of Old World states and civilizations. The oikumene expanded from the tiny confines of the Fertile Crescent (3200–2500 B.C.) to Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, and the Indus plains, and


11

thence outward by slow stages to the entire world. China, though independently developing state society around 2000 B.C., had long been connected to the west Asian oikumene. (Recent literature on China and the medieval and modern world-systems is abundant; see Huang 2002; Mote 1999; Pomerantz 2000, 2002; Wong 1997.There is a need for a work comparable to Mote’s but covering the previous thousand years or so. China has its own counterpart of Ibn Khaldun, Sima Guang [1019–1086], but his great work is, most unfortunately, not translated.) Therefore, the essays in this work progress from the Near East in the most ancient times to a medieval world including India, Central Asia, and (sometimes rather marginally) China and Europe. World systems theory has had to make its way in an age of particularism. On the whole, the late twentieth century was a period of specialization in history and the humanities. This was often justified by appeal to the uniqueness of each case. Scholars stressed the individuality of cultures, societies, individuals, and the frequently arbitrary and “constructed” nature of generalizations at any level. All this served as a valuable corrective to preceding grand systems—of Toynbee or Spengler—but many of us now suggest the pendulum has swung far enough. The oikumene was, after all, real. By the time recorded history began, around 3000 B.C.E., the ancient Near East was already quite homogeneous at the (literal) grassroots. Wheat and barley, native to the northern Fertile Crescent, were the staples everywhere. (They had been so for millennia, and had long spread throughout the western Old World.) Everywhere in the oikumene, they were made into beer and into bread. Everywhere beans and peas, olives, figs, grapes, dates accompanied the bread, and a host of other shared foods. Onions, garlic, cumin, coriander, sesame, and probably several other plants were almost universally shared flavorings. Except along fishrich coasts, dairy foods were the main source of animal protein (in striking contrast to East Asia and other realms). Feasts involved the same sheep and goats, with now and then cattle and pigs thrown in. Usually, these animals were sacrificed, in rites broadly comparable if different in detail (Robertson Smith 1894). As noted in several chapters in this book, trade was widespread, drawing on lands far beyond the oikumene. Metals and ores, Baltic amber, lapis lazuli from high central Asia, and flint and obsidian from many sources joined with foods, spices, medicines, seals, documents, and pottery in a vast international web. Basic staples like wheat, barley, sheep, and goats spread with trade. The presence of wheat and goats in China before 2000 B.C.E. and Chinese millet in Europe even earlier (Anderson 1988) shows that China had been incorporated in the wider trade networks based ultimately in west Asia. By 100 B.C.E., superior milling technology for wheat had come from the west; sharing of many major wheat-using techniques followed over time. Grapes and grape wine came to China in the second century B.C.E. Soon after, Chinese silk was flowing westward in such quantities that some Romans were afraid its cost would bankrupt Rome (see Green 1991).

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A steady interchange of plants followed, moving in both directions (Anderson 1988; Buell, Anderson, and Perry 2000; Laufer 1919). Rice, spread throughout East and South Asia by the dawn of civilization, reached Spain with the Arabs not long after their conquests (Watson 1983). Bitter oranges and lemons, both derived from some part of south or Southeast Asia, came then or soon after. By the time the Mongols made an industry of knowledge exchange (Anderson, chapter 6), China and the West had been part of one technological and economic system for centuries. China’s north was moving toward its subsequent dependence on wheat rather than native grains. Flavoring food with coriander leaves (a Near Eastern plant) was about equally common in both regions; Near Easterners were not only eating rice in quantity, but they were often eating it from the extremely prestigious porcelain bowls traded from China (Carswell 2000, especially on the importance of the Mongols in this trade). In short, at the gut level (literal once again), the oikumene was real, and regional cultures had exchanged much of their very basis of existence. This being the case, it is not surprising that the cycles of empire in distant systems began to coincide with one another in time (Chase-Dunn and Manning 2002). The timing grew closer and closer over centuries, until the Mongols guaranteed the coincidence by creating the first empire to fuse East and West. But the rough equivalence in time of the Abbasids and the Tang (to name one conspicuous example) was already probably related to their participation in a common world. At the fateful battle of the Talas River, in 751 C.E., the Arabs and Chinese reached their respective farthest limits of conquest. The Arabs won, setting a limit to Chinese ambitions that was to survive through today, but the Arabs themselves were too overextended to hold their new lands. Grand currents of trade, nomadizing, and military activity, however, seem to have been adequate to provide some form of synchronization of long cycles. Climate was a factor, too, as pointed out by several authors in this book.Warm periods are accompanied by hot dry weather in arid west and central Asia but by stronger monsoon activity in the south and east. The Mongols built their empire as the Medieval Warm Period was making their homeland more lush and pleasant. They rode out into a Near East weakened by heat and drought. Semiperipheral Development Ibn Khaldun was writing mainly about single polities. But his analysis is quite relevant for the study of world-systems because of its ability to account for the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. Can his work be generalized to regional declines, or even to the declines of whole worldsystems? Ibn Khaldun cycles can be understood as one type of the phenomenon of semiperipheral development theorized by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:chapter 5). Semiperipheral development is a process in which some of the societies that are in a semiperipheral (or formerly


13

peripheral) position within a world-system act to transform the system either by means of upward mobility or by altering the logic of institutional interaction within the larger system. Ibn Khaldun’s cycle is quite similar to what Chase-Dunn and Hall have described as a semiperipheral marcher state that unifies a group of older core states by means of conquest, creating a core-wide empire. What Ibn Khaldun discovered in the relationship between nomadic and urbanized Arabs had been going on since the first emergence of states in Mesopotamia, and a similar process can also be found in systems composed of chiefdoms. Complex interchiefdom systems experienced a cycle in which a single paramount chiefdom became hegemonic within a system of competing polities by conquering adjacent chiefdoms (D. G. Anderson 1994; Kirch 1984).6 Once states emerged within a region they went through an analogous cycle of rise and fall in which a single state became hegemonic and then declined. Eventually these systems of states (interstate systems), experienced the phenomenon of semiperipheral marcher conquest in which a new state from out on the edge of the circle of old states conquered all (or most) of the states in the old core region to form a “universal empire.” This pattern repeated itself for thousands of years, with occasional leaps in which a semiperipheral marcher state conquered larger regions than had ever before been subjected to a single power (e.g. Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, Alexandrian Hellenism, the Han Empire, Rome, the Islamic Caliphates, the Aztec and Inca Empires, the Manchu Dynasty in China) (see figure 1.2). With the rise of Europe and intensified capitalism a modification of this old pattern appeared. In the European interstate system the semiperipheral marcher states were outdone by a new breed of capitalist nation-states. These capitalist hegemons established primacy in the larger system without

Large

Hegemons with colonial empires Core-wide empires States Small Chiefdoms Time Figure 1.2 Rise and fall of large and powerful polities within regional interpolity systems

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conquering adjacent core states, and so the core remained multicentric despite the continued rise and fall of hegemonic core powers. Imperialism was reorganized as colonial empires in which each core state had its own peripheral “backyard.” The efforts by some core powers to conquer their neighbors were defeated by coalitions that sought to reproduce a multistate structure among core states. Thus the oscillation between “universal state” and “interstate system” came to end and was replaced by the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers.The hegemonic sequence of the modern interstate system alternates between two structural situations as hegemonic core powers rise and fall: hegemony and hegemonic rivalry. This was a new form of the process of rise and fall (see figure 1.3). The Westphalian interstate system, in which the sovereignty of separate and competing states is institutionalized by the right of states to make war to protect their independence, has become taken for granted in the modern world-system. Historians of international relations (Kennedy 1987) and theorists of international relations (Waltz 1979) have come to define this situation as a natural state of being. Authors with greater temporal depth (Wilkinson 1988, 1999) have argued that the peculiar resistance of the modern interstate system to the emergence of a universal state by means of conquest has been the result of an evolutionary learning process unique to modern Europe in which states realized that in order to protect their own sovereignty they should band together and engage in “general war” whenever a “rogue state” threatens to conquer another state. A rather different explanation of the modern transition from the pattern of semiperipheral marcher state conquest to the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, points to the emergent predominance of capitalist accumulation in the European-centered interstate system. Once capitalism had become the predominant strategy for the accumulation of wealth and power it partially supplanted the geopolitical logic of institutionalized political coercion as a means to accumulation. Powerful capitalist core states emerged that could effectively prevent semiperipheral marcher states from conquering whole core regions to erect a “universal state.” The first capitalist-nation state to successfully do this was the Dutch republic of the seventeenth century.

Core Time 1

Core Time 2

Hegemon

Hegemony Figure 1.3 Unicentric versus multicentric core

Hegemonic rivalry


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Theories of Modern Rise and Fall There are several important ways in which explanations of modern rise and fall are different from one another. One important distinction is between the functionalists (who see emergent global hierarchies as serving a “need for global order”) and conflict theorists (who dwell more intently on the ways in which hierarchies serve the privileged, the powerful and the wealthy). The term “hegemony” usually corresponds with the conflict approach, while the functionalists tend to employ the idea of “leadership,” though several analysts occasionally use both of these terms (e.g. Arrighi and Silver 1999). Another difference is between those who stress the importance of political/military power vs. what we call “economic power.” This issue is confused by disciplinary traditions (e.g. differences between economics, political science and sociology). Most economists entirely reject the notion of economic power, assuming that market exchanges occur among equals. Most political scientists and sociologists would agree that economic power has become more important than it formerly was. Some of the literature on recent globalization goes so far as to argue that states and military organizations have been largely subsumed by the power of transnational corporations and global market dynamics (e.g. Ross 1995; Robinson 1998). The three most important approaches to theorizing modern hegemony are those of Wallerstein (1974, 2004), Modelski and Thompson (1996), and Arrighi (1994).Wallerstein defines hegemony as comparative advantages in profitable types of production. This economic advantage is what serves as the basis of the hegemon’s political and cultural influence and military power. Hegemonic production is the most profitable kind of core production, and hegemony is just the top end of the global hierarchy that constitutes the modern core/periphery division of labor. Hegemonies are unstable and tend to devolve into hegemonic rivalry. Wallerstein sees a Dutch seventeenth-century hegemony, a British hegemony in the nineteenth century, and U.S. hegemony in the twentieth century. He perceives three stages within each hegemony. The first is based on success in the production of consumer goods; the second is a matter of success in the production of capital goods; and the third is rooted in success in financial services and foreign investment stemming from the institutionalized centrality of the hegemon in the larger world-system. George Modelski and William R. Thompson (1994) are political scientists whose theoretical perspective contains a strong dose of Parsonsian structural functionalism applied to international systems. They allege that the world needs order, and world powers rise to fill this need. Such powers rise on the basis of economic comparative advantage in newly leading industries, which allow them to acquire the resources needed to win wars among the great powers and to mobilize coalitions that keep the peace. World wars are the arbiters that function as selection mechanisms for global leadership. But the comparative advantages of the leaders diffuse to

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competitors and new challengers emerge. Successful challengers are those that ally with the declining world leader against another challenger (e.g. the United States and Britain against Germany). Modelski and Thompson (1994) measured the rise of certain key trades and industries, so-called “new lead industries,” that are seen as important components of the rise of world powers. They also have measured the degree of concentration of naval power in the European interstate system since the fifteenth century (Modelski and Thompson 1988). Their “twin peaks” model posits that each “power cycle” includes two Kondratieff waves.7 Their list of world powers begins with Portugal in the fifteenth century. Then they include the Dutch period of world leadership in the seventeenth century. And they see the British as having successfully performed the role of world leader twice, once in the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth century. Thus they introduce the possibility that a world leader can succeed itself. They designate the United States as the world leader of the twentieth century. Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994) The Long Twentieth Century employs a Marxist and Braudelian approach to the analysis of what he terms “systemic cycles of accumulation.” Arrighi rejects the idea that K-waves are regularly related to hegemony based on his claim that K-waves have not been theorized as elements of capitalist accumulation.8 He sees hegemonies as successful collaborations between capitalists and wielders of state power. His tour of the hegemonies begins with Genoese financiers who allied with Spanish and Portuguese statesmen to perform the role of hegemon in the fifteenth century. In Arrighi’s approach the role of hegemon itself evolves, becoming more deeply entwined with the organizational and economic institutional spheres that allow for successful capitalist accumulation. He sees a Dutch hegemony of the seventeenth century, then a period of contention between Britain and France in the eighteenth century, and a British hegemony in the nineteenth century, followed by U.S. hegemony in the twentieth century. A distinctive element of Arrighi’s approach is his contention that profit making from trade and production becomes more difficult toward the end of a “systemic cycle of accumulation” and so big capital becomes increasing focused on making profits through financial manipulations. Arrighi’s approach is compatible with the idea that new lead industries are important in the rise of a hegemony, but he sees the economic activities of big capital during the declining years in terms of speculative financial activities.These latter often correspond with a period of “growth” in which incomes are rising during a latter-day belle époque of the systemic cycle of accumulation. But this period of accumulation is based on the economic power of haute finance and the centering of world markets in the global cities of the hegemons rather than on their ability to produce real products that people will buy, and so these belle époques are unsustainable and are followed by decline. The approach developed by Ibn Khaldun continues to be relevant for understanding contemporary processes of uneven development and the concentration and deconcentration of power by pointing to important


17

continuing patterns and by allowing us to more accurately see the differences between modern and classical patterns of rise and fall. Notes 1. We are indebted to Peter Turchin for discussion and for letting us see the draft of his book on Ibn Khaldun and the rise and fall of states (Turchin 2003). 2. Ibn Khaldun’s theory is outlined explicitly on 249–430, esp. pp. 259–355 (Khaldun 1958). 3. See 1958:381; parenthetical words have been introduced by the translator for clarity. 4. Rudolph Rummel (1998) has recently discussed this, adding that power kills; genocide and democide take place in totalitarian states. 5. The text reads “40 years,” but these are Islamic years of 330 days. 6. D. G. Anderson’s (1994) excellent review of the anthropological literature on the rise and fall of chiefdoms uses the term “cycling” to refer to this phenomenon. Patrick Kirch’s (1984) model of the emergence of complex chiefdoms on Pacific islands implies that the marcher chiefs who manage to conquer adjacent polities and create a larger island-wide polity are frequently from junior lineages on less ecologically favorable regions of the island. 7. The Kondratieff Wave (K-wave) is a 40–60 year business cycle. The “A-phase” is a 20–30 year period of higher average growth rates in the world economy, while the “B-phase” is a 20–30 year period of lower average growth rates.The best evidence for the existence of the K-wave is to be found in price histories, but considerable evidence also exists for a temporally similar production long wave (Goldstein 1988). 8. Many of the political scientists who analyze K-waves spurn any analysis of capitalism (e.g. Goldstein 1988; Modelski and Thompson 1996), but Marxist economists such as Ernest Mandel (1980) and David Gordon (1980) have provided important theorizations of the K-wave.

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, Janet Lippman. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Algaze, Guillermo. 1993. The Uruk World System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, David G. 1994. The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Anderson, E. N. 1988. The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. ––––. 2003. “Caffeine and Culture.” In W. Sankowiak and Daniel Bradbord, Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion. pp. 159–176.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. —— and Beverly J. Silver. 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barbeau, Maurice and William Beynon, ed. John Cove and George MacDonald. 1987. Tsimshian Narratives. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Barfield, Thomas J. 1989. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Bentley, Jerry H. 1993. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1972 (Fr. orig. 1966). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row. ––––. 1979. The Perspective of the World. New York: Harper and Row. Buell, Paul, E. N. Anderson, and Charles Perry. 2000. A Soup for the Qan. London: Kegan Paul International. Carswell, John. 2000. Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain Around the World. Chicago: Art Media Resources. Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview.

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Chase-Dunn, C. and E. Susan Manning. 2002. “City Systems and World-Systems: Four Millennia of City Growth and Decline.” Cross-Cultural Research 36, 4: 379–398. Chew, Sing. 2001.World Ecological Degradation.Walnut Greek, CA: AltaMira Press. Crump, James L. (tr./ed.). 1970. Chan-kuo Ts’e. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denemark, Robert, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski (eds.), 2000. World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change. London: Routledge. Dols, Michael. 1977. The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dooley, Ann and Harry Roe (tr./ed.). 1999. Tales of the Elders of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry K. Gills (eds.). 1993. The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London: Routledge. Friedman, Jonathan and Michael Rowlands. 1977. “Toward an epigenetic model of the evolution of ‘civilization.’ ” In J. Friedman and M. Rowlands (eds.) The Evolution of Social Systems, pp. 201–278. London: Duckworth. Gibbon, Edward. 1946 (orig. 1782). The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Heritage Press. Gill, Richardson. 2000. The Great Maya Droughts. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Goldstein, Joshua. 1988. Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gordon, David M. 1980.“Stages of Accumulation and Long Economic Cycles.” In Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), Processes of the World-System, pp. 9–45. Beverly Hills: Sage. Green, Peter. 1991. Alexander to Actium. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hobbes,Thomas. 1950 (orig. 1657). Leviathan. New York: E. P. Dutton. Huang, Philip. 2002.“Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomerantz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.” Journal of Asian Studies 61: 501–538. Ibn Khaldun. 1958. The Muqaddimah. vol. 1.Tr. and ed. Franz Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books. Johnson, Allen W. and Timothy Earle. 1987. The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kennedy, Paul. 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. Kinsella,Thomas (tr./ed.). 1970. The Tain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirch, Patrick V. 1984. The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1959 (orig. 1956). History Begins at Sumer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Kroeber, A. L. 1948. Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, second ed. Lattimore, Owen. 1940. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. New York: American Geographical Society, republished 1951, second ed. Boston: Beacon Press. Laufer, Berthold. 1919. Sino-Iranica. Chicago: Field Museum. Lucero, Lucy. 2002.“The Collapse of the Classic Maya: A Case for the Role of Water Control.” American Anthropologist 104: 814–826. Mandel, Ernest. 1980. Long Waves of Capitalist Development: the Marxist interpretation. London: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGovern, Thomas H., Gerald F. Bigelow, Thomas Amorosi and Daniel Russell. 1996. “Northern Islands, Human Error, and Environmental Degradation.” In Daniel Bates and Susan Lees (eds.), Case Studies in Human Ecology, pp. 103–152. New York: Plenum Press. McNeill,William. 1976. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Modelski, George and William R. Thompson. 1988. Seapower in Global Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ——. 1996. Leading Sectors and World Powers: the Coevolution of Global Politics and Economics. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Mote, Frederick. 1999. Imperial China 900–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pareto,Vilfredo. 1968. The Rise and Fall of the Elite.Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press. Pomerantz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.


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——. 2002.“Beyond the East-West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth Century World.” Journal of Asian Studies 61:539–590. Ponting, Clive. 1991. A Green History of the World. New York: Penguin. Rummel, Rudolph. 1998. Statistics of Democide. Munich: Lit. Robinson,William I. 1996. Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention and Hegemony. Cambridge University Press. ——. 1998. “Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology and the Challenge of Transnational Studies.” Sociological Forum 13:561–594. Ross, Robert J. S. 1995. “The theory of global capitalism: state theory and variants of capitalism on a world scale.” In David Smith and Jozsef Borocz (eds.) A New World Order?: Global Transformations in the Late Twentieth Century, pp. 19–36.Westport, CT: Praeger. Sanderson, Stephen. 1999. Social Transformations:A General Theory of Historical Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlethorpe. Smith, Robertson.W. 1894. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. London: A. and C. Black. Taylor, Peter J. 1996. The Way the Modern World Works:World Hegemony to World Impasse. New York:Wiley Teggart, Frederick J. 1939. Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. 2001. Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Turchin, P. 2003. Historical dynamics: why states rise and fall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— and T. D. Hall. 2003. “Spatial Synchrony Among and Within World-Systems: Insights from Theoretical Ecology.” Journal of World Systems Research 9, 1 ⬍http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/ archive/vol9/number1/pdf/jwsr-v9n1-turchinhall.pdf ⬎. Vico, Giambattista. 1984. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. (Italian orig. 1744.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System,Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. ——. 2004.“The United States in Decline?” forthcoming in Thomas E. Reifer, Hegemony, Globalization and Anti-Systematic Movements, pp. 19–24. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Waltz, Kenneth N. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Watson,Andrew. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World:The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, pp. 700–1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, David. 2002. The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. New York: Thames and Hudson. Wheatley, Paul. 2001. The Places Where Men Pray Together. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilkinson, David. 1987. “Central Civilization.” Comparative Civilizations Review 17:31–59 (Fall). ——. 1991. “Core, Peripheries and Civilizations” In C. Chase-Dunn and T. D. Hall (eds.), Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, pp. 113–166. Boulder, CO:Westview. ——. 1988. “Universal Empires: Pathos and Engineering.” Comparative Civilizations Review 18:22–44 (Spring). ——. 1999. “Unipolarity without Hegemony.” International Studies Review 2:141–172 (Summer). Will, Pierre-Etienne and R. Bin Wong. 1991. Nourish the People. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wilson, John A. 1951. The Culture of Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wong, R. Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER TWO

Eurasian C-Wave Crises in the First Millennium B.C. William R. Thompson

One of the more interesting challenges in world-system history is modeling long-term fluctuations in change and instability. The task is challenging because we are not used to working in really longue durees and, partially as a consequence, the information needed to test theories is not readily available. It must be slowly reconstructed, to the extent that it can be found, from many scattered sources. A third problem is that our understandings of prehistorical eras are sketchy and interpretative. Coins, burned walls, and pottery styles must be studied for whatever clues they can impart. Most analysts of world-system history are not trained in numismatics or art history. Therefore, we are forced to rely on reconstructions executed by specialists who are not always particularly interested in bigger pictures. Fourth, the world system is and, seemingly, has been a rather large place for some time. Yet history and archaeology tend to be organized by regional and subregional foci that are usually further delimited by temporal filters. For instance, historians and archaeologists, as a rule, do not study the Bronze Age as a whole.They study a chronological slice of it (e.g., early, middle, late) in some village in Palestine, Greece, or the Carpathians. Moreover, substantial territories are studied and written about primarily in languages (e.g., Russian and Chinese) that are not widely known in the West. Fitting together information extracted from different villages, regions, and eras certainly goes on but it is not an activity in which many historians and archaeologists are engaged. Finally, the prevailing ideologies of anthropology, archaeology, and history are inherently antagonistic to some of the central conceptualizations on which we rely in world-system history.1 All of these problems are good reasons for not doing world-system history.Yet, as obstacles, they are not quite good enough reasons because the subject matter demands and deserves long-term interpretations. Patterns of long-term change ultimately may prove elusive and/or illusive but the patterns seem to be there waiting to be discovered and explained. One

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intriguing theory encompassing about 5,000 years of early world-system behavior is Chernykh’s (1992) Great Migration (hereafter C-waves) model. Chernykh argues that in the era characterized by the development of metal tools and weapons beginning around 3500 B.C. and up through about 1500, recurring periods of migrations had as one of their effects the closer integration of Eurasia and North Africa. Moreover, this closer integration can be observed in the pan-Eurasian synchronization of major periods of stability and instability. If this argument is valid, one type of globalization and interdependence process has been with us for a number of millennia.2 Any theory needs empirical corroboration.The core of the C-wave theory is a schedule of intermittent periods of turmoil and change focusing on shifts in metal technology and increasingly pan-Eurasian migrations of people uprooted by technological change. C-wave theory testing, therefore, can proceed in various ways.The explanation may be satisfactory while the periodizations of turmoil are less than fully appropriate. Alternatively, the periodizations may fit but the explanation may fail to encompass adequately all of the behavior it attempts to address. A third possibility is that neither the explanation nor the periodization work. Perhaps least likely is a fourth possibility—that both the explanation and the periodization of systemic flux are capable of withstanding any challenge. Earlier tests of the Chernykh theory have focused primarily on the fit of the periodization schedule. Modelski and Thompson (1998) executed a rough attempt to examine the full 3500 B.C.–A.D. 1500 run with information collected on the timing of “nomadic” incursions/migrations on sedentary areas.The apparent fit of the data was relatively good but a number of empirical corners had to be cut to develop a 5,500-year incursions database for Afro-Eurasia.3 Somewhat more selective tests have been developed in Thompson (2001, 2002) for the 4000–1000 B.C. era in the Near East. Non-sedentary incursions, changes in political regime, and trade fluctuations/ reorientations in Mesopotamia and Egypt correlate with three of the first four periods of Chernykh turmoil. One of the four periods misses a major period of Near Eastern instability by approximately 200 years.4 Continuing this focus on the accuracy of the periodization schedule, the current examination concentrates primarily on the first millennium B.C. and Chernykh’s single period of pan-Eurasian turmoil (400–200 B.C.). Several questions are posed. First, how well does the 400–200 B.C. interval encompass the observed instability in the first millennium? Other scholars have emphasized Cimmerian/Scythian behavior in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Should we ignore these activities for some reason even though this same period delineates the transition to the Eastern Chou dynasty in China? Chernykh also notes that the 400–200 period encompasses Celts, Sarmatians, Alexander the Great, and the Warring States era in China.What possible common denominator can these manifestations have, if any? A third question involves the turmoil interval that ushered in the first millennium B.C. How is first millennium B.C. turmoil similar or different to the instability that signaled the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 B.C.? Is there

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more discontinuity or continuity in the types of problems that beset the end of the Bronze and the beginning of the Iron Ages? Chernykh’s Great Migration Model Table 2.1 outlines the Chernykh model. Seven periods of crisis and transformation, each separated from its predecessor by some 700–900 years, have punctuated the six millennia between the fourth millennium B.C. to the second half of the second millennium A.D. Each period lasted 400– 500 years but peaks for no more than 2–3 centuries. The magnitude and scale of the migrations and their impacts are not uniform from period to period. While the emphasis is on mass migration from customary habitats to new places of resettlement, it is assumed that other variables (e.g., societal conditions and/or ecological changes) bring about the population movements. The Great Migration model, therefore, does not portray the migrations per se as the prime driver of the model. Rather, migrations are one of the most dramatic effects of changes in “deep and hidden processes” that lead to the decline and formation of systems and social structures. But Table 2.1 Chernykh’s seven great migration crises Timing

Scope

Comments

3500–3000 B.C., peaking in 3500–3200 2600–2400 B.C. peak

Carpatho-Balkans to Iran and Afghanistan

First wave of Indo-European migrations around Black Sea area

Throughout metal producing cultures

Aegean-west Asian Minor destruction; early bronze age towns in Syrian and Palestine collapse; Old Kingdom crisis onset in Egypt Spread of tin–bronze; middle–late Bronze Age transition in Eurasian steppes; Kassites in Mesopotamia; Hyksos in Egypt; Harappan collapse in Indus; Xia collapse and rise of Shang in China Spread of iron; second wave of Indo-Iranian migrations; Phrygians in Asia Minor; Sea Peoples in eastern Mediterranean Celts moving east and Sarmatians moving west;Alexander the Great; Warring States in China Successive waves of Huns and Turks from Pacific Ocean almost to Atlantic Ocean Crusades in Near East; Mongol conquests from Indonesia to Central Europe

1800–1500 B.C.

Eastern Europe to China

1200–900 B.C.

Pan-Eurasian

400–200 B.C., peaking in 300–200 300–700 A.D.

Pan-Eurasian

1000–1300 A.D., peaking in 1200s

Pan-Eurasian

Pan-Eurasian

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the displacement of large numbers of people is an important, intermediate agent of consequent changes. These migration periods generate long-term waves of change. Societal pressures build up and so do population movements. Movements in one place set off chain reactions in other places, leading to the movement of even more people and, often, considerable destruction. Most importantly, whole cultures and associated political institutions are likely to be swept away by the waves of change. New skills, new ideologies, and new institutions are introduced as old taboos and ways of doing things are supplanted abruptly. In particular, Chernykh emphasizes that familiarity with metalworking innovations expanded in step with each successive migration period and the subsequent introduction of new metallurgical techniques by migrants to areas hitherto unfamiliar with, successively, bronze, tin–bronze, or iron. If the migrations worked as intermittent agents of major changes and increased interdependence over a 5,000-year period, Eurasian interdependence in general was accelerated by the coming together of three early factors. First, metalworking required sources of ore, specialists in transforming ore into metal utensils, jewelry, weapons, and tools, and metal consumers. To the extent that it was unlikely that all three would be located in the same place, trade in commodities related to metalworking was strongly encouraged as early as the fifth millennium B.C. Moreover, to obtain these metal commodities, communities had to produce something that could be exchanged.Thus, trading propensities multiplied. A second factor, also beginning in the fifth millennium B.C., was the domestication of the horse and other animals used for transporting goods and people. More groups could be reached encompassing ever-expanding distances, and reached more quickly. A third factor that did not emerge until toward the end of the fourth millennium were states that could expand the number of different groups coexisting within a single social organization, and also the size of communities that might be affected by waves of violent change. Tying these three factors together is the idea that socioeconomic and political structures were closely linked to metallurgical developments and trade, transportation possibilities, and, of course, organizational principles. Monopolies in metal trade underwrote temples and palaces. The surplus extracted funded their existence and activities. Control over the metal trade led to the ability to reward followers, punish rebels, and expand chiefdoms into states.Weapons made of stronger metals contributed to military superiority over people with less durable weapons. Eventually, the merging of superior weaponry with mounted soldiers made cavalry an important tool for military mobility that only became obsolete fairly recently. The basic point is that changes in metallurgy, combined with the displacement of people with relatively advanced skills in metallurgy, within a context in which institutions and practices are tied to metalworking developments meant that the changes in skills and displacements of people could

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not be easily absorbed. They constituted major shocks to status quos that made the disintegration of established customs not inevitable but certainly probable. To the extent that the shocks broke down barriers to economic and other innovations, new metalworking and other types of practices could emerge thanks to the erosion of traditional prohibitions and the movement of skilled workers.The serial shocks also meant that Eurasian societies would become more and more alike in some ways—one of the main complaints of contemporary globalization—and especially in their levels of economic development. Every so often, the metallurgical playing field would become more even as the most advanced practices diffused to new areas.Yet these periods of intensified change and diffusion also meant that Eurasian societies, increasingly, would become attuned to a basic rhythm of change. New economic and sociopolitical structures would emerge at about the same time.They would enjoy periods of stability at about the same time.And they would atrophy more or less at similar rates, assuming some universal proclivity toward organizational entropy, thereby setting themselves up for another round of intensified change.Thus, Eurasian structures and politicoeconomic systems became not only more interdependent at an early time; their phased propensities toward major change also became more synchronized than might otherwise be anticipated. Metalworking is given great prominence as a primary driver of change and structural formations. Large-scale migrations are visualized as twin agents of instability and diffusion. Still, the argument is not so simple that it can be reduced to the equation that radical changes in metalworking led to movements of people which in turn led to all sorts of economic and sociopolitical changes. Chernykh actually leaves a great deal open in discussing the sources of change. Ecological changes may play some role.That possibility is left entirely open-ended although he notes that paleolithic migrations were probably more sensitive to climate changes than migrations in the Bronze/Iron Ages. Chernykh also notes several times that there are internal reasons for structural decline. Because of these endogenous entropic processes, societal structures become vulnerable to the external shocks posed by Great Migrations. Presumably, the intention at least in part is to soften resistance to an argument that places so much stress on exogenous impacts. But, the reference also underlines the incomplete specification of the argument. Other processes presumably are at work—both internally and externally; Chernykh is only emphasizing some of the more obvious or discernible processes. Incomplete though it may be, it offers a bold framework around which to organize and periodize world (read Eurasian) history between 3500 B.C. and 1500 A.D. It also offers a venue for integrating technological change with economic and sociopolitical changes. Moreover, the framework eschews gradual evolution from stage to stage for an emphasis on punctuated change and uneven development.There is no insistence, after all, that all of Eurasia was impacted equally in each iteration of the model. On the contrary, there are various reasons why we might expect that not to be

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the case—and these reasons (e.g., distance from the center of migrations or the extent of metallurgical innovation) become part of the explanation of historical change. For analysts intrigued by the emergence of Kondratieff waves (K-waves) predicated on 40–60 year discontinuities in commercial and industrial economic growth that date from the late eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in Britain, the eleventh-century economic revolution in Sung China, or have always been around in terms of alternations in economic expansion and contraction, Chernykh’s argument should be particularly appealing.5 It offers a very similar type of explanation, emphasizing discontinuous technological development, alternating periods of stability and instability, and major institutional changes as a consequence. Chernykh’s migration periods could represent an ancient set of cyclical processes that flattened out around 1500 and/or one that was supplanted by other, more modern, cyclical processes. On the other hand, migrations on a large scale have hardly disappeared in the modern era. Perhaps we simply do not recognize more contemporary movements of people as related to earlier manifestations of migration. These questions of linkages to other arguments and processes are intriguing but somewhat premature. We first need to ask whether there is supporting evidence for Chernykh’s interpretation. Chernykh, himself, only outlines his argument and periodization rather sketchily at the very end of an intensive study of metallurgic diffusion in ancient Central Eurasia. A question that is left open is whether the periodization fits the record of activities encompassed by the argument. Does it capture the periodicity of intensive migration activity? Does it correspond to advances in, and the spread of, metallurgy? Are there overt linkages to impacts in sociopolitical changes? How does the argument correspond to historical alternations in political stability and instability? We should not forget that we do not know much about the C-wave process. Has Chernykh identified the appropriate peak periods? For instance, Buzan and Segal (1998:53) identify seven “main waves of barbarian upsurges.” Their peak periods are nineteenth–fifteenth centuries B.C., thirteenth century B.C., eighth century B.C., third–seventh century A.D., seventh–eighth century A.D., tenth–fifteenth century A.D., and thirteenth century A.D. It is not clear whether Buzan and Segal were aware of Chernykh’s list but there are some overlaps as well as some difference of opinion. One reason for the differences is that Buzan and Segal characterize each upsurge according to the ethnic identity of the barbarians involved. Thus, the first three are Indo-European, the fourth is a mix of Indo-European and Turks, the fifth Arab, the sixth Turks again, and the seventh Mongols. Otherwise, one might fold the fifth upsurge into the fourth one and locate the seventh within the sixth. If that was done, the explicit disagreement would be reduced primarily to Buzan and Segal’s third upsurge (eighth century B.C.) and Chernykh’s fifth wave several centuries later. Putting aside the implicit question of when to start counting “barbarian upsurges,” who, if anyone, is right about the first millennium B.C.?

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Was it fairly early in the millennium, much later, or both earlier and later? Should we privilege the Western activities of Cimmerians/Scythians or Celts, and why? Is something pan-Eurasian occurring in these upsurges that would connect Chinese problems with “barbarians” with Mediterranean problems with their “barbarians”? The Scythian/Celt choice raises an auxiliary question.Are there epicenters located in Central Eurasia that then emanate out to the corners of Eurasia? What should we make of a barbarian/hinterland movement, such as that of the Celts, that begins on the western rim of Eurasia and then moves east and thereby, presumably, has less chance of creating pan-Eurasian impacts? What should we make of Cimmerian/Scythian activity that is best known for focusing on the Near East? Are some of these upsurges limited in scope and effect? Finally, we also need to ask whether any crises in the first millennium B.C. were instrumental in reorienting and expanding trade networks. Earlier C-wave crises were quite important in reorganizing the structure of Near Eastern trade and in linking, at various times, the Near East to India and the Mediterranean spheres. Did this process of crisis-induced reorganization continue into the first millennium B.C.? Questions and Dynamics Answers to all four of the main questions motivating this inquiry invariably will overlap. The first two questions are especially intertwined. Whether there is only one period of Eurasian turmoil in the first millennium and how Alexander the Great, along with Celts and Sarmatians, might be linked to the Warring States period in China are difficult questions to separate.The answers to be advanced here, that there were two periods of turmoil and that the seemingly disparate actors and processes are actually related in various ways, require attention to four coevolving dynamics, and their interactions, in first millennium B.C., or early classical Eurasia. Imagine five overlapping circles, with each circle representing a geographically delimited set of dynamics. On the right hand side of the image, the European circle intersects the top of the Mediterranean circle below it. A third, Central Asian circle lies to the right about midway between the first two circles and overlaps both the European and Mediterranean circles. Below the Central Asian circle lies the Indian circle, which was probably always linked closely to Central Asia and had been more prominently linked to the Mediterranean’s Near Eastern predecessor in earlier millennia.Toward the end of the first millennium B.C., its connections to the Mediterranean, Central Asian, and Chinese circles became more prominent.To the right of the Central Asian circle is a Chinese circle that overlapped with the Central Asian circle, and developed links to India, but had no direct connections to the Mediterranean or European circles in the B.C. era. Within each of the overlapping sections, the influences tend to be reciprocal or two way, although not always equally strong in both directions.6

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While the circles have different geographic labels, the real differences relate to the different types of dynamics evolving in each region. The Mediterranean dynamic is one of political–economic expansion and contraction, coupled with tendencies toward concentration and deconcentration of power—although not necessarily along unicentric lines. The Mediterranean region, encompassing the Mediterranean littoral as well as much of southwest Asia in this time period, eventually did become unicentric around Rome toward the middle of the Classical era (roughly first millenniums B.C. and A.D.). However, the norm in this region has been one of multipolar distributions of power, with different pockets of power concentration rising and falling at various times. It is this region that is the direct inheritor of ancient Near Eastern trading networks extending back at least to the fifth millennium B.C., if not before. The European dynamic in which we are most interested is one of subordination and response to the economic inroads of the Mediterranean dynamic. That is not to suggest that there were no internal rhythms of interest in Classical Europe. For present purposes, though, the answers to our first two questions require a focus on how Europe interacted with the more complex societies to the south and, to a lesser extent, the steppe tribes to the east. In contrast, the Central Asian principle dynamics of concern are the slow evolution to a fully nomadic economy and its implications for interactions with adjacent, more sedentary societies in the outer Eurasian rim. Finally, the Chinese dynamics resemble those of the Mediterranean in their emphasis on political organization, economic prosperity, and the need to deal with northern/northwestern threats.The Far Eastern processes differ from the Far Western ones in the sense that in the Chinese region the political tendency is more biased toward unification and decentralization, as opposed to concentration fluctuations within multipolarity evinced in the Mediterranean area, with the exception of the Roman era.7 Differences aside, one common denominator of the four regions that we will be focusing upon is that they became increasingly interdependent in the first millennium B.C. to the extent that turmoil in any one of the four regions was likely to be felt in adjacent regions and, at least intermittently but not always directly, in the other three regions. Mediterranean Dynamics The Mediterranean region had emerged from the older Near Eastern trading network. Initially focused on Mesopotamia, the Near Eastern system, subject to intermittent contractions and pulsations, had expanded to incorporate the Levant, the Indus region with its links to Central Asian oases and Arabia, Egypt with its links to northeastern Africa and Arabia, and the Aegean with its links to central and other parts of Europe. The Indus connection had withered after 1700 B.C. leading to increased emphasis on linkages in the Eastern Mediterranean. Around 1200 B.C. these Eastern Mediterranean linkages collapsed rather abruptly in a less than fully

28

William R.Thompson Table 2.2 Origins and dates of overseas artifacts found on Crete, 1100–600 B.C. Period

Greece/ Aegean

1100–1050 1050–1000 1000–950 950–900 900–850 850–800 800–750 750–700 700–650 650–600

4.5 2 19 27 16 59.5 36 101.5 69 85

Cyprus

Near East

Italy/ Europe

9 0 3.5 2 4 15 31.5 12.3 11 3

13.5 1 17.5 1 8 88 39 48.1 37 33.5

3 0 0 0 0 1 10.5 6.5 0.5 0

Total

30 3 40 30 28 163.5 117 168.4 117.5 121.5

Note: The Near East category includes Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. Source: based on Jones (2000: 179), with combined categories and corrected totals for the seventh century.

understood frenzy of turmoil and conflict registered throughout the Mediterranean littoral.The immediate post-1200 era is often referred to as a Dark Age, in part because population levels declined, societal complexity deteriorated, and trade diminished—but also in part because few, if any, people were in a position to write about the era in which they were attempting to survive. Mediterranean revival was in full force by the ninth century B.C. and perhaps even earlier. Table 2.2 summarizes datable foreign artifacts found on Crete in the first half of the millennium.8 Crete’s geographical centrality in the eastern Mediterranean should make it a good index of trading activity.The evidence suggests that the second half of the ninth and eighth centuries were peak years but that a near-cessation of activity is only observed in the second half of the eleventh century. In any event, by the ninth century, population growth was on the upswing and trade was clearly expanding. The leading agents of trade expansion were the Phoenician cities in the south, located along the coast between Syria and Palestine, of which Tyre became predominant, for a while the Etruscan city states in northern Italy, and various Greek cities in the north that established trading posts and colonies in the Black Sea and western Mediterranean. The Phoenician cities eventually succumbed to Assyrian domination, but not before creating a Carthaginian offshoot that took the place of Phoenician activities in the West.The Etruscan cities were eventually taken over by the Romans. The Greek cities were able to fight off Persian domination while developing their celebrated, high level of societal sophistication.Yet they were unable to evade a equally high level of intra-Greek conflict, as exemplified by the Peloponnesian wars of the latter fifth century B.C. Greek conflict continued into the latter part of the fourth century B.C. with the Macedonian successful, if short-lived bid for hegemony in Greece and then throughout southwest Asia and Egypt. In the western Mediterranean, the Carthaginian–Roman duel led to Roman

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victory and, eventually, Roman hegemony throughout the Mediterranean region and a considerable proportion of the European region. Prior to Roman hegemony, however, the threat of European tribal forces moving south had to be managed. Rome was attacked in 390 B.C. by Europeans from the western part of Central Europe, and this attack and consequent concerns about security may have encouraged subsequent Roman militarization and territorial expansion in northern Italy. In the fourth and third centuries B.C. other Celtic groups were moving into first the Carpathians and then the Balkans, including Macedonia and Greece, and then Asia Minor. By the last quarter of the third century, the Romans thought they had defeated the Celts in Italy only to find them allying with Hannibal’s Carthaginian invasion. By the late third/early second century, the momentum of Celtic expansion had been stemmed by a string of military defeats from Anatolia to Italy (Wells 1984: 125, 129, 150–151; Kristiansen 1998: 335). Still, Celtic raiding into Italy continued until the very end of the second century, by which time Rome dominated northern Italy, parts of southern Gaul, and was in a secure position to expand throughout the Mediterranean. This quick sketch of European developments leads to a rhythm of escalating conflict over the control of trade and political supremacy in the Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C. Cunliffe (1994: 340, 358) suggests the following schedule: pre-800—a gradual revival of economic interactions; 800–600 B.C.—relatively unrestricted trade; 600–450 B.C.—increasing conflict, competition, and intensification of trade by Phoenician/Carthaginian, Etruscan, and Greek traders; 450–140 B.C.—involving intense conflict among Greeks, between Greeks and Persians, between Romans and Carthaginians, and a movement toward the acquisition of Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean region. At the same time, tribal forces from Central and Western Europe were sometimes raiding and moving into the GraecoRoman world, as well as sometimes supplying mercenaries for southern armies and making alliances with various Mediterranean power contenders. European Dynamics There are of course all sorts of cultural dynamics at play in Europe in the first millennium B.C. The dynamic that most concerns the present inquiry is the Central European response to what were initially Mycenean-inspired trading relationships prior to the thirteenth century B.C. and later reconstructed by Greeks and others after the ninth century B.C. The Aegean traders sought metal ores, gold, salt, amber, and slaves from their northern hinterlands. The Central European response was to organize the supply of these commodities around centralized elite political structures that could ensure that the southern demand was met.This response led to the creation of a number of limited European power nodes focused on raw material production and the redistribution of desired commodities for southern or Mediterranean consumption.

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Two problems emerged around the middle of the first millennium B.C., although perhaps not for the first time. The Greeks found alternative sources of the northern commodities closer to home. Reduced transportation costs meant that Central Europe could be visited less often.The Greek world also became increasingly war-prone. Reduced demand undermined the European centers organized as sources and intermediaries in the north–south trade. Local power depended on monopolizing the import of luxury goods from richer societies. These luxury goods, in turn, could be used to demonstrate local elite status and to reward followers. But as these redistribution centers lost their raison d’etre and external subsidization/stimulation, central European societies reverted to a highly decentralized focus on agrarian production primarily for local consumption.9 Figure 2.1 offers a unique look at this process by plotting estimated meat consumption in Languedoc oppida. Meat consumption remained high between 800 and about the last decade in the sixth century, before abruptly dropping to less than half the 515 B.C. level in 505.The newly reduced level of consumption more or less remained constant through the beginning of the third century. The first half of the third century witnessed additional consumption reductions before returning to the 500–300 B.C. average until the beginning of the first century B.C. Meat consumption in the last century of the B.C. era rose to about 70 percent of the 800–500 average. These data are not as straightforward as they may seem. Kristiansen (1998: 328) suggests that the decline in meat consumption was due in part to being forced to exchange meat for wine imports because there was no demand for other commodities.The evidence for wine imports in the same area suggests that wine, or at least wine amphorae, doubled just as the meat consumption was reduced by half, and that this new level of wine import persisted to

4,000

Kg of meat per 100 vases

3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500

Year Figure 2.1 Meat consumption in Languedoc, 800–1 B.C.

1

50

80 0 75 0 70 0 65 0 60 0 55 0 50 0 45 0 40 0 35 0 30 0 25 0 20 0 15 0 10 0

0

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the end of the fifth century before declining to pre-525 levels.10 Yet the problem could not be simply a matter of trading away food for wine since the low consumption persisted after the wine imports tapered off. Nonetheless, it is clear, to the extent that these data are representative of oppida throughout Europe, standards of living north of the Mediterranean littoral deteriorated between the sixth and second centuries B.C.11 The deterioration of trade supply and demand relationships probably was only one of several changes that led to shifts in European organization strategies. Climate change appears to have encouraged shifts in the location and type of European agrarian production. A warm and dry climate was linked to agricultural production around low-lying bodies of water. Cooler and more humid weather generated incentives to move to higher ground and promoted investments in pastoral emphases on cultivating animal flocks. Demographic considerations also appear to have entered the equation. High population growth in one type of environment that encounters setbacks in terms of climate, shifts in economic strategies and external sources of economic prosperity leads to more mouths than can be fed. Migration of excess population to more attractive environments with less limited carrying capacity is one possible response. Another aspect of shifting strategies and organizational styles was a tendency for warriors and military skills to become the elite focus of the decentralized eras. There may have been several reasons for this development. In periods of centralization, armed forces would have been needed to protect the trade centers and to keep the commodities, including slaves, flowing into the centers. As the centers disintegrated, these armed forces would have had to seek new sources of remuneration, leading to raiding activities at home and abroad. Northern warriors did not need to learn their skills elsewhere but a two-way traffic in northerners hiring out as mercenaries in southern armies and later returning home would have expanded the pool of coercive skills in the agrarian north.The destabilization of political centralization principles would have led to periods of disorder putting a premium on coercive skills in any event. Finally, these periods of flux also appear to have been times of invasion by steppe warriors from the east, which not only contributed to the destabilization but would also have encouraged greater development of local military skills for defensive purposes. Kristiansen (1998:412) argues that this oscillation between periods of centralization and decentralization, with accompanying characteristics of variance in trade relationships, climate, and the emphasis on warrior skills, followed an evolutionary cycle in Central Europe for at least the last two millennia of the B.C. era. He demarcates 2000–1500, 1250–750, 450–0 as periods of decentralization and 1600–1250 and 750–450 as periods of centralization and trade intensification. Since the various influences that led to changes in European organization and economic strategies reoccurred and became more pronounced over time (e.g., north–south trade became more intense with each successive period of trade intensification), the European

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reaction to change should also have become more pronounced. One implication of this theory is that the migration and raids of northerners on southern wealth should be increasingly observable in the decentralization intervals. For our purposes, that means that we should find Central European groups raiding and moving into the Mediterranean area in the 1250–750 and 450–0 periods. Moreover, this behavior should have been more overt in the 450–0 period than in the 1250–750 period, which it clearly was. If north–south trade diminished between 500 and 400 B.C., Celtic raiding into Roman Italy began almost immediately after 400.12 One might have argued that trade declined because of Celtic raiding but the causal timing is clear-cut.Trade had been declining for a century before the raiding to the south began to develop some momentum following the Willie Sutton principle.13 The initial raids by warriors were followed by some wholesale migrations of warriors and their families to the east, southeast, and south.This Celtic expansion was roughly a 400–200 B.C. phenomenon (Wells 1984:125, 129). It was stopped primarily by the increasing strength of Roman armies to coercively thwart Celtic movements, the consequent expansion of Roman territorial control and order, and was followed by increasing Roman commerce with Central Europe (Wells 1984:150–151). One of the more intriguing synchronies of the Celtic expansion is that Scythians had also been moving into Eastern Europe by the early sixth century B.C. (Hungary,Thrace, and Bulgaria) and may even have penetrated into Western Europe (Sulimirski 1985:191; Brouzek 1989:39; Genito 1992:61; Kristiansen 1998:282–284). Celtic warriors apparently imitated some Scythian styles and military strategies (Kristiansen 1998:320). What remains unclear is the extent to which the Scythian attacks stimulated Celtic movements after 400 B.C.14 Central Asian Dynamics A number of analysts (e.g., Frank 1992; Adshead 1993) have attested to the centrality of Central Asia. Yet this Eurasian centrality, clearly self-evident on a map of Eurasia if not always to Western historians, was not a constant. Its centrality emerged in combination with a number of other key changes that developed during and after the second millennium B.C. Of these key changes, ecological changes must lead the list. Population movement into Central Asia had been slow prior to the second millennium B.C. but was accelerated by increasing aridity in the steppes after 2000 B.C. (Bashilov and Yablonsky 1995:xi–xii; Yablonsky 1995a:242). Climatic change in the West appears to have triggered not only movements to the East and South (Iran and India) but also a movement away from sedentary agrarian production to first seminomadic and then fully nomadic animal breeding. The economic transition was neither abrupt nor even. Several hundred years were required to attain full nomadism and even then nomads continued to coexist with sedentary farmers, forest hunters, and urbanized oases in different

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parts of Central Asia.15 Nor was it unknown for full nomads to return to a sedentary life.16 Furthermore, nomadic cattle breeding encouraged and, in turn, was enhanced by wagons, horse riding, and the development of related martial skills.Wagons and horse riding meant that herds and flocks could be moved over longer distances in search of grazing lands.The martial skills, primarily light cavalry with composite bows, meant that scarce grazing lands could be acquired from other people and defended once acquired. These same coercive skills could be used against rival groups of nomads and, when the occasion and need arose, sedentary societies. Nomadic–sedentary interactions were made more probable by the nature of the economic strategies that were employed. Sedentary societies produced grain and various other types of products, such as silk, cloth, and weapons that were desired by nomads. Nomads could supply horses and other products generated by their herds that were desired by the sedentary societies.When the exchanges broke down, usually due to security considerations, nomads could consider simply taking what they wanted from the sedentary areas via fast-moving raids. Nomads could also engage in various sorts of protection rackets, promising not to raid trade routes or urban areas if provided with some form of tribute. But even when trade and tribute flowed from the sedentary to the nomadic areas, intermittent raiding usually continued depending on the strength of the nomadic political organization in controlling attacks, the need for new leaders to demonstrate their military prowess, and an intermittent sort of chain reaction phenomenon in which one group of nomads in one area take over another nomadic group’s area, thereby encouraging the movement of the attacked group to do the same to the next nomadic group down the line. Chain reactions could be stimulated by intense military attack, climate deterioration, overpopulation, or some combination of the various stimuli. In this domino-like fashion, instability at either end of Central Asia could eventually be transmitted across Eurasia to the eastern, western, and southern peripheries of the Eurasian land mass which, of course, were inhabited by the wealthy sedentary societies. In the first millennium B.C., there were at least two discernible periods of nomadic movement.The first came in the eighth and seventh centuries and is most prominently associated with the Scythians. The ninth/eighth centuries B.C. are also considered the threshold of the transition to full nomadism in Central Asia—a development that put a greater premium on coercive territorial acquisition and control for grazing purposes (Gryaznov 1969:131).The second wave came in the fourth and third centuries and is most prominently associated with the Sarmatians and farther to the east with the Yuezhi and Xiongnu. Both waves contributed to instability throughout Central Asia. Shocks were also manifested in the Near East, Central Europe, and in China as well. Thus, the movements of Central Asian nomads were capable of transmitting change to all four of the main Eurasian theaters with which we are concerned.17 The Scythian expansion appears to have been encouraged by pressures from stronger nomad forces in the interior of Central Asia. Exactly who or

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what drove the Scythians west is disputed (see Bokovenko 1995:310–311; Buryakov et al. 1999:8) Once on the move, however, the Scythians attacked the Cimmerians in the area north of the Black Sea at the end of the eighth century.18 A subsequent period of Near Eastern turmoil involving Urartu, Medes, and Assyrians was thereby aggravated by Cimmerian and Scythian penetration from the north, sometimes in alliance with local states and sometimes at war with them. By about 600 B.C., the nomads from the north had been defeated by the Medes but not after Scythian incursions had been made as far west as Egypt in league with the Assyrians. After 600, the Scythians retreated north of the Black Sea where they were forced to reestablish their hegemony by force. Later in the last third of the sixth century (530 and especially ca. 513), a Persian invasion intended either to conquer Scythia or to discourage Scythian attacks while Persia was invading Greece was defeated.The fifth and fourth centuries were characterized by intermittent conflict with Thracians and Macedonians as Scythians continued to move west and economic collusion with Greek colonies in the general Crimean area. According to Moshkova ( 1995a:86–87), relations between the Scythians and adjacent Sauromatians was relatively peaceful in the sixth and fifth centuries. In the fifth and fourth centuries, Sauromatian penetration of Scythian territory increased. In the fourth and third centuries, a new group called the Sarmatians emerged from the Aral Sea area, thought to be stimulated by overpopulation and Alexander the Great’s disruption of normal central steppe movements and interactions with urban areas, and began moving into Sauromatian territory.19 Bokovenko (1995:311) takes this process back one step further east by arguing that the westward expansion of the “Huns” (by which he presumably means the Xiongnu in Mongolia) came at the expense of the Scythian cultures, which would encompass the Sauromatians and Sarmatians as well. By the second half of the third century, the Sarmatians had begun to take over Scythian territory in the region north of the Black Sea. Chinese Dynamics The two main Chinese dynamics of interest are (1) dynastic centralization and decay and (2) sedentary-hinterland tribal conflict. The first process is fairly straightforward. Chinese history is organized around cyclical movements toward and away from unification of a gradually expanding China. The legendary Xia rose to power around 2000 B.C. and were replaced by the Shang some time between the eighteenth and fifteenth centuries.The Shang in turn were ousted by the Zhou in 1122 B.C. The Zhou regime is divided into Western and Eastern segments with a dividing line at 770 when the Zhou regime was forced to relocate to the east due to increased tribal pressures.The Eastern Zhou dynastic period devolved into the Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras. China was reunified initially by Qin in 221 B.C. and then supplanted by the Han (in 206), which remained in

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power until 220 A.D. The basic life cycle of a Chinese dynasty was a matter of ascending to power at the expense of a weakened previous regime. Initial strength gave way to complacency, bureaucratic corruption, revolt, external attacks, and imperial fragmentation until a new dynasty emerged by force. One interesting thing to note is that each of the ancient regimes appear to have some type of relationship with Chernykh’s Eurasian crises summarized in table 2.1.The Xia seemed to have emerged after the second crisis, the Shang emerged during the third crisis, the Zhou defeated the Shang in the fourth crisis, and the Qin and Han emerged after Chernykh’s fifth crisis.20 This pattern continues into the A.D. era and I argue that it also fits a Eurasian crisis period that needs to be inserted between Chernykh’s fourth and fifth crises. In the period immediately preceding the emergence of Scythians in the western steppes, the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., the Zhou regime was forced to retreat in the face of tribal pressures from the northwest.21 The tribal pressure was repulsed by the Duke of Zhao but possibly not without repercussions for the western end of Eurasia if this Zhou-tribal interaction initiated the chain reaction that was to result in the emergence of the Scythians in western Eurasia. More likely, however, is Prusek’s (1971:119) interpretation. He describes an attack by “Hsien-yun” (Xianyun) nomadic riders on China beginning in 823 B.C. and states that “apart from the conquest of the Shang kingdom by the Chou dynasty there is no event in ancient Chinese history that has left such a profound mark on the historical sources as the fighting against the Hsien-yun.”22 Prusek describes the incursions as large-scale raiding, requiring a vigorous defense, yet brief in duration. His explanation is that this Hsien-yun incursion was indirectly related to the Cimmerian–Scythian conflicts in the west via a general redistribution of territory within the Central Asian steppes that was triggered by the full adoption of nomadism. Thus, the Hsien-yun and Cimmerians were not the same people but were linked by losing in the redistribution process and being forced to move toward the peripheries of the steppe centers. The short-lived nomadic incursions into China then encouraged further attacks on sedentary settlements by local tribes that were not horse-riding nomads. Conflictual tribal interactions with more sedentary society in China extends nearly back in time as long as there are records or myths.The basic pattern seems to be one of sedentary expansion at the expense of less complex tribes initially surrounding the emerging Chinese culture. In the east were the Yi.The Man were located in the south. Rong and Di were found in the north and tended to be the ones most likely to resist Chinese expansion (Hsu 1999:549–550). Gradually, the tribes were either absorbed or pushed back. That is not to suggest that tribal forces did not engage in quick raids and attacks on the sedentary Chinese settlements but that the threat of external or “barbarian” attack and defeat does not appear to loom large until around the first millennium B.C. Throughout this period, there are also non-coercive contacts between sedentary and tribal groups.23 A number of Western innovations, such as the chariot, are thought to have

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been introduced via Chinese interaction with western tribal groups long prior to the first millennium B.C.24 The Shang clearly fought (Prusek 1971:36–46) and traded with tribal elements in the late second millennium B.C., and it was also the Shang who first acquired chariots.Yet the Central Asian steppes were still in transition toward full nomadism and the increasingly homogenous culture of the steppe tribes in the Shang era. As part of this transition, non-Chinese, possibly horse-riding, tribes began filtering into the Inner Mongolia and northwest Chinese areas possibly before but certainly by the early first millennium B.C. (So 1995a:46). Some of these tribal groups were allied with the Zhou who had had a long history of dealing with Western “barbarians,”and were instrumental in bringing down the Shang hegemony in the late twelfth century.Yet clashes with Zhou forces began to increase in frequency and intensity around the mid-ninth century (Di Cosmo 1999:920), although the attacks did not always originate from outside Zhou territory. Through 782, Zhou forces were attacking Di and Rong and vice versa. But by 770 B.C. a weak Zhou dynasty was forced to move its capital east in order to reduce its vulnerability to tribal attack.25 External attacks from several different external groups (Rong and Di) continued after 770 but became prominent again in the late 660s and early 650s (Hsu 1999:569; Di Cosmo 1999). Lewis (1999:596) notes that the Rong threat in particular was not sustained and that this group had been conquered by the second half of the fifth century.26 An inadvertent by-product of the assimilation of these traditional peripheral tribal groups is the removal of a human screen between the sedentary Chinese and new tribal groups that continued to move toward northwest China from the west and are said to have been stimulated by displacements originating in the general vicinity of Persia. Darius attacked the Massagetae in 530 and 517 B.C. Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia in the 320s also encountered considerable nomadic resistance.27 Both impacts are thought to have started or continued chain reactions that led to new, more powerful, nomadic elements, armed as light cavalry bowmen, moving toward the Chinese border and establishing themselves as superior to indigenous tribal groups.Along with the horse-riding and compound bows also came the full transition to nomadism. By the fourth century B.C., the sedentary Chinese society was confronting a different type of external threat than it had ever encountered before. Not coincidentally, the structural incentives of the Warring States era encouraged Chinese state expansion in the competition to acquire hegemony in China. State expansion meant increased conflict with non-sedentary groups as the leading states sought to expand the resources available to their state. By 307 B.C., one of the leading state contenders (Zhao) had already adopted the light cavalry strategy and horseriding dress of the nomads, ostensibly to better fight nomads but also to use against its Chinese rivals (Di Cosmo 2002:134–138). The primary focus of the new threat became the Xiongnu who emerged rather abruptly in the late fourth century B.C.28 Initially subordinated to the

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Yuezhi, the Xiongnu overthrew the nomadic hierarchy while also escalating its attacks on Chinese areas. One by-product of the intra-nomadic conflict was the western migration of a number of Yuezhi, in flight from the prospect of extermination at the hands of the Xiongnu. Eventually reaching Bactria, the Yuezhi were instrumental in the defeat of Seluecid rule in Central Asia, and later established the Kushan Empire that encompassed parts of middle–Central Asia with northern India (Gorbunova 1992:33). Dealing with the new type of external threat became the primary foreign policy interest of successive Chinese rulers (Yu 1967). Initially ousted from the Ordos by the newly hegemonic Qin state, within a few years a reorganized Xiongnu returned in force, with a new leader at the head of an expanded tribal confederacy. Large-scale military clashes with the Han successors of the brief Qin ascendancy began at the very end of the third millennium (201–200 B.C.). Shortly thereafter, the Han developed a new strategy to deal with the Xiongnu.The nomads would abstain from border raids in exchange for imperial “gifts” and the occasional Han princess. Essentially, this hegin policy amounted to providing free trade goods or tribute to the Xiongnu and worked more or less for half a century despite frequent lapses. In 133 B.C. the Han decided to end the tribute and developed a more coercive approach to suppressing the external threat. Part of the new strategy involved seeking allies in the far west who could be used to attack the Hsiung-nu from a second front. From this change in strategy developed the official western probes to determine whether allies could be found that are part of the lore of the establishment of the Silk Roads. It also served as the principle rationale for the western expansion of Chinese rule toward the oases of Central Asia in order to undercut the Xiongnu access to, and control over, these resources. The Xiongnu initially were able to resist the newly aggressive Han campaign, but not without losing increasing amounts of territorial control. Several generations without trade subsidies and waning influence probably contributed to aggravating fissures within the Xiongnu (Yu 1990; Barfield 1993:156–157). Internal war broke out after 60 B.C. In 53 B.C. a weakened Xiongnu then returned to a subsidized trade regime with the Han, with the Xiongnu primarily responsible for protecting Han China from the raids of non-Xiongnu tribes. The increased dependency on Han subsidies ultimately undermined the already declining Xiongnu position beyond the Great Wall.With the decline and fall of the Han dynasty, the Xiongnu were pushed aside by other tribes and thereby developed incentives to begin drifting west after the first century A.D. How Many System-Wide Crises and Who Was Involved? Two of the original questions motivating this analysis were: (1) how well does Chernykh’s schedule of Eurasian crises fit the first millennium B.C.? and (2) how is it possible to reconcile Celts, Sarmatians, Alexander the Great, and the Chinese Warring State’s era in one discussion? A survey of

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the history of four regions of Eurasia leads to a conclusion summarized in table 2.2. Chernykh proposed one crisis for the first millennium, dated from 400 to 200 B.C. and peaking in 300–200 B.C. There appear to have been two. One is found in the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and China in the 850–650 period and primarily involves Cimmerians and Scythians in the west and increased nomadic/tribal pressures in the east. It also corresponds to the eighth century “barbarian upsurge” identified by Buzan and Segal (1998). A second crisis, involving most prominently Celts in the west and the Hsiung-nu in the east, emerged in the fifth–second centuries in all four regions, peaked in the fourth through second centuries, and substantially overlaps with what Chernykh presumably had in mind. Thus, Chernykh’s one first millennium crisis is substantiated although the dates are expanded to encompass the second century. At first blush, Celts, Sarmatians, Alexander the Great, and the Chinese Warring States appear to be a strangely mixed crew of trouble-makers. But, as long as one does not insist on them responding to exactly the same beat, they can be linked. One single process is not at work in all of the various corners of Eurasia. Each region evolved along somewhat different principles or subject to somewhat different processes. Nonetheless, the conjunctures of these multiple processes intermittently converged to create system-wide crises (and wider postcrisis systems).There are direct linkages between Celts and Alexander the Great. There are also indirect linkages among Alexander the Great, Sarmatians, and the Chinese Warring States.29 There may also be Eurasian-wide influences, such as demographic growth, climate change, and intra-steppe conflicts, to which all of these actors are responding in various ways. For the present, however, they seem best accounted for by conjunctions of sometimes interdependent, multiple processes occurring in overlapping regions of Eurasia. This conclusion should not detract from the notion of an increasingly interdependent Eurasia. Rather, it is meant to suggest that the nature of the interdependence is more complicated than causation based on a single process or complex of processes affecting one and all simultaneously. Different processes are at work just as there are lags in the transmission of impacts across large masses of territory. None the less, the centrality of Central Asian nomads to these various processes becomes more discernible as the millennium progressed. Presumably, this observation speaks to their geographical centrality to the other spheres, but also to the economic and political/ military transformations that Central Asia experienced as full nomadism and what might be referred to as a Scythian culture penetrated throughout the region. How Much Apparent Continuity in the Crises? Chernykh’s fourth crisis, dated from 1200 to 900 B.C., seems quite compatible with the developments of 850–650 and 300–100 B.C. While we might narrow his 1200–900 crisis to approximately 1250–1100, the main

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processes apparently at work—Mediterranean conflict and its links to European instability, transitional economic processes in the Eurasian steppes and related tribal movements, and sedentary–non-sedentary conflicts in China—appear to be part of the same general framework encompassing the last millennia and a half of the B.C. era. Of course, there is no evading the central interpretation problem of lack of information that pervades this period of time.Yet what we do know seems to fit the multiple dynamics, if not exactly Chernykh’s emphases, reviewed in this essay. In the late thirteenth/early twelfth centuries, a number of processes converged to create a systemic collapse in the Mediterranean. Troy VII was destroyed presumably not solely because of the transgressions of a beautiful woman but quite possibly in a struggle over the control of Black Sea trade that mobilized a broad spectrum of actors in the general area (Kristiansen 1998:390).30 Shortly thereafter, Mycenaean cites, with the sole exception of Athens, were attacked and destroyed, either due to intra-Mycenaean conflict, in-migrations from Central Europe and the Balkans, or some combination of the two.31 The Mycenaean trading network disintegrated, bringing a halt to north–south trade in Europe. Groups from Central Europe and the Balkans subsequently moved into Greece and Anatolia. Phrygians migrating in from the Black Sea area destroyed the Hittite Empire. Groups moving in a clockwise motion from Anatolia to Egypt sacked a number of cities located along the southeastern Mediterranean coast. Eastern Mediterranean trade, which had been the flourishing core of the old Near Eastern system in the fourteenth century B.C., ceased to operate. In Egypt, the “Sea Peoples” allied with Libyan tribal forces were finally defeated by a desperate Egyptian defense. As a consequence, the “Sea Peoples” were scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Trump (1980:191) argues that a number of different factors were probably involved, including the usual suspects of overpopulation, rigid bureaucracy, and famine that set in motion increased conflict and the spread of disorder by the survivors. Climate deterioration leading to agricultural failure is another strong possibility. Migrations by hinterland warriors and sometimes their families were both cause and effect in this complex of interactions. International conflict (e.g., the Trojan War and possibly slightly later in Greece) may have been the initial catalyst. We know that the same period was interval of flux in Central Asia as people who were moving toward full-fledged nomadism moved south in search of better grazing lands. Groups from Central Asia may also have moved into Central Europe at this time. In the far east, the Shang were overthrown by Zhao in alliance with western tribes. Some of the same factors applied speculatively to the west, at the very least, climate deterioration, may also be found in the east. Thus, there are a host of internal and external factors coming together intermittently to create crises of continental scope.32 The crises of the first millennium B.C. may not have been identical in all respects nor did they usher in any dark ages. But they do not seem to be of a different order than

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the end of the second millennium one that closed out the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.33 Crisis-Induced Trade Reorientations Most but not all of the Bronze Age C-wave crises in the Near East had an additional effect. International trade was disrupted by the turmoil. When trade resumed, it often had been reoriented in a different direction. The Urukian expansion in the fourth millennium in all directions (Anatolia, Iran, and Egypt) was forced to retreat and retrench around 3200 B.C. A new eastern linkage to the Indus via Dilmun (Bahrein) became increasingly important in the third millennium as an alternative to Iranian/Anatolian sources of supply. Mesopotamian prosperity and the Indus connection fell apart in the early second millennium leading to an increased emphasis on Egyptian–eastern Mediterranean interactions (Minoan–Mycenaean) throughout most of the second millennium. Chernykh’s third crisis (1800–1500) was damaging to the Harappans and the Mesopotamians but actually facilitated Egypt’s eastern Mediterranean relationships, given the Levantine/Palestinian background of the invading Hyksos. Chernykh’s first crisis shifted Near Eastern trade eastward. The second and third crises shifted it westward. The fourth crisis (1200–900 by Chernykh’s terms—1250–1100 in terms of the arguments advanced here) caused Mediterranean and north–south European trade to halt for an extended period.The fourth question motivating this essay then is whether the first millennium crises also had similar trade reorienting effects? The answer is mixed. The 1250–1100 turmoil seriously interrupted western trade for an extended period of time. Aubet (2001:25) notes that Phoenician commerce was minimal between 1200 and 1050, and that Syrian–Palestinian contacts with Cyprus and the Aegean were not reestablished before the tenth century.34 Once economic revival began, the resumption of trade initially followed the paths already established.The difference is that the identity of some of the traders were new and the geographical and trade volume scale appears to have expanded gradually beyond the levels attained in the late second millennium. The Phoenicians, especially Tyre, first sought access to Near Eastern markets and then control of Asian trade routes in the tenth century B.C.35 In alliance with Israel, land routes to Mesopotamia and Arabia were controlled. Maritime expeditions, developed primarily to break the late Bronze Age Egyptian monopoly on gold, were organized from Elath to sail to East Africa and possibly India (Chandra 1977:45). In the ninth and eighth centuries, Tyre expanded its operations to encompass Syria, Anatolia, and Cyprus as well, gaining control over metals, slave trades, and eastern Mediterranean sea lanes (Aubet 2001:50).Toward the end of the ninth century, the Phoenician commercial position in the Fertile Crescent area was made difficult by Urartuian and Greek competition on the one hand and Aramaic and Assyrian imperial expansion on the other, thereby

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encouraging an increase in economic activities in a western direction. Initially, west meant Cyprus and the establishment of a Phoenician colony for copper extraction there around 820 B.C.36 Increased demand for metals presumably encouraged the subsequent development of Phoenician colonies farther west in North Africa and Iberia. But Assyrian expansion to the west also continued and gradually absorbed the Phoenician cities into its empire by force, with Tyre managing to hold out just barely until about the middle of the seventh century B.C.37 Its commercial activity persisted at a reduced level until it was conquered by Babylonia in the first third of the sixth century. As population sizes began to grow again in Greece and Ionian western Anatolia (see Tandy 1997), Greek trading colonies were established in Italy and the Black Sea area in the first half of the eighth century—hence moving both east and west almost simultaneously. Further westward movement on the part of the Greeks is described as accidental (Hammond 1986:120), with a storm-driven merchant returning from the Atlantic coast of Iberia with a rich cargo in 638 B.C. Massalia (later Marseilles) was founded in 600. Both Phoenicians and Greeks redeveloped versions of the older Mycenaean raw material acquisition networks in Europe.38 Their competition in the Mediterranean and over access to the European hinterland was joined by the Etruscans in the late eighth century. Hammond (1986:123–124) nicely summarizes the general trading outcome of the first half of the first millennium B.C. . . . But most important of all was the expansion of trade which laid the economic basis for the second flowering of civilization in the Mediterranean area. As in the late Bronze Age, so now Aegean merchants bartered tin from Britain, amber from the Baltic Sea, And gold from the Ural Mountains. But there were now significant differences. The opening of the Black Sea and the advance to France and Spain offset the comparative decline of Egypt in the south. The main currents of trade now set along the northern shores and islands of the Mediterranean Sea.Thus until the Greco-Mediterranean conquest of the East, the centre of balance in the movement of commerce was firmly fixed in the Greek peninsula . . . The next crisis (850–650 B.C.) does not appear to have had a major impact on trade levels except perhaps in the Near East where interstate conflict was already prevalent, and to which Central Asian migrations only contributed.39 On the contrary, in the Black Sea area Greek–Scythian economic collusion became increasingly pronounced. The Greek trading colonies in the east depended heavily on Scythian protection (Sulimirski 1985:158). The Scythian economy became increasingly geared to supplying grain for Greek consumption, leading to the previously mentioned growing sedentarization of the Scythian community.40 Probably more impactful was the Greek–Etruscan–Carthaginian trading competition in

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which the Greeks were forced to retreat from parts of Iberia and Corsica by military defeats at the hands of their competitors in the second half of the sixth century.41 Near Eastern conflict centered on Assyrian military expansion also contributed to Greek trading setbacks, although this may have been offset by renewed interaction with Egypt via the Naucratis entrepot beginning in the early sixth century. Dandamaev and Lukonia (1989:209–214) attribute a Near Eastern trade expansion to relative peace in the region after the 520s.42 The Persian Empire maintained roads and order, as well as encouraging maritime trade (Ray 1994). Darius I restored the Suez Canal linking Egypt to Persia and India via the Red Sea (Selles 1987).Achaemenid boundaries stretched from the Indus to the Aegean and down part of the Nile by the end of the sixth century. For a limited time, India, Central Asia, and the Near East/ Mediterranean were well connected by trade until the outbreak of GrecoPersian conflict in the early fifth century, a series of revolts throughout the Achaemenid Empire, and, ultimately, the Macedonian invasion in the fourth century B.C. The last crisis of the first millennium B.C. (300–100), in part brought on by an interruption of European trade, led to a resumption of the north–south trade, this time organized under Roman auspices who were also in the process of taking over the old Mediterranean/Near Eastern economy. One of the highlights of this process is the Roman–Indian trade, albeit of unknown volume and, for the most part, a trade connection that peaked after the end of the B.C. era.43 Yet this connection was simply taken over from earlier Ptolemaic Egyptian/Seleucid efforts to make this same connection. Seleucid efforts, in turn, resurrected even older Persian plans to develop stronger trading connections in the Indian Ocean (Cook 1985: 222–223). The difference was that Roman hegemony in the west meant that an even greater demand for eastern goods could be communicated to Indian trading networks than had been the case in the Hellenistic Empire created by Alexander the Great or Darius’s Persia. On this score, Frye (1996:105, 107) observes that the Macedonian movement into southwest Asia in the fourth century B.C. was quite comparable to the earlier Greek colonization effort but ended up being organized around the protection of the Mesopotamian–Bactrian trade route. Central Asian penetration and conquests of Indo-Greek Bactria (Yuezhi) and Parthia (Parni) in the third and second centuries B.C. probably made an Egyptian–Indian maritime connection all the more attractive.44 Another probable contributing factor were the Scythian attacks on the Black Sea Greek colonies in the second century in an Asian attempt to eliminate some of the European middle men in the Asian–Mediterranean trade (Melyukova 1990:107). Roughly at the same time as Roman penetration toward the east, China was expanding its control of what became western China and seeking western allies in the fight against the Xiongnu. While trade with the west does not appear to have been a primary objective since there it was not

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obvious that the west could supply desired commodities, east–west trading connections grew toward the end of the first millennium B.C. India, as opposed to the Silk Roads that moved through Parthian territory, may have been the favored conduit for this expanded east–west trade.45 Chinese goods would move through Central Asian oases into eastern India, moved around to western India by Indian shipping, and then carried west by a maritime, Greco-Roman network to Egypt via the Red Sea.46 The ultimate irony of this first really strong east–west trade was that it was an unintended by-product of strictly strategic decisions to expand military control over territories in the west and the east—not for trade purposes per se but rather to establish regional hegemony for security purposes at both ends of the continent. The 300–100 B.C. system-wide crisis very much facilitated this outcome. To the extent that the Celtic and Xiongnu threats from the north were managed, Roman and Chinese expansion toward one another was encouraged, as was the development of the Chinese–India–Mediterranean trade conduit. Conclusions Four questions have been pursued in this essay. Is Chernykh right to have only one pan-Eurasian crisis for the first millennium B.C.? My answer is no. There appear to have been two, peaking in 850–650 and 300–100 B.C. Table 2.3 summarizes some of their more prominent actors, along with similar information for the last crisis of the second millennium B.C. Is it possible to link actors widely separated in Eurasian space as if they were all involved in one large, sweeping process? The answer is yes. There are direct and indirect linkages between Mediterranean and Chinese security problems. Actions taken in the Near East could have repercussions in the Far East and vice versa.Turmoil in Central Asia could eventually be felt in China, India, the Mediterranean/Near East, and Europe. At the same time, though, these manifestations of interdependence do not imply that all Table 2.3 Eurasian interland turmoil in the long first millennium B.C.

Europe

Mediterranean/ Near East Central Asia

India China

Thirteenth–twelfth centuries

Ninth–seventh centuries

Fourth–second centuries

Phrygians and others moving south into Greece and Anatolia Europeans and SeaPeoples moving south territorial redistribution involving Karasuk culture? Indo-Aryans moving south Shang-Jung

Cimmerian-Scythian impact in eighth– seventh centuries Cimmerian-Scythian incursions in Near East Cimmerian-Scythian

Celts

Celts Sarmatians; Yuezhi; Saka

?

Yuezhi/Kushan

Zhou-Hsien-yun/ Rong/Di

Han-Xiongnu

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Eurasian actors were involved in exactly the same processes at the same time. Each region had its own evolutionary trajectory, with a mixture of relatively unique and relatively common processes at work. Intermittently, the nature of the evolutionary trajectories would cross paths—sometimes by force (as demonstrated by imperial conquests and/or nomadic raiding) and sometimes as a function of the nature of the evolutions. For instance, Central Asia has always been in the geographical center of Eurasia but it only slowly evolved into a setting that could influence all of its adjacent regions. It is true that western steppe migrants could influence China in the second millennium but it was far less likely that sedentary–tribal conflict in China could have a lagged impact on the west in that same millennium. The same cannot be said of the following millennium. Similarly, the connections linking the Mediterranean/Near East with Europe were not always there. They emerged, at least in the form manifested in the first millennium B.C. only in the second millennium B.C. The third question pertained to the element of continuity observed when the first millennium crises are compared to the last second millennium crisis. Table 2.3 suggests a great deal of continuity. It’s not quite the same thing being replayed over and over again but there is definitely an element of cyclical repetition in the west.The eastern manifestations of cyclical repetition in nomadic–sedentary relations only become more obvious in the first millennium A.D. Nor is there any suggestion that each crisis wreaked the same level of havoc.What levels of turmoil were observed varies from region to region, again depending on environmental structures and processes operating in each region as well as those immediately adjacent. The last question asked whether the two crises of the first millennium B.C. were instrumental in reorienting trade patterns as had occurred earlier in the Near East. The answer varies by crisis. The end-of-the-second millennium crisis interrupted trade for a while but perhaps not as long as was once thought. The Phoenicians were given a window of opportunity to exploit Mediterranean trade opportunities and they, along with the Greeks and Etruscans, recreated the old Mycenaean European/Mediterranean network on an even larger and more intense scale.The Phoenicians were forced to move farther west by precrisis obstacles in the Near East after first attempting to move in an eastern direction.The Greeks moved in both eastern and western directions.The first crisis in the first millennium B.C. only facilitated the Greek eastern position in the Black Sea area courtesy of a Pax Scythia.Yet, by and large, the shift to a Greek-centered Mediterranean economy was not a system-wide, crisis-induced phenomenon. The second crisis toward the end of the first millennium did play a more evident role in encouraging Roman and Chinese hegemonies at the two ends of Eurasia.They also contributed to the downfall of the Seleucid and Indo-Greek empires and the emergence of Parthian and Kushan rule in parts of southwest and south Asia.These developments somewhat inadvertently set up the conditions for the first regularized trade between China and the Mediterranean, both on land and especially at sea, via India. This

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change must be reckoned as a significant reorientation of trade from a Western perspective. Nevertheless, there should be no implication that the new eastern trade completely reoriented Mediterranean/Near Eastern trading patterns. Rather, it could be said that it complemented traditional eastern tendencies and probably increased the volume of commodities flowing from east to west. It probably also increased the volume of gold and silver flowing from west to east. Both of these tendencies will take on increasing significance in the millennia to follow the end of the B.C. era, but they were essentially established with some Persian and Greek assistance toward the end of the first millennium B.C. The bottom line of this analysis is that Chernykh’s emphasis on intermittent, pan-Eurasian crises continues to be a useful device in analyzing the emergence of Eurasian interdependence. However, Chernykh’s interpretation and crisis dating need further scrutiny and revision as appropriate.There is also a need to integrate these crises to other ongoing processes such as economic prosperity and depression, climate change, and political power concentrations. In short, more work needs to be done. More millennia need to be examined. Notes 1. Concepts such as world-system, diffusion, external stimuli in general,“barbarian” invasion in particular, climate, and even trade are frequently rejected instinctively by people more accustomed to working in shorter terms and less ambitious spatial scopes. For reasons why this might be the case, see Chapman and Hamerow (1997) and Kristiansen (1998). 2. I do not mean to suggest that Eurasian interdependence rests solely on the outcome of tests of the Chernykh model.There are a number of other interesting models and arguments that have emerged quite recently that deserve further consideration as well. See, Clark’s (1997) very long-term globalization argument, Chase-Dunn and Hall’s (1997, 2000) pulsation process, Dark’s (1998) complexity waves, Marcus’s (1998) consolidation-breakdown process, Modelski’s (2000) double-gaited evolutionary process, Sherratt’s (2000) demographic cycles, Wilkinson’s (2000) incorporation process, or Buzan and Little’s (2000) process formations. 3. See, as well, Modelski and Thompson (2002). 4. Chernykh’s 2600–2400 period would fit the Near East better if it were dated 2200–2000 B.C. Whether there is substantial Eurasian turmoil in the 2600–2400 period and how it might be related to 2200–2000 events in the Near East have not yet been explored. 5. A review of the Kondratieff or K-wave phenomenon may be found in Goldstein (1988). Modelski and Thompson (1996) argue that the K-wave sequence can be pushed back to Sung China in the tenth century A.D. Gills and Frank (1993; Frank and Gills 2000) and Frank (1993) argue that recurring cycles of economic expansion and contraction encompass the last 5,000 years of economic history. See also Frank and Thompson (forthcoming-a, forthcoming-b) on this question. 6. Eurasia of course consists of more than five circles or spheres of interaction. In the first millennium B.C., China and India interacted with Southeast Asia. Korea and Japan appear to have some linkages to China and perhaps Central Asia via nomadic intruders in the second half of the millennium. But these areas are definitely marginal (and not well known) to our main interests in this analysis. 7. The Indian circle will be largely ignored throughout most of this Chapter since its significance only emerges late in the first millennium B.C. as a target of Central Asian invasions, various local political concentrations, and as an indirect trade conduit between the Mediterranean and China.As a consequence, it is more easily dealt with in a study of the late Classical period.This Chapter focuses only on early Classical developments. 8. Foreign artifacts might be found anywhere for a number of reasons ranging from trade to careless tourists. It is assumed that most of the artifacts referred to in table 2.2 reflect either exchanges with, or the effects of, non-Cretan visitors to Crete.

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9. See, among others,Wells (1984), Collis (1984), Nash (1985), and Kristiansen (1998) for more details on this interpretation. 10. Wine imports tripled around 100 B.C. and remained at least double the level brought in between 325 and 125 B.C. 11. Since Languedoc is closer to the Mediterranean than many places in the European interior, it seems likely that other European oppida may have encountered more problems in obtaining Mediterranean wine. 12. Celtic–Etruscan conflict preceded the raids on Roman territory by a century (Ellis 1990:25). 13. Sutton broke into a number of banks. When asked why, his alleged response was “because that’s where the money is.” Celtic raiders presumably were looking for commodities no longer available at home but still abundant in the Mediterranean littoral. 14. Cimmerians or “Thraco-Cimmerians” are described as moving into Hungary in the late ninth–early eighth century B.C. and establishing themselves as elites by force (Kristiansen 1998: 206). But, see also Harke (1989:197) and Brouzek (1989) for suggestions that external coercion was only one of several factors in bringing about changes in Central Europe. 15. On this gradual process, see Yablonsky (1995b), Dvornichenko (1995), Anthony (1998), and Shishlina and Hiebert (1998). Anthony (1998) argues for a 3000-year transition. 16. The Scythians became increasingly sedentary in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (Petrenko 1995: 27; Melyukova 1995:55) thanks in large part to satisfying the Greek demand for grain. However, Melyukova (1995:32) also notes that the steppe regions in the vicinity of the Black and Azov Seas became “unfit for habitation” in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Davis-Kimball and Yablonksky (1995:21) state that southern Ural steppe rainfall began to increase in the sixth century after poor weather in much of the first half of the first millennium B.C. 17. India also was certainly affected by these instabilities in Central Asia. 18. Little appears to be known about the Cimmerians. Diakonoff (1985:51, 94) has them entering Armenia and Asia Minor in the eighth century B.C. from the north Caucasian steppes. Prusek (1971: 119) specifies the 730s as their date of appearance in [Western] history. If this was the case, they were only a “step” ahead of the Scythians, which is entirely plausible. Other scholars (e.g., Melyukova 1990:98) suspect Cimmerians were already in the Black Sea area by the ninth century, or perhaps even earlier. But there is no reason to assume that these groups came at one time. 19. Barbarunova (1995:122) observes that the southern Ural steppes from which the Sarmatians emerged were largely abandoned by the first century B.C. The extensive depopulation of the area sounds more like a climate deterioration problem than simply overpopulation and Alexandrian disruption. 20. However, the dating of the mythical Xia hegemony might fit the Chernykh schedule better if the 2200–2000 turmoil in the Near East was inserted between the second and third crises. However, it is not yet clear to what extent the 2200–2000 problems were idiosyncratic to the Near East. Even so, as noted by Cohen (2000: 3; see also Chang 1999:72–73) we know very little about the Xia Dynasty. 21. So (1995b:37) notes that the Shang also may have been forced to relocate their capital in response to tribal attacks in 1300. 22. Curiously, though, he is one of the few historians writing in English to even mention it. 23. The earliest silk found outside China was discovered in Uzbekistan and dates from the beginning of the second millennium B.C. (Kuzmina 1998:64). 24. The eastern movement of groups using chariots has been tracked from the Urals in the seventeenth–sixteenth centuries to Kazakhstan and Kirghistan in the fifteenth–thirteenth centuries (Kuzmina 1998:72). However, the earliest chariot currently known dates to the end of the third millennium B.C. and was found in Kazakhstan, thereby confusing the issue as to where exactly chariots originated. 25. Lattimore (1951) was skeptical of this story and claimed that what was really happening was a subordination of the Zhou leadership to its own aristocracy who, in turn, took over the western expansion of Chinese territory. While this argument does not seem to enjoy much support in Chinese historical circles, it does not rule out extensive and intensive combat at that time by tribal and sedentary forces.The main question is only which side was the primary aggressor. Hsu (1999: 546) elaborates a number of internal reasons for the fall of the Western Zhou (expanding governmental costs and shrinking resources, a loss of control over distant garrisons, population pressures, natural disasters) in which external incursions number as only one of many factors. 26. The Di continued to fight successfully in the north at least through 593 (Di Cosmo 1999:948).

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27. These observations are repeated throughout the literature but never are accompanied by much detail. See Bunker (1995:54). Granted any evidence of displacement would be very ambiguous, it remains unclear whether we really know these Mediterranean impacts were causal. Still, the impacts are plausible if perhaps speculative. 28. Construction on what was to become the Great Wall began in 324 B.C. The initial building was carried out by several different states during the Warring States era, with their products being connected and expanded in later eras of unification. 29. Part of the problem, however, is distinguishing between actors contributing to turmoil and the common denominator carriers of disorder. Alexander the Great and the Chinese Warring States were influences acting on or interacting with Central Asian nomadic groups that led to increased problems with Sarmatians and Xiongnu in different parts of Eurasia. 30. Blegen (1963:161–171) notes that Troy was destroyed or conquered on three separate occasions between 1300 and 1100 B.C. 31. Hammond (1986:74) observes that archaeology is literally clueless in assigning dates, identity, and origins to the migrants. Only the effects are clear with cities deserted and little in the way of interaction among the different parts of Greece. 32. The frequency of these crises suggests that we should be wary of putting too much emphasis on metallurgical roots of crisis that appear to be prominent, again as both cause and effect, in only some of the C-wave crises. 33. Keep in mind, as well, that the Bronze Age took longer to end in other parts of Eurasia. 34. Osborne (1996:114) says that regional trade was in hiatus in the eleventh century. However, see table 2.2. 35. Aubet (2001:70–96) has the most sophisticated explanation of the Phoenician commercial lead. Lebanese cities had large populations and restricted access to a hinterland controlled by the Philistines that might have supplied food for the urban areas. Climatic deterioration after 1200 (and with greater impact away from the Lebanese coast) further reduced the availability of food.At the same time, these cities specialized in the manufacture of items for elite consumption. There was also an opportunity for someone to become the main intermediary in the redistribution of metals in the aftermath of the eastern Mediterranean trading collapse. Metal transport by sea is more attractive than by land. Therefore, the metal intermediary role privileged actors that developed a naval capability.The logical outcome was an increased emphasis on long distance trade and its production specializations that initially imitated the success of Ugarit in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. 36. Aubet (2001:52) observes that this Cypriot colony was called Qardt-hadasht or “new city,” the same name later bestowed on the Phoenician colony in Tunisia (Carthage), and suggesting a western drift of new Tyhres. 37. The Phoenician payment of increasing levels of tribute to Assyria and Assyrian recognition that continued Phoenician commercial operations went a long way in accounting for the survival of the Phoenician activities in a hostile geopolitical setting. 38. Trump (1980:200) argues that one of the by-products of the Sea Peoples episode was the transplanting of Mycenaeans, as part of the Sea Peoples contingents repelled from Egypt, to Lebanese coastal cities. 39. Hammond (1986:130) specifies 750–550 as a period characterized by an “amazing expansion of sea-borne commerce within the Mediterranean area.” 40. The period between 610 and 540 B.C. is also described as the apex of Ionian prosperity thanks in part to increased access to the Scythian economy and beyond (Hammond 1986:127, 131). 41. Hammond (1986:121) describes Greek trade via Poseidium (near but not at Al Mina according to Jones 2000:157), their main entrepot in Syria, as flourishing from 750 to 600, and then dying before resuming in 520 B.C. Greece and Carthage were also at war at least by 600 B.C. (Trump 1980:246). 42. The Persians had defeated the Medes in 550, Lydia in 547, and Babylon in 525 to establish their Near Eastern hegemony. 43. According to Sidebotham (1991:22) Asian luxury goods (such as silk, pearls, and ivory), spices, slaves, and cotton were exchanged for Roman gold and silver, glass, wheat, and wine. 44. Whitehouse (1991:218) also reminds us that we should not exaggerate the Roman role in creating and maintaining the Egyptian–Indian trade route.A variety of people were active in the Indian Ocean and few of them were likely to have been Romans from the Mediterranean area. See also Ray (1994) on this issue. Casson (1989) points to another dimension of this Indian Ocean question by noting that East Africa also played a significant role in this trade. 45. Frye (1996:154) contends that Silk Road traffic on land only increased after the development of the Kushan Empire. Ball (2000:139) insists quite strongly that there was little movement of goods

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between China and the West, presumably on land, prior to the Mongol Empire due to political restrictions along the way and a general lack of interest. 46. Ball (2000:131) argues that spices, not silk, were the main import through this Indian conduit.

References Adshead, Samuel A.M. (1993). Central Asia in World History. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Anthony, David W. (1998). “The Opening of the Eurasian Steppe at 2000 BCE.” In Victor Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, vol. 1, pp. 94–113.Washington, D.C.: The Institute for the Study of Man. Aubet, Maria E. (2001). The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, 2nd ed., translated by Mary Turton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ball,Warwick. (2000). Rome in the East:The Transformation of an Empire. London: Routledge. Barbarunova, Zoya A. (1995).“Early Sarmatian Culture,” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball,Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T. Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 121–132. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Barfield,Thomas J. (1993). The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Bashilov,Vladimir A. and Leonid T.Yablonsky. (1995).“Introduction.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball,Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T. Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, xi–xv. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Blegen, Carl W. (1963). Troy and the Trojans. New York: Praeger. Bokovenko, Nikolai A. (1995). “The Tagar Culture in the Minusinsk Basin.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball, Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T.Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 299–314. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Brouzek, Jan. (1989). “The Eastern Mediterranean and Central Europe: The Beginning of the Iron Age.” In Marie Louise S. Sorenson and Roger Thomas (ed.), The Bronze Age and Iron Age Transition in Europe: Aspects of Continuity and Change in European Societies, c. 1200 to 500 B.C. , pp. 36–42. Oxford: BAR International Series 483 (1). Bunker, Emma C. (1995). “Luxury Exports from China to the North: Sixth-First Century B.C.” In Jenny F. So and Emma C. Bunker (eds.), Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier, pp. 53–67. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Buryakov, Y.F., Baipakov, K.M., Tashbaeva, K.H. and Yakubov, Y. (1999). The Cities and Routes of the Great Silk Road.Tashkent: International Institute for Central Asian Studies. Buzan, Barry and Richard Little. (2000). International Systems in World History: Rethinking the Study of International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buzan, Barry and Gerald Segal. (1998). Anticipating the Future:Twenty Millennia of Human Progress. New York: Simon and Schuster. Casson, Lionel. (1989). The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chandra, Moti. (1977). Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India. New Delhi: Abhinav Publishers. Chang, Kwang-Chih. (1999).“China on the Eve of Historical Period.” In Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., pp. 37–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, John and Helena Hamerow. (1997). “On the Move Again—Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation.” In John Chapman and Helena Hamerow (eds.), Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation, pp. 1–10. Oxford: Archaepress. Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Tom D. Hall. (1997). Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, Co.:Westview. ——. (2000). “Comparing World-Systems to Explain Social Evolution.” In Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski (eds.), World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change, pp. 85–111. London: Routledge. Chernykh, E.N. (1992). Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Robert P. (1997). The Ecological Imperative: An Interpretative History of the Spread of Humankind. Boulder, Co.:Westview.

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Cohen,Warren I. (2000). East Asia at the Center. New York: Columbia University Press. Collis, J. (1984). The European Iron Age. London: Batsford. Cook, J.M. (1985). “The Rise of the Achaemenids and Establishment of Their Empire.” In Ilya Gershevitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran: The Median and Achaemenian Periods, pp. 200–291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunliffe, Barry. (1994). “Iron Age Societies in Western Europe and Beyond, 800–140 BC.” In Barry Cunliffe, (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe, pp. 336–372. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dandamaev, Muhammad A. and Vladimir G. Lukonia. (1989). The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran, translated by Philip L. Kohl and D.J. Dadson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dark, Ken R. (1998). The Waves of Time: Long-Term Change and International Relations. London: Pinter. Davis-Kimball, Jeanine and Leonid T.Yablonsky. (1995). Kurgans on the Left Bank of the Ilek: Excavations at Pokrovka, 1990–1992. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Diakonoff, I.M. (1985).“Media.” In Ilya Gershevitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran:The Median and Achaemenian Periods, pp. 51–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Di Cosmo, Nicola. (1999). “The Northern Frontier in Pre-Imperial China.” In Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., pp. 885–966. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. (2002). Ancient China and the Enemies:The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dvornichenko, Vladimir V. (1995). “Sauromatians and Sarmatians of the Eurasian Steppes: The Transitional Period from the Bronze Age.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball, Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T.Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 101–104. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Ellis, Peter B. (1990). The Celtic Empire:The First Millennium of Celtic History, c. 1000BC–51 AD. London: Guild Publishing. Frank, Andre Gunder. (1992). The Centrality of Central Asia. Center for Asian Studies: University of Amsterdam Press. ——. (1993).“The Bronze Age World System and Its Cycles.” Current Anthropology, vol. 34, pp. 383–413. —— and Barry K. Gills. (2000). “The Five Thousand Year World System in Theory and Praxis.” In Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski (eds.), World System History:The Social Science of Long-Term Change, pp. 3–23. London: Routledge. —— and William R. Thompson (forthcoming-a) “Bronze Age Economic Economic Expansion and Contraction Revisited.” Journal of World History. —— (forthcoming-b) “Early Iron Age Economic Expansion and Contraction Revisited,” In Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson, eds. Globalization and Global History. London: Routledge. Frye, Richard N. (1996). The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener. Genito, Bruno. (1992). “Asiatic Steppe Nomad Peoples in the Carpathian Basin: A Wesern Backwater of the Eurasian Nomadic Movement.” In Gary Seaman (ed.), Foundations of Empire: Archaeology and Art of the Eurasian Steppes, pp. 59–67. Los Angeles, Ca.: Ethnographics Press. Gills, Barry K. and Andre Gunder Frank. (1993).“World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD.” In Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills (eds.), The World System: Five Hundred Years of Five Thousand? pp. 143–199. London: Routledge. Goldstein, Joshua. (1988). Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press. Gorbunova, Natalya G. (1992). “Early Nomadic Pastoral Tribes in Soviet Central Asia During the First Half of the First Millennium A.D.” In Gary Seaman (ed.), Foundations of Empire: Archaeology and Art of the Eurasian Steppes, pp. 31–48. Los Angeles, Ca.: Ethnographics Press. Gryaznov, Mikhail P. (1969). Southern Siberia, translated by James Hogarth. Geneva: Nagel Publishers. Hammond, N.G.L. (1986). A History of Greece to 322 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harke, Heinrich. (1989). “Transformation or Collapse? Bronze Age to Iron Age Settlement in West Central Europe.” In Marie Louise S. Sorensen and Roger Thomas, (eds.), The Bronze Age and Iron

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Age Transition in Europe: Aspects of Continuity and Change in European Societies, c. 1200 to 500 B.C., pp. 184–203. Oxford: BAR International Series, 483 (1). Hsu, Cho-yun. (1999). “The Spring and Autumn Period.” In Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., pp. 545–586. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristiansen, Kristian. (1998). Europe Before History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuzmina, E.E. (1998). “Cultural Connections of the Tarim Basin People and Pastoralists of the Asian Steppes in the Bronze Age.” In Victor Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, vol. 1, pp. 63–93.Washington, D.C.:The Institute for the Study of Man. Jones, Donald W. (2000). External Relations of Early Crete, 1100–600 B.C. Dubuque, Io.: Kendall Hunt. Lattimore, Owen. (1951). Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Boston, Ma.: Beacon Press. Lewis, Mark E. (1999).“Warring States Political History.” In Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., pp. 587–650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, J. (1998). “The Peaks and Valleys of Ancient States: An Extension of the Dynamic Model.” In G.M. Feinman and J. Marcus (eds.), Archaic States, pp. 59–94. Sante Fe, N.Mex: School of American Research Press. Melyukova, Anna I. (1990). “The Scythians and Sarmatians.” In Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge Early History of Inner Asia, pp. 97–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. (1995). “Scythians of Southeastern Europe.”In Jeanine Davis-Kimball,Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T.Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 27–58. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Modelski, George. (2000). “World System Evolution.” In Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski (eds.), World System History: The Social Science of Long Term Change, pp. 24–53. London: Routledge. —— and William R.Thompson. (1996). Leading Sectors of World Power:The Coevolution of Economic and Political Power. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ——. (1998). “Pulsations in the World System: Hinterland-to-Center Incursions and Migrations, 4000 BC to 1500 AD.” In Nicholas Kardulias (ed.), Leadership, Production and Exchange:World Systems Theory in Practice, pp. 241–274. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. ——. (2002).“Evolutionary Pulsations in the World System.” In Sing C. Chew and David Knottnerus, (eds.), Structure and History: Recent Issues in Social Theory, pp. 177–196. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Moshkova, Marina G. (1995).“A Brief Review of the History of the Suromatian and Sarmatian Tribes.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball, Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T. Yablonsky, (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 91–96. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Nash, Daphne. (1985).“Celtic Territorial Expansion and the Mediterranean World.” In T.C. Champion and J.V.S. McGaw (eds.), Settlement and Society: Aspects of West European Prehisoty in the First Millennium B.C. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Osborne, Robin. (1996). Greece in the Making: 1200–479 B.C. London: Routledge. Petrenko, Vladimir. (1995). “Scythian Culture in the North Caucasus.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball, Vladimir A. Bashilov, and Leonid T.Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 5–22. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Prusek, Jaroslav. (1971). Chinese Statelets and the Northern Barbarians in the Period 1400–300 B.C. New York: Humanities Press. Ray, Himanshu P. (1994). The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Selles, Jean-Francois. (1987).“The Arab-Persian Gulf under the Seleucids.” In Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White (eds.), Hellenism in the East:The Interaction of Greek and non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander, pp. 75–109. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sherratt, Andrew. (2000). “Envisioning Global Change: A Long-Term Perspective.” In Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski (eds.), World System History: The Social Sciences of Long-Term Change, pp. 115–132. London: Routledge. Shishlina, Natalia I. and Fredrik J. Hiebert. (1998). “The Steppe and the Sown: Interaction Between Bronze Age Eurasian Nomads and Agriculturalists.” In Victor Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early

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Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, vol. 1, pp. 222–237.Washington, D.C.: The Institute for the Study of Man. Sidebotham, Steven E. (1991). “Ports of the Red Sea and the Arab-India Trade.” In Vimala Begley and Richard D. DePuma (eds.), Rome and India:The Ancient Sea Trade, pp. 12–38. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. So, Jenny F. (1995a).“Expanded Cultural Exchange, ca. 1000–500 B.C.” In Jenny F. So and Emma C. Bunker Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier, pp. 33–39. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ——. (1995b).“Early Trade and Contact: Second Millennium B.C.” In Jenny F. So and Emma C. Bunker (ed.), Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier, pp. 41–51. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sulimirski, Tadeusz. (1985). “The Scyths.” In Ilya Gershevitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran:The Median and Achaemenian Periods, pp. 149–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tandy, David W. (1997). Warriors into Traders:The Power of the Market in Early Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, William R. (2001). “Early Globalization, Trade Crises, and Reorientations in the Ancient Near East.” Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Boulder, Co., November. ——. (2002).“Testing a Cyclical Instability Theory in the Ancient Near East.” Comparative Civilizations Review, vol. 46, pp. 34–78. Trump, D.H. (1980). The Prehistory of the Mediterranean. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Wells, Peter S. (1984). Farms, Villages and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Whitehouse, David. (1991).“Epilogue: Roman Trade in Perspective.” In Vimala Begley and Richard D. DePuma (eds.), Rome and India:The Ancient Sea Trade, pp. 216–218. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wilkinson, David. (2000). “Civilizations, World Systems and Hegemonies.” In Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski, (eds.), World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change, pp. 54–84. London: Routledge. Yablonsky, Leonid T. (1995a). “Written Sources and the History of Archaeological Studies of the Saka in Central Asia.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball,Vladimir A. Bashilov and Leonid T. Yablonsky, (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 193–197. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. ——. (1995b).“Some Ethnogenetical Hypotheses.” In Jeanine Davis-Kimball,Vladimir A. Bashilov and Leonid T.Yablonsky (eds.), Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age, pp. 241–252. Berkeley, Ca.: Zinat Press. Yu, Ying-shih. (1967). Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. (1990). “The Hsiung-nu.” In Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, pp. 118–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER THREE

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae: Dark Ages, Political–Economic Declines, and Environmental/Climatic Changes 2200 B.C.–700 B.C. Sing C. Chew

Introduction Considerations of hegemonic decline as a world historical process most often attempt to account for decline and collapse of complex institutions in terms of social, political, and economic processes (Gills and Frank 1992). As we increasingly question whether there are physical–environmental limits that would affect the reproduction of world-systems, political, economic, and social dimensions might not be sufficient to account for hegemonic declines. Consideration of environmental and climatological factors needs to be combined with socioeconomic relations in our understanding of hegemonic declines and shifts.This approach assumes that the humans seek to transform nature in an expansive manner, and ceaselessly amass surpluses. There are certain long periods in world history that exhibit large economic and social crises and hegemonic decline. Such long periods of economic and social distress are here termed dark ages. Over a decade ago, Gills and Frank (1992:632–636), in trying to account for hegemonic shifts in world history, used the term “dark ages” to describe certain “B-phases” of the world-system during periods of hegemonic shift—the decline of a powerful state and the rise of a different state. Their effort to periodize long-term hegemonic shifts however, did not establish the length of these dark ages, or the frequency of recurrence. Furthermore, they did not ponder the implications of dark ages for world history other than assuming that these were long periods of socioeconomic distress. In this chapter, I contend that dark ages are more than just periods of depressed socioeconomic conditions. Dark ages are also characterized by environmental and climatological changes (Chew 2001, 2002). Dark ages

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 53 condition the rhythms and processes of the world-system, and therefore have implications for our understanding of hegemonic shifts and declines. The argument to be developed here is that our understanding of hegemonic decline needs to be placed within a wider context beyond (but also including) the dimensions of social, political, and economic considerations; for underneath the superficial currents of public–social events and the actions of historically important agents, there are deeper swells of world systemic connections underlying expansions and collapses, and of environmental and climatological changes that need to be measured and analyzed not in decades but in centuries and/or millennia. The longer duration in terms of time scale is especially important when we are considering outcomes arising from the relationship between culture and nature. The impact of socioeconomic activity on the natural environment, and hence the length of ecological cycles of crisis is of a longer duration than, for example, the 300-year economic cycles of boom and bust that are believed to be pulsations of the world-system. Not only the duration, the frequency of the occurrences does not cycle rhythmically over 300 years or 50 years in length, as we would find with economic cycles. The disruption of natural rhythms of the ecological landscape via the process of the degradation of the environment extends over a longer period, at least 500–600 years. Given this, whatever socioeconomic and political changes are triggered by culture–nature relations appear only after very long periods of ecological stress.What this means is that political and economic changes need also to be framed within a longue duree of ecological time. And this must consider climatological changes that are either human or nonhuman induced. It does not mean however, that political–economic changes occur only over longer cycles of ecological time.There are political–economic changes that occur over shorter durations of social time.The understanding of both social time, for example, each 300-year political–economic shift, and ecological time, which is based on natural processes and mechanisms (and hence of a longer duration) requires that we conceptualize and measure both. What this means is that every political–economic shift periodized along the social time continuum cannot always be correlated with signs of ecological degradation, because ecological crises and climatological changes operate on a longer time duration. Because of this, it is difficult at times to draw a link between political–economic changes and environmental changes and to prove that the latter changes triggered historical sequences of political–economic changes. Given the above, this undertaking starts from the position that a systemic crisis or “dark age” began around 2200 B.C.–1700 B.C. impacting northwestern India, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Egypt,West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe and had repercussions for the urbanized core areas such as Mesopotamia, Indus, and Egypt.1 Following this, new power centers emerged in the Near East, northern Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. From 1200 B.C. to 700 B.C., depending on the region, we

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have the onset of another systemic crisis that impacted the main areas of West Asia, Egypt, eastern Mediterranean, and central Europe (from 800 B.C. onward).These periods of crisis not only were characterized by socioeconomic distress, regime transitions, and center–hinterland conflicts but were also riddled with population losses, deurbanization, natural resource depletion, environmental degradation, and climatological changes. Given the occurrences of depressed ecological conditions and climatological changes dovetailing with socioeconomic and political crises, to what extent do environmental stress and climatological changes contribute to hegemonic decline? This chapter is an attempt to address this question. System Crisis, Dark Ages, Ecological Degradation Over world history since the Bronze Age, the political–economic connections between communities, kingdoms, and civilizations from Asia to Europe have exhibited certain economic rhythms and trends that seemed to have circumscribed the socioeconomic developmental trajectories of regional and world transformations (Kristiansen 1993, 1998; Sheratt 1993; Chew 1997, 2001; Modelski and Thompson 2001). Periodizing these rhythms has been based overwhelmingly on economic conjunctures of expansion and contraction over long periods of time, contingent on kingdom, regional, and civilizational reports of economic conditions in the areas of trade, manufacturing and natural resource extractive activities, agricultural productivity, and so on (Modelski and Thompson 1999, 2001; Frank 1993; Sheratt 1993). Beyond these political and economic cycles, there are also certain long phases of socioeconomic and political downturns that have been labeled as Dark Ages by historians and archaeologists.These phases are periods, in some cases, of contraction and/or collapses of human communities and civilizations.They exhibit conditions of acute social, economic, and political disruptions exhibited by trends such as economic slowdowns, structural, social, and political breakdowns, deurbanization, increased–reduced migration, and population losses. Unfortunately, such long-term socioeconomic analyses of these dark ages, most often fail to account for the condition of the environment during such times. During these Dark Ages we find as well, ecological degradation on the world scale (Chew 1999, 2001).The latter is brought about by the numerous collisions with the natural environment as civilizations, empires, kingdoms, and nation-states seek to reproduce themselves (Chew 1999, 2001; Hughes 2001; Ponting 1991). From an ecological point of view, this makes Dark Ages interesting periods in world history. For during these phases, culture–nature relations exhibit trends and tendencies that are significantly different from expansionary phases when socioeconomic activities assume an intensive natural resource extractive trajectory. The socioeconomic patterns that emerge during these Dark Ages veer away from the usual intensive exploitation of Nature that normally characterize periods of economic expansion (though

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 55 initially the landscape exhibits devastation only to recover in the later periods of the Dark Ages). We find several culture–nature trends and patterns that are subdued: fall in population levels, decline or loss in certain material skills, decay in the cultural aspects of life, fall in living standards and thus wealth, and loss of trading contacts.2 From an anthropocentric point of view, such socioeconomic and political trends would spell disaster for human communities and social–economic progress. Hence, the use of the adjective, “dark,” to depict these specific phases of world history. Ecocentrically speaking, Dark Ages should be appreciated as periods for the restoration of the ecological balance that has been disrupted by centuries of intensive human exploitation of nature. The anthropocentric evaluations of Dark Ages in terms of conditions and factors leading to the onset of these periods are found quite commonly among the historical literature, especially for the Dark Age that occurred in the second millennium B.C. They ranged from cultural decadence, invasions and conquests by “barbarians” and nomadic tribes, internal conflicts, overcentralization of authority, famine and diseases, climate changes, and tectonic shifts (Toynbee 1939; Childe 1942; Schaeffer 1948; Carpenter 1968; Snodgrass 1971; Desborough 1972; Bryson 1974; Renfrew 1979; Bintliff 1982; Harding 1982;Weiss 1982; O’Connor 1983; Neumann and Porpola 1987). On the whole, most explanations for the onset of Dark Ages have focused overwhelmingly on anthropocentric causes related to social and economic conditions, and to some extent, on climatological changes and earthquakes. There is less emphasis on analyzing ecological conditions and the relationship between human communities and the ecological landscapes to account for the onset of the Dark Ages. There are, however, some exceptions. Kristiansen (1993, 1998) and I (1993, 1997, 1998, 2001) suggest that ecological relations between human communities and nature have impacted on their economic reproduction, and have also caused socioeconomic organizational changes, and perhaps even their collapse. In this respect, I have further suggested (2001) that extreme ecological degradation over prolonged periods have led to system crisis, and in some cases collapse, followed by Dark Ages. If one thinks along these lines as Kristiansen (1998) and I (1998, 2001) have pursued, ecological limits become also the limits of the socioeconomic processes of the world-system, and the interplay between ecological limits and the dynamics of the system define the historical tendencies and trajectories of the human enterprise. Therefore, perhaps the usual dictum that it is “economy in command” that is the sole underlying force underlining global transformation in the long term needs to be reconsidered. Along the type of argument I have stated in my previous works (1998, 2001), we might need to file down further the key for understanding and explaining world-system dynamics and transformation. The operating dimension should be “ecology in command” interpolating with the often accepted “economy in command.” What this means is that if we shift our focus to culture–nature relations and examine the outcomes of these

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relationships we might obtain a better understanding of the rise and fall of political–economic systems. In this regard therefore, Dark Ages are interesting because these are periods that can reveal to us the extent of the dependency of the socioeconomic realm on ecological relations in the reproduction of political–economic systems. Notwithstanding the visible impacts to socioeconomic life as a consequence of the onset of the Dark Ages, these impacts do not extend necessarily and evenly across geo-spatial boundaries of the system. Depending on the systemic connections of the world economy at a particular point in time, and the level of intensity of the culture–nature relations experienced by a given region, the extent of impact of a Dark Age period is uneven.The state of crisis and/or transition appears to have its greatest impact on the regions of the world-system that are considered the core/s of the system at the specific point in time. No doubt, this is related to the fact that it is in the core region/s where culture–nature relations are at its most heightened levels.This does not imply that the periphery does not experience any crisis type conditions. The connections that the core has with the periphery via several economic and political processes assure that at least some (if not all) crisis conditions will be felt. The extent, of course, is based on how incorporated the periphery is in the productive processes of the core/s. To some extent, the crisis/transition also offers opportunities for some in the periphery to rearticulate themselves within the hierarchical matrix of the zonal production and reproduction processes. One would suspect that the conditions and impacts of the Dark Age occur in different phases for the core and the periphery/margins, and the simultaneity and synchronicity of these conditions are contingent on the connectivity of the worldsystem at a particular point in time.As human history evolved, and with the increasing systemic connectivity between regions and the development of new technologies, these long ecological swings of culture–nature relations (Dark Ages) became more systemic and consequential when they occured. Besides these devastating ecological outcomes, climatological changes are also associated with Dark Ages. Climatological changes and natural calamities when they occur during Dark Ages generate further challenges to social system reproduction.Their occurrences and impacts on social systems have been noted during periods of the Dark Ages (see, e.g., Weiss 1993, 2000, 2001; Chew 1999; Keys 1999). Higher than normal temperatures can generate salinization problems for agricultural cultivation, especially in areas where irrigation is extensively used. It could also lower harvest yields.The aridity that commonly occurs with high temperatures has often generated severe problems for pastoral herds that have led to nomadic migrations thus causing further pressures on core centers. Dark Ages, therefore, should be utilized to refer to those periods of systemic socioeconomic collapse characterized by ecological crisis exhibiting severe ecological stress and losses. They reflect long centuries of exploitative relationship (via accumulation, urbanization, etc.) between culture and nature (leading to excessive ecological scarcity and degradation), especially

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 57 when this historical relationship is coupled with natural calamities (tectonic shifts, volcanic eruptions, etc.) and climatological changes during a specific conjuncture (Chew 2001). It is a crisis moment that can lead perhaps to even system collapse depending on the state of the natural environment at that point in time, the cultural willingness and foresight to make changes in lifestyle and social organization, and perhaps, the level of technology and knowledge available to address the conditions of the ecological crisis. The rarity of such occurrences in the last five thousand years of world history suggests the resiliency of the ecological landscape to human assault. Besides this, it underscores further the different time duration for our understanding of the interaction between culture and the natural environment measured along ecological time compared with political and economic activities that are necessarily gauged along social time. Dark Ages therefore depict very specific moments in world history when system reproduction is in a state of crisis and/or transition. Resolution of the crisis requires an extended period of time (historically at least 600 years) as the length of occurrence of a specific Dark Age has revealed. Such an expanse of time (ecological time) provides the window of opportunity for the ecological balance to be restored so as to enable economic productive capacities to continue. Especially with resource depletion, the need arises for innovations in social organization and technology. If it is not possible for the ecological environment/balance and trade networks to be restored, new geographic areas of ecological assets have to be located and/or the replacements of much depleted natural resources for productions are adopted. Furthermore, technological innovations could also occur to address the issue of depleted natural resources so that some level of economic production can continue. Besides this, it underscores further the different time duration for our understanding of the interaction between culture and the natural environment measured along ecological time compared with political and economic activities which are necessarily gauged along social time as I have differentiated earlier in this chapter. Related to the above developments various social, political, and economic processes come into play during such moments of systemic crisis and/or transition.They range from social upheavals (revolts, wars, etc.) and dislocations (such as migrations), to cultural/ideological shifts, along with political and social reorganizations, and so on. In certain circumstances, resolution of a system crisis might not necessarily lead to a system transition. In this case, the crisis is resolved because the ecological balance has been restored allowing for social reproduction on the extended scale to occur, and that the state of the socioeconomic organizations and political hegemonies in place has the capacity to meet the contingencies of the restored ecological balance. If, however, these conditions are not in place, a new set of organizing and learning principles will need to be engendered in order to meet the contingencies of the transformed terrain generated by the crisis conditions of the Dark Age. In such a context, qualitative changes ensue and a system transition occurs.

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Hence, Dark Ages are important moments in world history for they provide opportunities for the ecological balance to be restored, political and economic opportunities for some peripheral groups to advance up the zonal power matrix, and for reconfiguration of the hierarchical division of political–economic power of the world-system at specific conjunctures of world history. Dark Age System Crisis Period, 2200 B.C.–700 B.C. The ancient world of the Near East and northwestern Indian subcontinent during the third millennium was characterized by a system of overlapping core regions instead of a single dominant core (see for e.g., Kohl 1987; Gills and Frank 1992; Chew 2001). Within such a political–economic matrix, each core interacted with its immediate hinterland and with each other leading to certain core regions attempting to manipulate its adjacent hinterland, and at times trying to control it. Given such political incursions and trading initiatives, systemic connections were established, and during moments of systemic crisis, crisis-like conditions reverberated throughout the system providing opportunities and constraints depending on the circumstances. Such were the conditions that permeated the late third millennium Bronze Age during the Dark Age crisis period starting around 2200 B.C. It was a systemic crisis of the Bronze Age system that led to certain political–economic reconfiguration. System Crisis 2200 B.C.–1750 B.C.: Ecological Degradation, Climatological Changes, and Political–Economic Declines Most accounts and explanations of political–economic declines, and even civilizational collapses have been based on mostly anthropocentric reasons and causes. Usually, invasions by foreign armies, internal corruption, economic disintegration, extreme exploitation by elites and ruling classes are given as factors accounting for collapses (Yoffee 1988). Other factors contributing to political–economic declines such as ecological degradation, climatological changes, and natural calamities are rarer. The crisis starting around 2200 B.C. was a systemic crisis of the Bronze Age system.This systemic crisis and the consequent political economic declines, and even collapses of the core centers of the Bronze Age world-system can be linked, I believe, to factors that are nonanthropocentric in nature such as what we have listed above. By 2200 B.C., the ecological relations in Mesopotamia and Harappa indicate an intensive exploitation of nature to meet not only domestic needs but also commercial requirements in other parts of the world economy. By this time, in terms of ecological duration, centuries of ecological stress as a result of accumulation, urbanization, and population growth are increasingly being felt in the sphere of agricultural production with

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 59 decreasing harvest yields. Such ecological stress upsets the balance in the natural environment, and increases the vulnerability of production systems to climatic changes and natural calamities when they occur. This vulnerability coupled with trade declines and civil/social invasions and conflicts led these urban complexes to face crisis of reproduction and consequent decline. Therefore, ecological degradation leading to systemic crisis takes a long duration to emerge. Mesopotamia Between 2400 and 1700 B.C., southern Mesopotamia faced a crisis in agricultural productivity (Jacobsen and Adams 1958; Adams 1981). The stratified society pursued intensive socioeconomic activities to produce surplus for domestic consumption as well as for exports (in the form of grains and woollen textiles) to the Gulf and beyond. The scale of intensity required extensive deforestation, maximal utilization of agriculture, and animal husbandry. Salinization was a problem in Mesopotamia from the third millennium onwards.To meet this agricultural crisis, seeding rates were increased. Between 2150 and 2000 B.C., 55.5 liters of seed were planted per hectare. This volume doubled in comparison to the previous period between 3000–2350 B.C. Furthermore, with no consideration for the repercussions, alternate year fallowing was also violated in order to maintain the maximum amount of land available for cultivation (Gibson 1970). Such a crisis in agricultural productivity was exacerbated further by climatological changes. Climate change in terms of increasing temperature, and hence increasing aridity for the period of crisis around 2200 B.C. is especially well documented for West Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and parts of the New World.3 Confirmation of these changes via decreased pollen yields,Tigris–Euphrates stream flow, dust spikes, decrease in lake levels have been made in recent years (Weiss 2001). The Dead Sea area reported a 20–30 percent drop in precipitation from the previous period of 610 mm (Bar-Mathews and Avalon 1997; Bar-Mathews et al. 1998, 1999). Pollen records from Lake Zeribar in West Asia suggest extreme drought (Bottema 1997). The Lake Van cores document a dust spike around 2290 B.C.– 2000 B.C., a decrease in lake levels and a rapid increase in aridity (Lemcke and Sturm 1997; Lemcke et al. 1997). The Lake Van proxies provide a climate record for the Tigris–Euphrates headwaters region. Given such climatological changes, the agricultural sector was further stressed as increasing temperatures led to a rise in evapotranspiration. For irrigated agriculture, which is the basis of Mesopotamian agricultural practices, this would mean a demand for more water. The enhanced application of irrigated water had a deleterious effect on agricultural lands that possessed a salinity problem that southern Mesopotamia was already experiencing. Southern Mesopotamia never recovered from the disastrous decline in agricultural yields that accompanied the salinization process. Deurbanization was the order of the day especially toward the end of the second

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millennium (Adams 1981). Urban life and culture continued on a declining scale with the population concentrating only in the major towns (Brinkman 1968). In northern Mesopotamia, such climatic conditions also impacted on towns such as Tell Brak, and Tell Leilan under Akkadian imperial rule, and shared the same fate as the other urbanized areas in the south (Weiss 2000). Abandonment of towns and settlements in the Habur plains also followed. The Harappan Civilization The political economic decline of Mesopotamia around 2200 B.C. coincided with crisis conditions pervading the Harappan civilization. The culture–nature relations of the Harappan civilization were very similar to its Mesopotamian counterpart. By this time period, ecological relations were severely strained as a consequence of centuries of resource exploitation within the immediate vicinity and the surrounding hinterland. Climatological changes and natural calamities such as tectonic shifts added to the stress that this social system was experiencing in this Dark Age crisis period. High-resolution paleoclimate records of the Indian monsoon indicate signs of aridification in the late third millennium B.C. (Bentaleb 1997;Weiss 2001). Ratnagar (1981) confirms this climate shift, and has further suggested a small-scale oscillation to drier conditions between 1800–1500 B.C. Especially for arid regions, minor shifts in terms of wetness would spell severe ecological stress. Thus, starting from the second millennium B.C., the increasing aridity placed pressures on the Harappan civilization. The shift in rainfall patterns, coupled with increasing salinity impacted on the agricultural productivity of the Harappans. Tectonic shifts also occurred that diverted water courses. These diversions transformed some rivers into dry riverbeds further exacerbating the aridity, and thus impacting on socioeconomic life. The drying up of the Sarasvati River had tremendous implications for Harappan urban complexes located on its river banks (Possehl 2001). Agarwal and Sood (1982) noted tectonic shifts that diverted the course of the Satluz and the easterly rivers away from the Ghaggar, which over time died into a lake-like depression during this period.Thus, in northern and western Rajasthan, unstable river systems impacted on socioeconomic life. This thesis of tectonic shifts impacting on the reproduction of socioeconomic life has been advanced to account for the demise of the Harappan urban complexes such as Mohenjo-daro and its associated communities (Sahni 1956; Raikes 1964; Raikes and Dales 1977; Dales 1979).4 Dales (1979), building on this, has suggested that enmeshed in this detoriating condition, the weakened state was unable to send help to its inhabitants in the northern frontier when they were threatened by tribal incursions. Beyond the climatological changes and tectonic shifts arguments for the demise of the Harappans, it has been suggested that over-cultivation, over

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 61 grazing, salinity, deforestation, and flooding as factors generating the decline of the Harappan urban complex (Raikes and Dyson 1961; Wheeler 1968; Fairservis 1979a; Stein 1998). The flooding of the Indus would have the effect of increasing the water table for a considerable distance on both sides of the channel.With the salt content of the water table being high, and the mean temperature about 90 degrees, poor leaching led large areas to become unfit for cultivation over time. The decline of the Harappans coincided with that of southern Mesopotamia. The end of this flourishing maritime trade coincided with the time phasing of the demise (1700–1500 B.C.) of the Harappan civilization. As the urbanized communities of the Harappans were linked to the overarching Gulf Trade and beyond, its infrastructure and surrounding hinterlands had therefore developed and specialized in the manufacture of products and natural resources for export. Thus, when its exports to the Gulf and beyond disappeared, it could no longer reproduce the accumulation process that had sustained the urban growth.This led to out migration to the rural areas of the north and south. Deurbanization followed. In Cholistan, settled areas dropped in size from an average of 6.5 hectares in 3800–3200 B.C. to 5.1 hectares by 1900–1700 B.C. and finally to almost fifty percent less (2.6 hectares) by 1000 B.C. (Possehl 2000: 66). With the accumulation process slowing down, the outlying trading towns and outposts in the hinterland, devoid of prosperous support from the Harappan core, gradually merged with the countryside. Coupled with the problems of (normal and abnormal) flooding and the detoriating ecological conditions, the decline proceeded unchecked. These ecological explanations enrich our understanding of the vectors that led to the demise of southern Mesopotamia and the Harappan civilization. Furthermore, with the power base shifting northward in the case of Mesopotamia, the trade in metals and timber with sources in Syria and Anatolia increased. The central Mesopotamian cities thus relied on this northern hinterland more for its resources than what the southern cities did. Such developments led to the strengthening of the land trading routes of the north and northeast and the demise of the maritime trade routes of the Gulf.The shift engendered the disappearance of the Gulf trade and the repercussions were felt throughout the trading points along the Gulf up to the Indus Valley. The contemporaneous decline of Harappa and Mesopotamia was by no means the only set of occurrences of political economic decline.This Dark Age systemic crisis period was also experienced throughout the Bronze Age economic system. Egypt, for example, also experienced regime changes. Temperature increases also impacted on Egypt. During the first Dark Ages (2200 B.C.–1700 B.C.), climatological changes led to a reduced flow of the Nile thus lowering its level and inducing drought conditions that had systemic impact on the overall economy of Egypt and the surrounding lands (Bell 1971; Hassan 1997). The annual flooding of the Nile valley provides the rejuvenation of the agricultural landscape. On this basis,

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lower river levels would mean falling Nile flood levels. Nile flow is a function of the amount of rain that falls on the Ethiopian Highlands, which is correlated with precipitation stored in the closed-basin lakes of Lake Abhe, Lake Zway-Shala, and Lake Turkana.The rainfall on these highlands accounts for over 83 percent of the water of the Nile at Aswan. The seasonality of the rain is dependent on the Indian monsoon, which falls between June to August (Barry and Chorley 1992).Therefore, any changes in the monsoon would have an impact on rainfall that ultimately would lower the flow of the Nile. Around 2200 B.C., a severe lake level reduction at Lakes Abhe, Zway-Shala, and Turkana was reported (Johnson and Odade 1996; Ricketts and Johnson 1996; Gasse 2000). This led to a lower Nile flow and level that engendered aridity and drought conditions in Egypt (Hassan 1986, 1997; Bryson and Bryson 1998). There were also reports of the invasion of dune sand in the valley near Memphis suggesting the increasing aridity of the landscape (Hassan 1997). In Middle Egypt, sand dunes also invaded the flood plain. Lack of high floods from the Nile along with the dry climate led to severe pressure on the agricultural system as naturally irrigated areas for crop cultivation were reduced. Famine followed and has been confirmed by the ancient texts of Egypt (Bell 1971; Hassan 1997). The above climatologically induced conditions led to reduced agroproduction which, in turn, had an impact on the economy of the First Intermediate Period (Weiss 2000). Flood failures occurred between 2180 and 2135 B.C. and again around 2005 and 1992 B.C. (Bell 1975). Signs of famines emerged again around 1750 B.C. though they were not as severe as what occurred in 2200 B.C. (Bell 1975). Besides famines, the climatological changes also brought about the dissipation of central authority. Drought conditions and lowered Nile flooding impacted on the farmer’s ability to pay taxes because of lower harvest yields.This resulted in local administrators and governors who collect taxes having to delay their transfer to the royal house. In turn, the revenues of the king plummeted and thus impaired his ability to pay for an army or to deal effectively with the drought and famine.As a result, the stability of the political regime was affected.The sum effects of this in the realm of political stability as Bell (1971) concluded, were short reigns. For example, between 2190 and 2130 B.C., there were about 31 to 40 kings. Hassan (1997) covering a slightly different period, 2180–2134 B.C., reported 18 pharaohs reigned over this short span. The collapse of the central monarchy of the old Kingdom around 2180 B.C. occurred within such dynamics.5 Later in the period around 1700 B.C., short reigns also predominate (Bell 1975). For example, between 1768–1740 B.C., there were 18 kings. Besides political instability, resource exhaustion pervaded the landscape as evident in terms of the size and elaborateness of the Pharaonic tombs. By this time, the tombs of the kings were one-chambered affairs with less ambitious layouts (Bovarski 1998). Elsewhere in the Bronze Age system for this time period of 2200 B.C., similar signs of deteriorating conditions were also encountered in Anatolia

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 63 Table 3.1 Cool and warm periods: Anatolia and adjacent regions Period 3385 B.C.–3250 B.C. 3250 B.C.–2900 B.C. 2900 B.C.–2710 B.C. 2710 B.C.–2345 B.C. 2345 B.C.–2205 B.C. 2205 B.C.–1650 B.C. 1670 B.C.–1655 B.C. 1650 B.C.–1410 B.C. 1410 B.C.–1205 B.C. 1205 B.C.– 815 B.C. 815 B.C.– 685 B.C. 685 B.C.– 406 B.C.

Cool Warm Cool Warm Cool Warm Dark Age Cool Warm Cool Warm Dark Age Cold Warm

Source: Fairbridge 1997.

with the abandonment of urban centers such as Troy II to Troy III–IV (Mellink 1986;Wilkinson 1990). Consequently, depopulation also resulted. Sedentary population settlements on the Anatolian plateau were also abandoned. Time series of temperature changes in terms of warm and cool periods has been offered by Fairbridge (1997), categorizing this period as a warm period (meaning increasing aridity of the environment) (see Table 3.1). To the west of Anatolia, Palestine also was suffering from such crisis conditions. Unwalled villages replaced walled towns. There were signs of cave occupations and migratory movements. In some areas, settlements completely disappeared, and remaining settlement sites were reduced by more than half of what existed before 2200 B.C. (Harrison 1997). Across the Mediterranean from Palestine, the Aegean experienced distress as well, though not as dire. Between 2300 and 1900 B.C., there was a loss of sedentary population. Such losses were experienced both on mainland Greece and even Crete (Jameson et al. 1994; Watrous 1994). It has been argued that such losses were a consequence of land degradation and anthropogenic soil erosion (see, e.g., Runnels 1995).While others such as Rockham and Moody (1996), suggest that the socioeconomic crisis can be accounted for via the reduction of precipitation leading to pressures on rain-fed agriculture. It should be noted that the Aegean recovered faster than the rest of the Bronze Age system, for by 1900 B.C., Minoan Crete was on an expansionary growth path in terms of palace building that lasted until 1700 B.C. (Chew 2001). Such a pace of recovery suggests perhaps the social system in question has not reached a stage whereby ecological degradation had attained ecological crisis proportions and that ecological recovery would not require a longer duration in terms of ecological time. Furthermore, at this point in time of world history, Crete and mainland Greece cannot be considered to be part of the multiple core centers of the Bronze Age system, and therefore might not

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have intensively exploited their environment in comparison to other core centers. Therefore, the ecological condition of their landscapes might not have reached crisis conditions. However, this was to change later following periods of intensification of socioeconomic expansion (Chew 2001). To the east of the Aegean, in central Eurasia, preliminary data also confirmed marked changes in vegetation beginning around 2200 B.C. and lasting around 1700 B.C. following increases in temperature (Krementski 1997; Hiebert 2000). Pollen cores indicate a sharp decrease in tree pollen and increase in steppe pollen. From 2200 B.C. to 2000 B.C., there was a severe drop in forest and an increase in steppification leading to an expansion in the steppe landscape from 1800 B.C. to 1700 B.C. Arid conditions also affected arable lands that caused severe pressure on animal husbandry of the steppe population. The lush feather grass steppe that depicted the landscape near Kalmykia from 2500 B.C. to 2200 B.C. gave way to dry scrubby vegetation—wormwood steppe—and even desertification by 2200 B.C. to 1700 B.C. This changed ecological landscape led to out migration of sedentary population from river valleys with increased time and exploitation of the steppe lands for animal feed. Following the deurbanization trajectory that was encountered in the Indus and Mesopotamia a decline of urban sites took place. Denucleation occurred with establishment of smaller communities near oases. This spread occurred in Central Asia at Khorezm (south of the Aral Sea) and Margiana (Murghab delta) in Turkmenistan, Bactria, and western China. System Crisis 1200 B.C.–700 B.C.: Ecological Degradation, Climatological Changes, and Political–Economic Declines The systemic crisis that started around 2200 B.C. can be considered the beginning of the first dark age of the system from an ecological point of view. Besides the economic and political contractions that characterized this time period, it was a signal reflecting the level of ecological devastation that has been caused by the various civilizations. Coupled with the climatological changes, the rising trends in terms of ecological degradation and deforestation put system reproduction under severe stress (hence system crisis), and such tendencies continued from 2200 B.C. through to at least 1750 B.C. By 1750 B.C., the Persian Gulf section of the Bronze Age trade network had collapsed, and the trading levels began to intensify in the western part of this trading system around the Eastern Mediterranean littoral (Chew 2001). Egypt, Syria-Levant (such as Ugarit, Mari, Byblos, Ras Shamra), Crete, Cyprus, and mainland Greece expanded their trading volumes utilizing the peripheral areas such as Central and Eastern Europe, and Nubia for their resource needs (Knapp 1993; Kristiansen 1998; Chew 2001).With the loss of trading dominance of southern Mesopotamia, Mesopotamian trade shifted northward making Anatolia an important eastern node of this Bronze Age trading network (Larsen 1987; Chew 2001).

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 65 The Eastern Mediterranean littoral became the prime axis where economic activity of the Bronze Age system was concentrated. Such a development also meant that the culture–nature relations were extended in this area, and in some cases, such as Crete and Mycenaean Greece they were intensified. If 2200 B.C. was a beginning signal reflecting past centuries of ecological degradation within this Bronze Age system, it was also a point indicating the start of a systemic ecological collapse or Dark Age. By 1200 B.C., we also witnessed similar characteristics like the 2200 B.C. crisis. Bell (1971) and Braudel (2001) for example, have noted that starting around 1200 B.C., a second dark age began and it was marked by the disappearance of the Hittite Empire of Anatolia, the end of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, the decline of Egypt (Third Intermediary Period) and its empire (Weinstein 1989), with Babylonia and Assyria in decline around 1100–1000 B.C. Collapse was widespread throughout the region, and migration away from the coastal cities as a consequence of climate changes to the interior occurred, such as in Palestine and Jordan, for ecological landscapes that could sustain agriculture and access to natural resources (iron) (McGovern 1987).The paucity of information concerning culture–nature relations of the Hittite Empire prevents us from suggesting that the fall of the Hittite Empire by the eleventh century B.C. can be accounted along the lines of ecological degradation and climatological changes as we have pursued so far. Beyond the core areas of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, the periphery of the system such as Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe had a different rhythm vis-a-vis economic expansion. Around 1200 B.C. was a period of population increases, settlement expansion, agrarian intensification, and reorientation of trade and exchange for these regions (Kristiansen 1993, 1998; Chew 2001). With the collapse of the Near Eastern Mediterranean trade networks, metal production boomed in central and Eastern Europe, and the east–west exchange connection was strengthened, thus establishing a regional system (Urnfield) of trade exchanges and production. Regional system crisis emerged much later around 750 B.C., following centuries of intensive resource extraction, land exhaustion, and climatological changes when the climate became cooler and moister. Such differences in economic trajectories between the regions of the Bronze Age system suggest that at this point in time (in terms of world-system development) the synchronicity of relations and processes is not as linked to the extent that crisis in the core was felt throughout the periphery. If the ecological conditions of the landscape and climate are factors of consideration, the state of the environment therefore can be considered a principal determinant on political economic crisis conditions that the various regions of the Bronze Age system will encounter. Despite the lack of synchronicity, systemic change continued to occur. As we have stated above, for Central and Eastern Europe, regional system changes occurred at a later time after 1200 B.C., around 750 B.C., following centuries of landscape degradation.

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In the Aegean, the continuous degradation of the environment started as early as the third millennium B.C., and persisting to higher intensity by the second millennium B.C. with the expansionary growth of Crete and Mycenaean Greece. For Crete, there were two phases of palace building (1950–1700 B.C. and 1700–1450 B.C.) which led the urbanization process, and for Mycenaean Greece, palace building reached its height between 1400–1200 B.C. Such economic growth with production processes located within the palace complexes, and the surrounding lands allocated for agricultural production and animal husbandry generated tremendous stress on the environment, especially when these intensive practices are conducted over centuries without much relief for the ecological landscape (Chew 2001; Hughes 2001). The decline/demise of Crete starting around 1500 B.C. has been widely debated. Explanations have ranged widely from tectonic shifts to anthropogenic causes such as the invasion by Mycenaeans, systems complexity, internal rebellions and revolutionary military innovations (Marinatos 1939; Chadwick 1976; Hooker 1976; Renfrew 1979; Warren 1985; Drews 1993). Single causal theories for demise, such as that of Marinatos (1939), would need to be complemented with other explanations as the complex Minoan system could not have possibly collapse over a single catastrophic event, such as an earthquake on a nearby island close to Crete. Crete lies on the Aegean plate that straddles the Turkish, African, and Eurasian plates (Manning 1994). It has been argued that between 2800 B.C. and A.D. 400, a particularly active tectonic regime was in force in the southern Aegean (Manning 1994). Such a pattern of geological conditions does provide the grounds for the argument made first by Marinatos (1939) and followed by others such as Chadwick (1976), and Warren (1985), that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes around 1500 B.C. provided the circumstances for the demise of Crete. To Chadwick (1976), the earthquakes followed by volcanic eruption on Thera precipitated further the delimiting conditions for the Minoans.The volcanic ash not only killed vegetation but also destroyed the Minoan naval fleet. The loss of the latter undermined Cretan naval supremacy, which for a long period provided Minoan Crete the power to exercise its dominant position in this region of the world system. This line of argument needs to be buttressed with other trends. Climatological changes, such as increasing aridity can cause severe disruptions to food production. Manning (1994) and Carter and Dale (1974) have suggested that there was evidence of increasing aridity in the southern Aegean. This arid condition—combined with a degraded environment— would have added severe stress on agricultural production as grain was exchanged for other needed imports of natural resources for the manufacturing processes in the urban environments. The demise of Minoan Crete around 1500 B.C. should also be considered with the political changes occurring during this time period. The

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 67 increasing role played by the Hittites and Kassites through their expansion and dominance of Anatolia and Mesopotamia must have impacted on the economic activities of Minoan Crete. This dominancy of the Hittites and Kassites along with the ascendancy of Mycenaean Greece further curtailed the economic reproduction of Minoan Crete.The Minoans, who had relied on the import of necessary natural resources for the manufacturing processes from the trading interconnections of the Bronze Age worldsystem, experienced the loss of these sources.Those sources located on the Greek mainland came increasingly under the control of the Mycenaeans. Their supply centers in western Anatolia and northern Syria were also restricted because of Hittite expansion and control. Faced with these desperate conditions and coupled with climatological changes and natural catastrophes, the Minoan civilizations came under severe stress around the mid-second millennium B.C. The causal conditions for the decline of Mycenaean Greece are similar. Besides the anthropogenic factors such as the invasion by the Dorians from the north and the Sea Peoples, and the changing style of warfare in the later period of the second millennium, conditions such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, changing climatological patterns, soil erosion have been advanced as circumstances leading to the demise of Mycenanean Greece around 1200 B.C. (Carpenter 1968; Desborough 1975; Betancourt 1976; Chadwick 1976; Drews 1993). Like Minoan Crete, the natural environment of Mycenaean Greece was by 1200 B.C. severely stretched in terms of agricultural production of wheat, barley, flax, and the rearing of sheep (Chew 2001). Notwithstanding this, deforestation was quite severe. Betancourt (1976) has asserted that such intensive cultivation was further exacerbated by overspecialization in the growing of only one or two types of cereals that make the economic structure extremely vulnerable to collapse. Placed within such a context, the thesis of climatological change of Rhys Carpenter (1968) for the demise of Mycenaean Greece needs to be considered. Basically, Carpenter’s position is that with the shift in the tracks of the cyclonic storms that normally bring rain to Mycenaean Greece a disruption in the rainfall pattern followed for the interior of the Greek mainland. This resulted in drought-like conditions during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C. The persistent drought was also accompanied by an increase in land temperature. As a consequence, the socioeconomic structure was impacted. Wright (1968), Chadwick (1976), and Drews (1993) however, have challenged this thesis of climatological change affecting the socioeconomic structure of Mycenaean Greece in the later second millennium. Notwithstanding this, others such as Lamb (1967), Braudel (2001), Bryson et al. (1974), and Bryson and Padoch (1980), have indicated that the period of drought proposed by Carpenter appears to have prevailed during the time of Mycenaean decline, according to precipitation patterns examined. Besides climatological changes, earthquakes have also been attributed as causal factors for the decline of Myceneaen Greece. Earthquakes at Tiryns,

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Mycenae, the Argolid during the Late Helladic Period have been suggested for the decline of these two urbanized communities (Mylonas 1966; Zangger 1993). The crisis Mycenaean Greece was experiencing resulted in major transformations of the socioeconomic and political landscapes. Depopulation and deurbanization of mainland Greece were the order of the day. Braudel (2001) has suggested that the deurbanization process that occurred was very likely a cause of climatic change as Mycenaean sites were found abandoned and deserted without any signs of destruction by human hands. In addition, like what had occurred in Egypt during the third millennium Dark Age of 2200 B.C. where artistic degeneration occurred, and the scale of monumental building scaled back, Greece encountered similar trends: decline or loss in certain material skills, decay in the cultural aspects of life, fall in living standards and thus wealth, and loss of trading contacts within and without Greece (Snodgrass 1971; Desborough 1972). The archaeological evidence unearthed suggests socioeconomic patterns that are distinctively different from the style and level of socio-cultural life prevailing prior to the onset of this “Dark Age.” The pottery and other objects recovered from excavated graves along with the architecture and design of dwellings from excavated sites reflect ecological stress and scarcity in natural resources to reproduce the socio-cultural life during this “Dark Age” period. Pottery styles became austere unlike the decadent style of the prior era. The bulk of a pot was usually left plain in the natural color of the clay and the decorations covered at most a third of the surface area. The lack of intense firing suggests, as well, the scarcity of dwindling energy supplies.As recovery proceeds and the balance of Nature is restored, we find the plain rectilinear or curvilinear patterns in pottery designs giving way to images depicting animals and humans. Such shifts could suggest the return of biodiversity to the environment and reveal to us perhaps the loss of biodiversity at the onset of the “Dark Age.” Beyond pottery styles, other objects recovered indicate a scarcity of natural resources, especially in the area of metals, or that the supply sources have dried up. The use of obsidian and bones for blades and weapons underscore such scarcity, and also suggests that trading routes and centers for sourcing the metals might have been disrupted or disappeared. Ecological scarcity required a downscaling of material and cultural lifestyles. Such changes are reflected in burial practices that exhibited a reorganization of life along modest and rational lines. The designs of clothing and shoes were of the plainest kind.The downscaling process was exhibited further in the formation of decentralized communities and the associated population losses.Whether this life style trend is one that is actively sought as a consequence of ecological scarcity or that it occurred as an outcome of the depressive conditions of the “Dark Age” is difficult to gauge. What we are sure of is that as recovery proceeded—we begin to witness this by the mid-half of the tenth century B.C.—trading networks were reestablished and

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 69 communities were revived. Such an upswing was arrayed with exuberance, materialistic consumption, and accumulation. For during the “Dark Age,” materialistic consumption went down, and most of the trading networks disappeared or were restricted only to the area of the Aegean Sea. What the Dark Age of this period represented for the region was an era when extreme degradation of the ecological landscape precipitated socioeconomic organizational changes to meet the scarcity in resources in order to reproduce some semblance of cultural and economic life of prior times. As a consequence, systemic reorganization occurred at various levels from the way commodities are produced to the clothing fashions and designs. Hierarchical social structures disappeared during the Dark Age as evident by the burial practices, and were restored when recovery proceeded (Whitley 1991). In Central and Eastern Europe, we also witness similar collapse of social hierarchy with communal burials replacing chiefly burials from 1250–750 B.C. (Kristiansen 1993, 1998). The deurbanization process that resulted in mainland Greece gave rise to small communities with lower population levels.This process prompted by ecological degradation and environmental changes also occurred in Syria, Palestine, and Jordan. Migration out of urban centers located on the coast to the interior and the establishment of smaller village type settlements resulted (McGovern 1987). Seen from the ecological point of view, this down scaling provided the necessary timing for Nature to restore its balance, and for socioeconomic life to start afresh when recovery returned. From these small communities, in the case of Greece, the preconditions for the rise of the Greek polis were put into play, and what followed was a flourish of political and economic life as soon as the social system recovered (Snodgrass 1971). Seen from a social evolutionary point of view, it is a transformation that occurred which caused systemic changes that cannot be viewed from a modernist perspective as progressive during the period in question. What followed in the recovery phase, however, was a Dark Age conditioned sociocultural and political lifestyle that formed the basis of Western civilization as we know it today. Given the above, the crisis of 1200 B.C. was a continuation of the ecological crisis of the Bronze Age system experienced in 2200 B.C. Systemic in nature, the crisis years lasted until 700–500 B.C. depending on which region of the world system one is referring to. At the end of this, we witnessed a further shift of the core centers of the Near-Eastern Mediterranean trade network further westward. Conclusion The documentary evidence discussed above suggests that a systemic political, economic, and ecological crisis emerged during the Bronze Age around 2200 B.C. and partial recovery returned around 1750 B.C. For regions that experienced severe ecological degradation such as southern Mesopotamia and northwestern India following millennial length of

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growth (in terms of urbanization, accumulation, and population), the recovery that occurred around 1750 B.C. did not return these centers to the level of political economic strength they enjoyed prior to the 2200 B.C. What followed was a shift in terms of trade relations and trade volume away from the southeastern portion of this Bronze Age system to the west and northwestern sectors. Such reorientation led to realignment of old centers such as Egypt, northern Mesopotamia, and the ascendance of new ones in Anatolia, and regional centers in the Aegean. Crisis conditions returned again in 1200 B.C. (though for parts of the Aegean, Crete in particular, it started around 1500 B.C.) and lasted until 700–500 B.C. This later phase of the systemic crisis extended to all areas of the western and northwestern segments of the Bronze Age system that grew and intensified in terms of trade, economic exchange, and ecological degradation after the crisis of 2200 B.C. as discussed above. From what has been presented in the previous pages, systemic crisis from an ecological perspective is longer in duration (perhaps 600 years in length), and during the Bronze Age, it extended from 2200 B.C. to 1750 B.C. and from 1200 B.C. to 700–500 B.C. Besides economic and political difficulties and transformations, we find also deurbanization, lower population growth or losses, and natural resource scarcity as a result of resource exhaustion or trade interruption. For this Bronze Age system, we note deurbanization from 2200 B.C. onward, and this trend continued from the system as a whole to 1200 B.C. and beyond. From a different vantage point in trying to account for urbanization (concentration), and not resorting to ecological conditions to explain deurbanization (dispersal) as I have done, Modelski (1997, 1999a, 1999b) and Thompson (Modelski and Thompson 2001) have also reported of this dispersal tendency during the period of the Bronze Age that I have identified. Subsequent Dark Age periods of world history that I have periodized also dovetail with their findings (Chew 2002). It is suggestive from this to state, and to borrow a phrase from Modelski (1999a): “we’ve got rhythm in the world system.” It is only by probing deeper, and moving beyond just relying on social, political, and economic explanations can we understand and explain fully the dynamics and trajectory of the world-system that we have collectively agreed is the proper level of analysis. Notes 1. Thompson (2001) has periodized an earlier socioeconomic systemic crisis beginning at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. 2. See for example Snodgrass (1971) and Desborough (1972) for conditions of Greece during the second millennium B.C. Dark Age. 3. By no means are these climate changes anthropogenic in origin (Weiss 2000). The causes for these global climatic changes around 2200 B.C. of which West Asia is a subset have been attributed to alterations in solar radiation, thermohaline alterations, or ocean tidal cycle with periodicities ranging from 1800 years to 500 years. 4. This thesis has been questioned by Lambrick (1967).

From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 71 5. Butzer (1997) has challenged this thesis that lowered Nile floods induced a demise of the Old Kingdom. Rather for Butzer (1997), the Old Kingdom collapse was a consequence of decentralization, dynastic weakness, a shift of wealth and power to several provincial centers during Dynasty 6, the loss of royal power anchored in part on the trade monopoly with Syria being undercut by the Akkadian conquest of Byblos, and civil wars, etc.

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From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae 73 Keys, David. 1999. Catastrophe. New York: Ballantine Books. Knapp, Bernard. 1993. “Thalassocacies in the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Trade: Making and Breaking a Myth.” World Archaeology 24:332–347. Kohl, P. 1987. “The Ancient Economy, Transferable Technologies, and the Bronze Age World System: A View from the Northeastern Frontiers of the Ancient Near East.” In M. Rowlands et al. (eds.), Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, pp. 13–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krementski, Constantin. 1997. “The Late Holocene Environmental and Climate Shift in Russia and Surrounding Lands.” In H. Dalfes et al. (eds.), Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, pp. 351–370. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Kristiansen, Kristian. 1993. “The Emergence of the European World System in the Bronze Age: Divergence, Convergence, and Social Evolution During the First and Second Millennia B.C. in Europe.” Sheffield Archaeological Monographs #6. ——. 1998. Europe before History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambrick, H.T. 1967.“The Indus Flood Plain and the ‘Indus’ Civilization.” The Geographical Journal 133, 4:483–489. Larsen,Trolle Mogens. 1987. “Commercial Network in the Ancient Near East.” in M. Rowlands et al. (eds.), Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, pp. 47–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemcke, G. and M. Sturm, 1997.“d O and Trace Element Measurements as Proxy for the Reconstruction of Climatic Changes at Lake Van.” In H. Dalfes et al. (eds.), Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, pp. 653–678. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Marinatos, S. 1939. “The Volcanic Eruption of Minoan Crete.” Antiquity 13:425–439. McEvedy, Colin and Sarah McEvedy. 1972. Dark Ages. London: McMillan. McGovern, P. 1987. “Central TransJordan in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages: An Alternative Hypothesis of SocioEconomic Collapse.” In A. Hadidi (ed.), Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 3, pp 267–273. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mellink, Machfeld. 1986.“The Early Bronze Age in Western Anatolia:Aegean and Asiatic Correlations.” In G. Cadogan (ed.), End of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean, pp. 139–152. Leiden: Brill. Modelski, George. 1997. “Early World Cities.” International Studies Association Meeting.Toronto. ——. 1999a. “Ancient World Cities 4000–1000B.C.: Center/Hinterland in the World System.” Global Society vol. 13, no.#4:383–392. ——. 1999b. “Classical World Cities: 1200B.C. to A.D. 1000.” In K.Watt (ed.), Human Ecology. —— and Thompson,W. 1999.“The Evolutionary Pulse of the World System: Hinterland Incursion and Migrations 4000B.C. to A.D. 1500.” In Nick Kardulias (ed.), World System Theory in Practice, pp. 241–274. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ——. 2001.“Evolutionary Pulsations in the World System.” In Sing Chew and David Knottnerus (eds.), Structure, Culture, and History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mylonas, George. 1966. Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neumann, J, and S. Porpola. 1987.“Climatic Change and the Eleventh-Tenth century Eclipse of Assyria and Babyloniaer.” British Journal of New Eastern Studies 46:161–182. Ponting, Clive. 1991. A Green History of the World. New York: Penguin. Possehl, Gregory. 2000. “The Drying Up of the Sarasvati.” In G. Bawden and R. Reycraft (eds.), Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response, pp. 63–74. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rackham, Oliver and J. Moody. 1996. The Making of the Cretan Landscape. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Raikes, Robert. 1964. “The End of the Ancient Cities of the Indus.” American Anthropologist 66, 2:284–299. ——. 1984. Water,Weather, and Prehistory. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. —— and R. Dyson. 1961. “The Prehistoric Climate of Baluchistan and the Indus Valley.” American Anthropologist 63, 2:265–281. —— and G. F. Dales. 1977. “The Mohenjo-Daro Floods Reconsidered.” Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India 20:251–260. Ratnagar, Shereen. 1981. Encounters:The Westerly Trade of the Harappan Civilization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Renfrew, Colin. 1972. The Emergence of Civilization London: Collins. Renfrew, Colin. 1979.“Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in early State Society.” In C. Renfrew and K. L. Cooke (eds.), Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Cultural Change, pp 481–506. New York: Academic Press. Ricketts, R. C. and T. C. Johnson. 1996.“Climate Change in the Turkana Basin as Deduced from a 4000 year Long d O Record.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 142:7–17. Runnels, Curtis. 1995. “Environmental Degradation in Ancient Greece.” Scientific American March. 96–99. Sahni, M. R. 1956. “Biogeological Evidence Bearing on the Decline of the Indus Valley Civilization.” Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India 1, 1:101–107. Schaeffer, C. F. A. 1948. Stratigraphie comparée ed chronologie de l’Asie occidentale (III et II millennaires). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheratt,Andrew. 1992.“What Would a Bronze Age World System Look Like? Relations between Temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in Later Prehistory.” Journal of European Archaeology 1, 2:1–57. Snodgrass, A. M. 1971. The Dark Age of Greece. Edinburgh: University Press. Stein, Burton. 1998. A History of India. London: Blackwell. Toynbee, A. J. 1939. A Study of History IV and V. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, Peter M. 1985. “Minoan Palaces.” Scientific American 253, 1:94–103. Watrous, L.Vance. 1994.“Review of Aegean Prehistory III: Crete from Earliest Prehistory Through the Protopalatial Period.” American Journal of Archaeology 98:695–753. Weiss, B. 1982.“The decline of Late Bronze Age Civilization as a Possible response to Climate Change”. Climate Change 4:173–198. ——. 2000. “Beyond the Younger Drayas” In G. Bawden and R. Reycraft (eds.), Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response, pp. 75–98. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Weiss, M. 1993.The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamia Civilization 261. 995–1004 Weiss, H. and R. Bradley. 2001.“Archaeology:What Drives Societal Collapse.” Science 291, 5504 January 26: 609–610. Wheeler, R. E. M. 1968. The Indus Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitley, James. 1991. Style and Society in Dark Age Greece: The Changing Face of a Pre-Literate Society 1100–700 B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson,T. J. 1990. Town and Country in Southeastern Anatolia Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yoffee, Norman. 1988 “The Collapse of Ancient Mesopotamian States and Civilization.” In N.Yoffee and G. Cowgill (eds.), The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, pp. 44–68.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Zanger, E. 1993. “Neolithic to Present Soil Erosion in Greece.” In M. Belland, and J. Boardman, Past and Present Soil Erosion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 133–147.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Power is in the Details: Administrative Technology and the Growth of Ancient Near Eastern Cores M i tc he l l A l le n

World-systems scholars have examined the expansion of the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) core for two decades now, since it represents the earliest documented case of strong core and peripheral differentiation. But many have pointed out that those differences were fragile, and ANE empires had limits as far as size and longevity. This situation changes drastically in the first millennium B.C., when the Assyrian empire expanded to a size unheard of in previous times and survived intact for almost two centuries. Even when it fell Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Macedonian empires of equal size replaced it.What caused this exponential leap in the strength of cores over peripheral areas? Using the example of the western semiperiphery of the Assyrian Empire—Phoenicia, Philistia, and Israel—I demonstrate that the Assyrians used new innovations in administrative technology to solidify the growth of their empire—standardized weight systems, a lingua franca, currency rationalization, and taxation mechanisms. Curiously, though, these advances were originally developed by the semiperipheral states that were independent of the Assyrian Empire were only later turned into tools of imperial stabilization. I discuss the Assyrians, specifically the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the tenth–seventh century B.C., the first large empire of the central world-system core. It was an empire that stretched from the mountains of Iran to the Nile River of Egypt—basically the boundaries of the contemporary Middle East, about three thousand kilometers as the crow flies—and significantly dwarfed in size any Near Eastern empire that had come before it. As I’ve shown in my previous work (Allen 1997), their world-system was much larger than the imperial borders, extending from beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to Afghanistan. It was a stable empire too.The Assyrian hegemony in the Ancient Near East lasted nearly two centuries, and it was succeeded by equally large empires—Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian, Macedonian,

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and Roman—that controlled territory of much the same size or larger for the subsequent millennium. This, of course, raises the question of “how did they do that?” What were the mechanisms that allowed this breakthrough, so that an empire could expand so much larger than any of its predecessors? Generally, the answer to that is accompanied by a yawn. Empires consist of long successions of dynastic squabbles, military conquests, pillaging of defiant enemies, scenes of tribute and gifts by vanquished foes, long defiles of dejected slaves trudging off into exile, and towering monuments to the victors. Assyrian palaces were polluted with this ideological stuff and our popular conception of Assyrians is limited to those kinds of images.Worse for world-systems theory, empires like that of the Assyrians are boring: surplus leads to hierarchical differentiation, which produces tribute within a unified political entity. Expansion extends beyond the ability to support the bureaucracy and splat, the entity collapses (Wallerstein 1976:347).Trying to breathe some life into the old empire, I propose an answer to the “how did they do that” question, one that that involves innovations in administrative technology, the kind that allowed a world-empire to act like a world-economy, and enabled this growth. An Invisible Export In 1973, Harriet Crawford noted the archaeological lack of Mesopotamian exports in the peripheral areas of Syria, Iran, and the Persian Gulf. She attributed this to the fact that Mesopotamia exported “invisible exports,” grain, fish, oils, leather goods, and, most important, textiles. As symbolic markers of status, the importance of textiles is now generally accepted. Mesopotamian textiles have been identified as key markers of elite status in peripheral areas of the Near East since the Early Dynastic third millennium and were a key trade item in the well-documented Old Assyrian trade in Anatolia (Larsen 1976).Their importance cross culturally has been demonstrated by scholars like Mary Helms (1992). But I discuss truly “invisible” exports, not simply ones that are invisible because of their absence in the archaeological record. Administrative technology—also called “technologies of social control” (Lamberg-Karlovsky 1996:93)—has that characteristic of invisibility. In organizing ever larger units, be they kinship groups, empires, trading systems, or multinational corporations, the technology for communication, information management, coercion, and control of physical assets becomes ever more important. We know these technologies began as early as the fifth millennium B.C., maybe even 3,000 years before that (SchmandtBesserat 1992). Finding better ways of controlling the movement, storage, and management of people, goods, armies, capital, and information has been one of the engines of growth of cores since hierarchy emerged in the earliest world-systems. Limitations in administrative technology constrain the size of empires, as happened in the first three millennia of the Central

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Core system. It took administrative innovation to break that constraint. I show that the Neo-Assyrian Empire went through three different phases of administrative technology to control the flow of people and goods through its system, each one of them a response to the increased size of the empire.The transformations of the Assyrian empire allowed it growth and stability and paved the way for future successor empires. Since most readers are not specialists in Ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology, let me start with a brief primer on the Neo-Assyrian empire. Assyria is the name of a geographical region currently in northern Iraq and western Iran. Centered near modern Mosul on the Tigris River, it began as a peripheral area of the southern Mesopotamian world system, incorporated by the fifth millennium B.C., and was peripheral to the Uruk worldsystem of the fourth millennium. (Algaze 1993a). Assyria had two brief periods of expansion of its own—an Old Assyrian empire of the nineteenth century B.C., just predating Hammurabi, and a modest and brief Middle Assyrian Empire in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., sharing the spotlight with the Hittites and New Kingdom Egyptians at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the time of the Trojan War. In neither case could their role be described as hegemonic, with their orbit of control mainly contained within the top of the Fertile Crescent. Neither would foreshadow the success of the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the ninth century through the late seventh century, whose exploits are well known from multiple cuneiform texts, classical and biblical sources, and extensive archaeological work in Iraq over the past 150 years. Located in a relatively narrow river valley, the Assyrian plain could not always feed the urban population it was trying to support, even in periods of intense agricultural activity (Oates 1968:49). So Assyria regularly relied upon its ability to obtain agricultural and other staple goods from neighboring areas in Northern Mesopotamia or from the Babylonian plain to the south.This clearly played into Assyrian expansionist tendencies. The administrative structure of the empire had four overlapping components—the palace, the provincial administration, the city/town administration, and the temple administration (Pecirkova 1977).While each had its own hierarchy and power base, all ultimate power flowed from the king, who could usurp the powers or roles of any functionary at any level of administration (Van Driel 1970:168). The four overlapping structures served to balance one another and prevent the usurpation of power by any one (Postgate 1973:xvi), thus providing stability to the political system. Using these structures, the Neo-Assyrians built an administrative and economic system that continually expanded the size and wealth of the core over several centuries. A small, hereditary aristocracy, headed by the king, populated these administrative domains and controlled most of the internal means of production. Resources were garnered internally through taxes, military call-ups, and labor conscriptions.The agricultural base continually grew with the addition of new lands settled by deportees from elsewhere in the empire, parceled out as favors by the king, who, in turn, was promised

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loyalty because of his magnanimity. This created a highly stratified society with a small, aristocratic elite of land owners, high government officials, and military officers, themselves tightly controlled by the king (Kinnier Wilson 1972:42), and a rapidly expanding internal periphery—both within Assyria proper and in the provinces—of village collectives, small land owners, serfs, herders, and crafts workers.1 The growing wealth of the landed aristocracy and aristocratic bureaucracy was fed by annual influx of booty and large tributes from the expanding ends of the empire, marked with elaborate public rituals celebrating the success of the empire.These too were parceled out by the king to the various aristocratic groups. It was their continued flow—and the ideological display to the Assyrian populace that accompanied it—that allowed the whole system to increase in wealth and reproduce itself, capping the potential for political unrest that lurked below the surface of an increasingly stratified society. With each transaction the temples, themselves burgeoning and wealthy bureaucracies, were further enriched. They replied by becoming the bankers to the empire, supporting military, agricultural, and trade ventures and legitimating the institutions of the state and the economy. Some of Assyria’s success can be attributed to military innovation.They were the first ancient empire to maintain a year-round standing army and had a well organized system of distribution and storage of food and materiel for soldiers and draft animals that extended throughout the empire (Saggs 1963). They solved communication problems through an equally effective precursor to the Pony Express, a chain of posts that allowed rapid communication between the capital and distant provinces (Kinnier Wilson 1972). They perfected the latest transportation technology—the horse— both for military purposes and for general transport (Crown 1974). But these technological fixes cannot be solely responsible for Assyria’s success. Philip Kohl, in his early seminal article that attempted to assess the applicability of the world-systems model to the premodern world, notes in reference to technological advantages of core states “critical technologies such as metal working and, later, horse breeding, were not controlled by core areas alone. Bronze Age technologies could not be monopolized but quickly diffused from one area to another or, in this sense, were transferable. Moreover, important technologies often initially developed or were further refined in peripheral areas close to the natural source of the necessary resources” (Kohl 1987:22). Because of these factors—technological development in the periphery and quick diffusion of technology throughout ancient systems—Kohl feels the technology gap necessary for long-term core stability didn’t exist. Chris Chase-Dunn’s theoretical work on semiperipheries (Chase-Dunn 1988) echoes Kohl’s idea even more broadly— semiperipheral areas, rather than cores, are generally the loci of social, organizational, and technological innovation in a world-system. I find that largely true about the Assyrian empire. So there must have been more that made Assyria so large and so stable.


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Three Phases of Assyrian Expansion The expansion from resource-poor city-state to world empire stretched over the course of four centuries can be divided into three phases. Agricultural Intensification The nomadic Aramean invasions of the eleventh and tenth centuries BC after the end of the Middle Assyrian Empire had a severe negative impact on the potential of the early Neo-Assyria core to procure necessary goods. With the exceptions of communities along the major waterways, most settlements in regions of Northern Mesopotamia were abandoned at this time (Postgate 1974b:237).Thus, the initial impetus for the aggressive expansion of the ninth century Neo-Assyrian state—Phase 1—may have been to counteract this paucity of agricultural resources available to the Assyrian core. Certainly, early Assyrian expansion toward the agricultural land of Habur River triangle to the west and to the eastern river valleys were moves to recapture some of these decimated lands in order to repopulate them and increase the agricultural supplies of the Assyrian urban elite. From the populations encountered by the first wave of Neo-Assyrian expansion came two general responses. Agrarian city-states, generally occupying lowland river valleys, tended to submit and pay tribute to the Assyrians. They were incorporated into the growing empire, had their economies and political systems reorganized into “pre-provincial” structures, and were forced to institute or reinstitute tribute, acts of submission, and corvee labor (Liverani 1992:117 ff.).The acceptance by the stronger, agrarian states of Assyrian suzerainty seems to be linked to previous incorporation into the Assyrian tribute economy of the Middle Assyrian and early NeoAssyrian kings, a reestablishment of previously existing core–periphery arrangement (Liverani 1992:117). It provided a ready source of bulk goods and tribute wealth for the Assyrian heartland. These are all mechanisms of incorporation and control long known in the Ancient Near East. The Discovery of Trade During the second phase, the political conquests were different and the mechanisms of control changed dramatically. Moving north and east into mountainous territory, the chiefdoms and tribal peoples with little hierarchical structure encountered in the next phase of ninth century expansion were much more difficult to incorporate.2 The Assyrians responded to these groups by defeating them militarily, and killing, deporting and plundering their population centers. Liverani (1992:134) estimates that about 20 percent of the captured populations were deported in the ninth century campaigns of Assurnasirpal. This had its political uses in breaking up existing political power nodes that could threaten the growth of the empire (Oded 1979), but it also served to

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increase the rural population of the Assyrian-controlled countryside in order to intensify core agricultural production. This helps explain why 85 percent of all deportees from conquered territories known from the texts were sent to the Assyria core (Oded 1979:28). Oded (1979:20) estimates there were as many as 4.5 million deportees from just the 157 cases known from existing texts. To the west, the Assyrians encountered a different set of polities, larger agrarian-based Neo-Hittite states linked into the fluid world-economy of the eastern Mediterranean. As the productivity levels of Assyria and the previously incorporated provinces increased,Assyrian policies changed. No longer were lands preserved for settlement and agricultural development. These needs were met by the core and nearer provinces where the labor costs of transport of bulk goods were considerably lower. Instead, most of the agricultural potential of conquered lands was destroyed through population resettlements, destruction of towns, roads, storage centers, and the disruption of existing social and economic relationships that allowed local exchange to take place.This ensured that products of these conquered lands would not be used for revolutionary activity. Remaining centers were reconfigured as Assyrian administrative centers to support centralized collection of agricultural goods for redistribution in the tributary system, to supply provisions for Assyrian military activities, and to provide control over the local population’s growth, wealth, and activity through control of the food supply.3 It is in this realm that we hear of most of the cases of Assyrian murder and pillage, cities destroyed and their populations carried away. Areas initially incorporated as vassals, were reconfigured as provinces during the reign of Tiglath Pileser III in the eighth century, streamlining the administration of large areas considerably (Pecirkova 1987:165). At the same time, the economic structure of the Assyrian core, based as it was on the accumulation of wealth through agricultural production and redistribution of booty and tribute, did not have the flexibility to allow trade to develop internally, creating a void. But Assyria had reached a point where they needed a trading economy. Their sheer size had reached the geographical limits of bulk goods redistribution and their elite demands for increasing items of status had blossomed. Contact with increasingly diverse foreign regions had created an interest in ivory, exotic animals, purple-dyed garments, and ornamented furniture. While booty from annual conquests and tribute from newly acquired provinces provided much of this, it was clear they needed to be able to reach outside the boundaries of their political empire for status goods.The solution was subcontracting. Merchants from these western provinces became the traders of the Assyrian empire. Of the texts mentioning tamkaru (traders) from Neo-Assyrian times, Moshe Elat (1991) determined that 22 of the 54 traders’ names mentioned in Assyrian documents are Aramaic, the language of these Syrian provinces. Given the pressure to adopt the culture (including naming practices) of the imperial core, the number of Aramaic traders on this list was probably over 50 percent. If trade was directed from the core, it would have


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had enormous impact on the trading practices both inside and outside the empire. Generally, one could assume that Assyrian currency standards, weights, writing systems, and terminology would be adopted and standardized throughout the empire. This did not happen. Instead, a variety of weight systems were used and several different currency systems. Possibly the most significant cultural institution brought by the westerners was their language and script.Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Assyrian empire as early as the reign of Tiglath Pileser III (Tadmor 1975:42). Many documents were written bilingually, and when not, often Aramaic graffiti was added to a traditionally inscribed cuneiform tablet (Naveh 1970:16).As early as the eighth century, Assyrian kings employed scribes who could write official documents in Akkadian, Aramaic, and Egyptian (Kinnier Wilson 1972:93). Aramaic script became standardized and conservatively unchanging through the century in which the court officially used it, as one would expect of a government-managed cultural form (Naveh 1970:1–2).Though we have limited data, it seems this script was used regularly in the West for commercial transactions and in trade relations throughout the empire. In Assyria itself, ironically, the use of stamp seals, an import from the west, rapidly overshadows the traditional use of cylinder seal of the previous three thousand years (Parker 1962). Stamp seals were in general use in western regions for sealing papyrus, leather, and other materials on which Aramaic could be written. Cylinder seals were typically rolled onto clay cuneiform texts.The late seventh century excavations at Fort Shalmaneser in Iraq produced double the number of stamp seals vis a vis cylinder seals, as opposed to two-third as many from excavations of eighth century Nimrud (Parker 1962:27). Some of the stamp seals showed distinct Western stylistic influence. Assyria adopted the Western administrative technology. Additional evidence of the Westernization of Assyrian trade comes from the economic standards used. In this pre-monetary time, weights were standardized to allow for long-distance trade. By the eighth century, there were two in common use—the mina of Nineveh (a core city of the Assyrian homeland) and the mina of Carchemish (Lipinski 1979:575–576). Carchemish, an Aramaic city on the Euphrates River, was one of the gateways for transshipment of materials from the North and West conquered by Assyria first in 854. Tadmor (1975:42–43) also makes a case for the adoption of the western concept of loyalty oath, or ade, by the Assyrian monarch as the concept that governed relations with the Assyrian king. Originally designed to bind vassal states to Assyria, it eventually became the means by which individual Assyrian subjects, both at the core and in conquered provinces, were bound to their king. Thus, when the Assyrians sought to reorganize their empire on a larger scale, they used not their own administrative devices, those of a land-locked, territorially based, agriculturally dependent world-empire, but the blueprint provided by the newly conquered western provinces, fluent in the language and practices of international trade, as their guide, an astounding leap for any empire.

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The final phase of Assyrian expansion, into the Levant and Egypt, led them into vastly different territory.The western phalange of the Fertile Crescent, along a pathway between the Mesopotamian core on the northeast and Egyptian core on the south and connected far to the west via the Mediterranean, had long garnered many of its resources—both bulk and elite—through the transfer of goods across long spaces of time and multiple political and economic units. The Late Bronze Age trading system, where goods regularly passed between Crete, Mycenae, the Hittites, Canaanites, and Egypt, is amply documented in written texts from the Bible to Homer, in tablets from Turkey and Egypt, from tons of imported goods found around the Eastern Mediterranean, and from several spectacular shipwreck finds. The local system that replaced the Bronze Age trading system I call the “Levantine world-system,” a multi-state, non-hegemonic system that carried on this long tradition of regional and extra-regional trade. This is the system of David and Solomon, Hiram of Tyre, and the South Arabian Queen of Sheba. The interaction between the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Levantine region was also impacted by radical changes occurring within the Assyrian core. The empire had, in fact, reached the limits of military expansion, as demonstrated by its multiple unsuccessful attempts to incorporate Egypt into the world-empire (Kitchen 1986) and an equally difficult relationship with Babylonia (Brinkman 1984). Military conquest became re-conquests of rebellious provinces, which returned them to the fold, but brought in no new tribute, booty, or conscript labor.This squeezing of resources brought to the surface the competition between Assyria’s traditional aristocratic elite and a new elite class of eunuch, which had developed an increasing role in managing the empire and challenged the traditional aristocracy in land ownership (Van Driel 1970:168; Fales 1984:216).Tax exemptions to many parties decimated the ability of the state to garner internal revenues (Postgate 1974a; Brinkman 1984). Assyria was in a seventh-century financial crisis. The Levantine states, and the trade they controlled, became extremely important for solving this crisis.The growth of the demands by the warring elite of the Assyrian core demanded ever larger and more exotic status goods, now obtainable from places like Central Africa, South Arabia, India, the Mediterranean, and North Atlantic, through the trading channels of the Phoenicians, Philistines, and Arab states. Items showing up on their tribute lists include exotic animals and woods, ivory, wine, honey, spices, fish, papyrus, and elephant hides (Elat 1978:30–32). Phoenician domestic industries also developed as a result of this trade. Thus Assyria imported large quantities of Phoenician carved ivories (Winter 1976), worked metal vessels (Falsone 1988), and multicolored textiles, which became the fashion of choice for Assyrian elites (Oppenheim 1967:246–247). More importantly, these western provinces were able to provide gold from Egypt and silver from the Rio Tinto mines in Spain to fuel an Assyrian economy ever more


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dependent on hard currency for its functioning. I describe this in more detail below. When the first military campaigns of Tiglath Pileser reached this region, they created problems of control that Assyria had not before faced. First, much of this region had long been part of the Egyptian world-system and therefore was not oriented toward incorporation into a northern-based empire. Second, distance created communication difficulties for incorporation and long-term control using traditional Assyrian practices. So the Assyrian solution here was very different. While traditional methods of conquest, deportation, taxation, and tribute, were tried, none produced stability in controlling important peripheries 1,500 miles away from Assyria. Instead, the Assyrians looked to other methods of control. Manipulating Elites Retained as vassal states, rather than reorganized as provinces, control was maintained through manipulating the elites of these vassals. While taxes, tribute, and corvee labor demands were generally modest by standards of the empire (Elat 1978, 1982), the Assyrians controlled the local elites through manipulation of royal succession and holding royal hostages.Tabua, possibly daughter of deposed queen Te’elhunu of the Arabs, was raised in Nineveh, then enthroned as queen of the Arabs by Essarhaddon (Eph’al 1982:122–123). Mitinti of Ashkelon became king in 677 after growing up in captivity in the Assyrian court (Tadmor 1966:98). Trade Manipulation Dependent on these trading states for elite goods, the Assyrians manipulated trade relations through a mechanism used to interface between their tributebased world-empire and the trade-based world-economy beyond it, the karum. This institution has been much discussed in the previous literature, being defined as the wharf or quay, the Assyrian imperial trading colony, administrative center, and the tax collecting station (Lewy 1956:37–51). In the Neo-Assyrian period, it may have served all of these functions. It is clear, though, that the karum was the key institution of Assyrian economic control within the vassal states. As early as the ninth century, the second phase of expansion, karu were established in areas beyond the political reach of the empire (Liverani 1992).These became central nodes to incorporate the local area when Assyrian conquest finally came. In the seventh century, the same policy was employed, since the karu mentioned in Assyrian texts were at the edge of the empire’s borders. Existing texts list at least eight of them in the Levant.4 Brown (1986) indicates that there were at least five karu in the central Zagros Mountains as well. Archaeologically, we have confirming evidence of the existence of these maritime karu through the location of double harbors, one controlled

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by the Assyrians, one by the local population, dating to the seventh century.5 Clearly, these sites were positioned strategically to control trade across the Mediterranean and to Egypt. While the karum controlled trade into and out of the geographic empire, large administrative centers controlled the flow of goods within the empire itself. In Syria-Palestine, archaeologists have identified over a dozen buildings whose large storage facilities and related artifacts suggest direct control of the Assyrians and concerned with transportation, trade, tribute, and taxes within the empire (Amiran and Dunayevsky 1958; Reich 1992:214–222). Rather than controlling all the elements of trade within the distant reaches of the empire and outside the empire, they were content to control critical nodes of transportation, storage facilities, and key ports of importation to keep control over the doings of the entrepreneurial westerners (Edens and Bawden 1989). The economic domination of the trade system at the fringes of the empire was reinforced by legal restrictions on trade by vassals.The Assyrians used this to limit the potential profits of the western traders in order to limit their capital accumulation in the interests of maintaining dependence. For example, in the letter ND 2715, dating from the time of Tiglath Pileser III, a local functionary reports to the king on the restrictions imposed on Tyrian traders, including the payment of mikse (customs duties) on wood and a prohibition against selling wood to Egyptians or Philistines (Saggs 1955:149–151; Elat 1991:25–26). Similarly, the treaty between Esarhaddon and Ba’al, King of Tyre (Parpola and Watanabe 1988) gives the Assyrian king the right to confiscate cargo from any coastal shipwreck, contrary to traditional Near Eastern practice (Elat 1991:28–29). It is reasonable to assume these were but a few of the many limitations on trade imposed by the Assyrians. Without them, the wealth accumulated by Phoenician, Philistine, and Arab traders would have threatened the stability of the core/ vassal relationship.This is typical of core/semiperipheral relations, according to Wallerstein (1979:23). While semiperipheral traders sometimes control long distance luxury trade, they are enjoined from the political rights, allowing the core polity to institute confiscatory measures whenever economic profits become so large that they could threaten the core. Bureaucratic Co-optation As important a strategy as the control of trade through force, economic and legal means, or seeking cooperation of local elites, was the strategy of incorporating vassal states into the bureaucratic structure of the empire. Bureaucratic incorporation created the conditions whereby control was normalized by aligning local institutions to imperial ones. Bureaucratic control of the West took two different forms—the exportation of Assyrian administrators to oversee and advise local rulers and contracting of local leaders to perform administrative functions generally reserved for the empire.


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In cases where western vassals retained their power locally, many were saddled with qepu’ officials from Assyria, who served as tribute collectors, but also to mold the local social and administrative structure to the imperial one (Liverani 1979). For example, according to the extant treaty, Tyre was not allowed to open communiques from Assyria without the qepu’ present, presumably to “interpret” royal orders (Parpola and Watanabe 1988). On several occasions, local rulers were subcontracted to replace imperial troops in activities the latter would have handled at the core of the empire, guarding the border and manning caravan routes, for example. The Arab sheikh Idibi’ilu, on the Philistine–Egyptian border, served as border guard for Sargon (Eph’al 1982:93).Another nearby sheikh, from the city of Laban, oversaw deportees settled near the City of the Brook of Egypt. Other texts mention Arab pastoralists as providing labor for the commercial and military route along the Jordanian/Syrian desert (Eph’al 1982:94–95). While some stress that these moves allowed Assyria to maintain a defensive stance against Egypt without expending precious military personnel thousands of miles from Assyria, more likely these steps were taken to perforate the border, not seal it. Since Arab guides and camels were regularly used to cross the Sinai desert to Egypt, how better to foster this trade than by incorporating these middlemen into the Assyrian administrative structure.6 This creative solution resolved several problems. It fostered trade, eliminated a potential threat to a distant border, and co-opted pastoral groups into the administrative structure of the empire.7 This co-optation strategy aided in incorporating peoples who had traditionally been external to the system. Control of Capital Though the evidence is scanty from the Neo-Assyrian period, documents from the Old Assyrian (Larsen 1976) and Neo-Babylonian (Oppenheim 1967) periods show that among the most effective methods of informal control is the control of capital for trade ventures (Allen 1992; Oppenheim 1967).Accumulation of capital was crucial to mounting long distance trade, by land or ship. With the capital surpluses of their trading ventures being converted to gold and silver to be paid in taxes or tribute to the Assyrian king,8 venture capital may have been difficult to obtain. Thus, control of capital accumulation and of credit may have enabled the Assyrians to maintain a hold on the western peripheral states, who seem to have used systems of public–private ventures to maintain their trade relations outside the political boundaries of the Assyrian empire. We know that the Sanctuary of Ishtar of Arbela, among other Assyrian temples, served as banking institutions for accumulating capital, ensuring the quality of the metals, loaning funds, and receiving debt payments and fines, becoming the “Banc de L’État” (Lipinski 1979:587). The temples of Haddad did the same for Syrian provinces in the seventh century (Lipinski 1979:582–586). They may have served as institutions controlling the flow

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of capital in the empire. The same mechanism could be one of resistance: Phoenicians, who controlled the silver trade to Spain, generated capital in their own periphery using the Temple of Melqart in Cadiz to perform key banking functions for the Phoenician Spanish colonies (Aubet 2002).While capital could be obtained in Tyre and other Phoenician cities for outgoing expeditions to the West, there had to be some means of regulating trade and exchange on return expeditions. The Spanish temple was presumably beyond the reach of Assyria, deliberately to avoid Assyrian supervision and intervention. One expects that any institution funding trade expeditions located in Phoenicia proper would have had strong Assyrian oversight— possibly one of the functions of the karu mentioned above.We would expect this same pattern in Southern Palestine for Philistine trade institutions. Controlling capital was a problematic issue for the Assyrians, since the capital itself—generally in the form of silver—was obtained from outside the empire by mercantile activity of semi-peripheral states, rather than under the direct control of the Assyrian core and its agents. In the early days of the empire, this was solved by Assyrian expansion to the northwest into Anatolia in the ninth and eighth centuries, bringing under its direct control sizeable source areas of copper, lead, tin (Curtis 1988), iron (Maxwell-Hyslop 1974), silver (Dalley 1988:100–101), gold, and other metals. But further expansion in the seventh century, coupled with the rise of the new Assyrian elites and the rationalization of the Assyrian bureaucratic state, led to an urgent need for increased imports of hard currencies, particularly silver and gold. It is in this century that silver becomes the general standard replacing copper (Postgate 1973:25), where iskaru (contracted craft service) payments are made in silver rather than in-kind, and where silver becomes increasingly the desired medium of tribute. It is, then, no coincidence that this time frame matches that of sharply increased importation of silver from Spain (Aubet 2002; Frankenstein 1979), gold and precious stones from the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea (Eph’al 1982:106), and gold from Egypt and Nubia via the Philistines. And the Phoenicians provided it. During the eighth and seventh centuries, the Phoenicians radically transformed the economy of Southern Spain through Gadir (Cadiz) and an extensive series of other colonies, extracting enough silver to leave 20 million tons of silver slag on the countryside (Frankenstein 1979). Copper, gold, lead, and other metals useful as currency were also exported (Aubet 2002). By-products of this extractive industry included environmental degradation, deforestation, and stratification within the local Iberian society.The Spanish hinterland was incorporated into the Phoenician extractive economy and was reorganized toward intensive mining and smelting of silver ore for export on Phoenician ships. As in the case of other trade goods, the Assyrians attempted to carefully manage the importation of currency-like metals by the semi-peripheral states through taxation, threats of force, tribute, and controlling the ends of the trade routes. But their need for currency was constant and constantly


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accelerating. I postulate that the demise of the Assyrian empire may be related to their inability to ensure the unimpeded flow of capital into and through the empire. The Western semiperipheral states—Phoenician cities, the Philistine Pentapolis and some Arab tribes—entering the Assyrian world-empire at the moment of the seventh century crisis are, they are preserved and encouraged to continue and expand their existing trade networks. Instead of being beaten down and decimated like the more economically-superfluous landbased states they adjoined, they become semiperipheral agents, valued by the Assyrians for their ability to solve the core problem of securing status goods and precious metals to use as hard currency.They take advantage of the Assyrian core’s inability to expand beyond its political and military bounds to secure their own political autonomy and economic wealth, two features that outlast Assyrian hegemony, while feeding the core with what it required for survival. Implications for World Systems Theory The Assyrians were masters of a world-empire, doing it better than anyone before them. But they reached the geographical limits of sustainable empire, where transportation costs exceed the ability of cores to exercise power (Stein 1999:58), soon after crossing the Euphrates River.This is where the true administrative innovation comes in.The Assyrians transformed themselves from a land-locked, agrarian-dependent marcher state, to a hegemonic power pulling in resources from the far reaches of the Ancient Near Eastern system and beyond. To do that, they enlisted the experts in long-distance operation, the traders of the early Iron Age Levant. Incorporation was a simple process at first.The Assyrians used their military might to defeat these polities and to establish their hegemony along the Mediterranean coast. But maintaining the empire at such a distance from the Assyrian core was clearly impossible without annual campaigns to put down rebellions. So the Assyrians used a variety of techniques to induce these states, already under military control, to become partners in this empire. They turned over the procurement of materiel from outside the empire to the experienced trading organizations of the Neo-Hittite states and followed their lead in adopting the language, sealing practices, and monetary standards of eastern Mediterranean international trade.There is no question of Assyrian hegemony here, these states—Carchemish, Arpad, Damascus, and others—were forced to contribute heavily through tribute and labor conscription and faced population deportations to the Assyrian core to ensure pacifism. But, rather than transforming these states into indistinguishable Assyrian provinces, they preserved them to become the traders for the empire. One more step to the west brought the Assyrians in contact with the true trading geniuses of the Mediterranean—the Phoenicians, Philistines,

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and Arabs. Here they were forced to go yet a step further.These city-states and chiefdoms were not incorporated into the Assyrian provincial structure at all, but allowed to maintain vassal status, conduct extensive trade outside the boundaries of the empire and were treated gingerly by the Assyrian core.The West was not impoverished, but enriched through its active trade beyond the system. The Assyrians encouraged this through the cooptative methods described above. Moreover, the Assyrians adopted these western products as elite status goods at the core of the empire—western dress, exotic animals, woods, and finished goods in metal and ivory. But this Assyrian magnanimity was not about elite status goods; it was about money. For the most important and far-reaching change instituted by the Assyrians in the seventh century was the move toward a monetized economy, their solution to the seventh century economic crisis. Rather than status goods or bulk goods, remote provinces and vassals were asked to provide cash—silver, gold, copper—to the Assyrian core. Within the core itself, certain payments, like the iskaru, were changed to become payments in silver, transforming the internal economy. Banking practices, such as the guarantee of the quality of silver or of weight by the crown or the temple, further paved the way to a monetized economy. Remember all this happened in the same century as the next great technological innovation, coinage, in Lydia at the western edge of the Assyrian empire. By the arrival of the next major hegemonic state a century later,Achaemenid Persia, coinage had become ubiquitous.And its way was paved by the transformation of the Assyrian economy in the seventh century. Where did all this money come from? Gold from Egypt and southern Arabia, and vast quantities of silver from the mines in Spain, were transported into the Assyrian system by the entrepreneurial Phoenician, Philistine, and Arab states, thus putting them in a privileged place in the Assyrian-dominated world-system. I call it a semiperiphery. Yet the Levantine semiperiphery clearly had mechanisms of control surrounding it.The Levantines could enrich themselves to a point, but taxation and tribute at key ports created a glass ceiling above them. Methods of exchange of goods, valuation, and recording were rationalized so that these goods fit into the Assyrian-controlled economic system. Assyrians manipulated the ruling elites of the Western states to ensure friendly monarchs on the thrones and coopted unfriendly tribes by incorporating them into the bureaucracy.While the threat of Assyrian force for noncompliance was always there, most mechanisms of control were indirect and subtle. It was a strange world empire that attached an entrepreneurial trading system to its frontier, and then adopted many frontier customs in the core. It breaks all our traditional images of what empires, those boring, frightening, and predictable structures, look like. And it raises questions about the dichotomy between a world-empire and world-economy, between the hegemony of the core vs. peripheral adaptation of core values, customs, and technologies.


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Notes 1. Even the lower echelons of the bureaucracy were likely impoverished (Jakobson 1969: 285). 2. The larger, regional states had more completely absorbed Mesopotamian administrative technologies and practices, making the incorporation process easier. 3. This is evident in the policies the Assyrians pursued in Samaria and Judah in the eighth century. The Israelite population is decimated and the Shephelan “breadbasket” of Judah loses 70 percent of its population (Finkelstein 1992). The urban centers which are preserved—Hazor (Reich 1975), Megiddo (Lamon and Shipton 1939), Gezer (Reich and Brandl 1985), e.g.—all feature strong Assyrian fortresses with large storage capabilities. 4. Sidon, Tyre, Mt. Lebanon (Saggs 1955:127) Arvad, Gaza (Na’aman 1979:83), Kar Essarhaddon (Tadmor 1966:98), City on the Brook of Egypt, and the “sealed harbor of Egypt” (Elat 1978:26). 5. In addition to Sidon,Tyre, and Arvad in Phoenicia, Assyrian-style double harbors have been identified archaeologically at Atlit,Akko,Tabbat-el-Hammam, and Amathos in Cyprus (Raban 1985).The excavation of numerous dual harbors dating to Neo-Assyrian times leads to the assumption that building a competing quay was standard Assyrian practice in vassal ports. 6. My own experience echoes this. Involved in an archaeological project on the border between Afghanistan and Iran, we were surprised to find that the local khans were given contracts by the Afghan government to serve as border guards and customs agents. This greatly facilitated illegal movement of people and goods across the border, fully controlled by these khans who ran it as a profitable business enterprise while ensuring the central government a quiet border. 7. Assyrians traditionally had difficulty incorporating pastoral peoples (Liverani 1992), who had little to gain from their contact with the Assyrians and were notably difficult to subdue on a permanent basis due to their fragmented political structure.This strategy shows that the Assyrians learned from previous mistakes. 8. Tyre’s tribute of 150 talents of gold to Tiglath-Pileser III was the largest ever recorded by the Assyrians (Elat 1991:24).

References Algaze, Guillermo. 1993. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. “Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantage.” Current Anthropology 42:199–234. Allen, Mitchell J. 1992. “The Mechanisms of Underdevelopment: An Ancient Mesopotamian Example.” Review 15:453–476. ——. 1997. “Contested Peripheries: Philistia in the Neo-Assyrian World System.” Dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Amiran, Ruth B. K. and I. Dunayevsky. 1958. “The Assyrian Open-Court Building and Its Palestinian Derivatives.” Bulletin of the AmericanSchools of Oriental Research 149:25–32. Aubet, Maria Eugenia. 2002. The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinkman, J. A. 1984. Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747–626 B.C. Occasional Publication of the Babylonian Fund 7. Philadelphia. Brown, Stuart C. 1986. “Media and Secondary State Formation in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros: An Anthropological Approach to an Assyriological Problem.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 389:107–119. Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1988. “Comparing World-Systems: Toward a Theory of Semiperipheral Development.” Comparative Civilizations Review 19:29–66. Crawford, H. E. W. 1973. “Mesopotamia’s Invisible Exports in the Third Millennium B.C.” World Archaeology 5:232–241. Crown, Alan D. 1974.“Tidings and Instructions: How News Travelled in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17:244–271. Curtis, John. 1988. Bronzeworking Centres of Western Asia, c. 1000–539 BC. London: Kegan Paul. Dalley, Stephanie. 1988. “Neo-Assyrian Textual Evidence for Bronzeworking Centres.” In John Curtis, Bronzeworking Centres or Western Asia, c.1000–539 BC, pp. 97–110. London: Kegan Paul.

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Edens, Christopher and Garth Bawden. 1989. “History of Tayma’ and Hejazi Trade during the First Millennium B.C”. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 32:48–103. Elat, Moshe. 1975a. “The Political Status of the Kingdom of Judah within the Assyrian Empire in the Seventh Century B.C.E.” In Yohanan Aharoni (ed.), Investigations at Lachish: The sanctuary and the residency (Lachish V), pp. 61–70.Tel Aviv: Gateway. ——. 1978.“The Economic Relations of the Neo-Assyrian Empire with Egypt.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 98:20–34. ——. 1982.“The Impact of Tribute and Booty on Countries and People within the Assyrian Empire.” Archiv für Orientforschung 19:244–251. ——. 1991.“Phoenician Overland Trade within the Mesopotamian Empires.” In Mordechai Cogan and Israel Eph’al (eds.), Ah Assyria . . . Studies in Assyrian history and Ancient Near Eastern historiography presented to Hayim Tadmor, Scripta Hierosolymitana serial 33. Eph’al, Israel. 1982. The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent, Ninth–Fifth Centuries B.C. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Fales, Frederick M. 1984. “The Neo-Assyrian Period.” In Alfonso Arch: Circulation of Goods in NonPalatial Context in the Ancient Near East, pp. 207–220. Rome: Edizioni Dell’ Steneo. Falsone, Gioacchino. 1988. “Phoenicia as a Bronzeworking Centre in the Iron Age.” In John Curtis (ed.), Bronzeworking Centres of Western Asia c. 1000–539 B.C., pp. 227–250. London: Kegan Paul, Finkelstein, Israel. 1992b. “The Archaeology of the Days of Manasseh.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature, San Francisco, November 1992. Frankenstein, Susan. 1979. “The Phoenicians in the Far West.” In M. T. Larsen (ed.), Power and propaganda: A symposium on ancient empires, pp. 263–294. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Helms, Mary. 1992. “Long-Distance Contacts, Elite Aspirations, and the Age of Discovery in Cosmological Context.” In Edward M. Schortman and Patricia A. Urban (eds.), Resources, power, and interregional interaction, pp. 157–174. New York: Plenum. Jakobson, V. A. 1969. “The Social Structure of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” In I. M. Diakonoff (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-economic history, pp. 277–295. Moscow: Nauka. Kinnier Wilson, J. V. 1972. The Nimrud Wine Lists. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Kitchen, Kenneth. 1986. The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1000–650 BC): Second Edition. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Kohl, Philip. 1987.“The Use and Abuse of World Systems Theory: The Case of the ‘Pristine’West Asian State.” In Michael B. Schiffer (ed.), Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 11, pp. 1–35. New York: Academic Press. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. 1996. “The Archaeological Evidence for International Commerce: Public and/or Private Enterprise in Mesopotamia.” In Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine (eds.), Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World, pp. 73–108. Lamon, Robert S. and Geoffrey M. Shipton. 1939. Megiddo I: Seasons of 1925–34, Strata I–V. Oriental Institute Publications XLII. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larsen, Mogens T. 1976. The Old Assyrian City-state and its Colonies. Mesopotamia 4. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ——. 1979. “The tradition of empire in Mesopotamia.” In M.T. Larsen (ed.), Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, Mesopotamia 7, pp. 75–103. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Lewy, Julius. 1956. “On Some Institutions of the Old Assyrian Empire.” Hebrew Union College Annual 27:1–79. Lipinski, E., 1979.“Les Temples neo-assyriaens et les origines du monnayage.” In Edward Lipinski, (ed.), State and Temple Economy in the Ancient near East II, OLA 6, pp. 565–588. Leuven: Departement Orientalistiek. Liverani, Mario. 1979. “The Ideology of the Assyrian Empire”. In M. T. Larsen (ed.), Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires. pp. 297–317. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ——. 1992. Studies on the Annals of Ashurnasirpal II 2: Topographical Analysis. Rome: University of Rome. Maxwell-Hyslop, K. R. 1974. “Assyrian Sources of Iron: A Preliminary Survey of the Historical and Geographical Evidence.” Iraq 36:139–154. Na’aman, N. 1979. “The Brook of Egypt and Assyrian Policy on the Border of Egypt.” TA 6:68–90. Naveh, Joseph. 1970. The Development of the Aramaic Script. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences.


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Oates, David. 1968. Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq. London: Oxford University Press. Oded, Busteny. 1979. Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Asyrian Empire.Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Oppenheim, A. L. 1967. “Essay on Overland Trade in the First Millenium BC.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 21:236–254. Parker, Barbara. 1962. “Seals and Seal Impressions from the Nimrud Excavations, 1955–1958”. Iraq XXIV:26–40. Parpola, Simo and Kazuko Watanabe. 1988. Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths. State Archives of Assyria II. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Pecirkova, J. 1977. “The Administrative Organization of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Archiv Orientalni 45:211–228. ——. 1987. “The Administrative Methods of Assyrian Imperialism.” Archiv Orientalni 55:162–175. Postgate, J. N. 1973. The Governor’s Palace Archive. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq. ——. 1974a. Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire. Studia Pohl: Series Maior 3. Rome: Biblical Institute Press. ——. 1974b. “Some Remarks on Conditions in the Assyrian Countryside.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. XVII:225–243. ——. 1979. “The Economic Structure of the Assyrian Empire.” In M.T. Larsen (ed.), Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, pp. 193–221. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Raban, Avner. 1985. “The Ancient Harbours of Israel in Biblical Times: From the Neolithic Period to the End of the Iron Age.” In Avner Raban (ed.), Harbour Archaeology, pp. 11–44. BAR International Series 257. Reich, Ronny. 1975.“The Persian Building at Ayyelet ha-Shahar: The Assyrian Palace of Hazor?” Israel Exploration Journal 25:233–237. ——. 1992. “Palaces and Residences in the Iron Age.” In Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich (eds.), The Architecture of Ancient Israel: from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, pp. 202–222. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. —— and Baruch Brandl.1985. “Gezer under Assyrian Rule.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly: 41–54. Saggs, H.W. F. 1955. “The Nimrud Letters, 1952.” Iraq 17:21–56, 126–160. ——. 1963. “Assyrian Warfare in the Sargonid Period.” Iraq 25:145–154. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1992. Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stein, Gil J. 1999. Rethinking World-Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Tadmor, Hayim. 1966. “Philistia under Assyrian Rule.” Biblical Archaeologist 29:86–102. ——. 1975.“Assyria and the West:The ninth century and Its aftermath.” In Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (eds.), Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature, and Religion of the Ancient Near East, pp. 36–48. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Van Driel, G. 1970.“Land and People in Assyria: Some Remarks.” Bibliotheca Orientalis XXVII:168–175. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. “A World-System Perspective on the Social Sciences”. British Journal of Sociology 27:343–352. ——. 1979a. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, Irene J. 1976. “Phoenician and North Syrian ivory carving in historical context: Questions of style and distribution.” Iraq XXXVIII:1–22.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Power and Size: Urbanization and Empire Formation in World-Systems Since the Bronze Age Christophe r Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Danie l Pasciuti

World-systems are intersocietal interaction networks in which culturally different peoples are strongly linked together by trade, political–military engagement and information flows. This chapter presents an overview of research on city and empire growth/decline phases and new evidence on the relationship between urban growth and the rise and fall of empires in six regions that once contained substantially separate world-systems.1 We find that empires and cities grow and decline together in some regions, but not others, and we examine the temporal correlations between growth/ decline phases of largest and second largest cities and empires within regions. Do large empires grow at the expense of other large states within a region or are there periods of regional growth in which states (and cities) are growing together? Earlier research has demonstrated the utility of studying settlement systems and networks of interacting polities as windows on the historical development of social complexity and hierarchy (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). By knowing the population sizes of settlements and the approximate territorial sizes of states and empires we can compare rather different time periods and regions in order to discover both regularities and uniquenesses. This chapter summarizes the results of earlier studies using city and empire sizes and presents new results on the relationships between changes in urban populations, city-size distributions and the territorial sizes of states and empires.Archaeologists often assume that the concentration of political power can be inferred from the rise of a size hierarchy of settlements— increases in the steepness of the settlement size distribution (e.g. Kowalewski 1982). Existing data can be used to test this hypothesis, though more certain results await the improved accuracy and greater temporal resolution of estimates of city and empire sizes.2

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Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) examined urban growth and city-size distributions3 in nine different regional political/military networks (PMNs)4 using data on city sizes from Tertius Chandler’s (1987) compendium. Political/military networks (PMNs) are interstate systems— systems of adjacent conflicting and allying states. David Wilkinson (1987) bounds these expanding and contracting systems of states as they merge or become incorporated into what Wilkinson calls the “Central Civilization.” Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) plotted changes in the Standardized Primacy Indices (a measure of the steepness of the city-size distribution) over time, and read descriptions of what was happening in nine different PMNs to examine the hypothesis that changes in the city-size distribution are related to changes in the centralization of state power in regional state systems.They also accidentally discovered a synchrony of changes in city-size distributions and phases of urban growth/decline in the East Asian and the West Asian-Mediterranean PMNs over a long period from 650 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E.5 This latter discovery led to further research using data on the territorial sizes of empires gathered by Rein Taagepera (1978a, 1978b, 1979, 1997). That analysis (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000) found additional evidence for synchrony between the East Asian and the West Asian-Mediterranean PMNs over this same 2150-year period, and confirmed what had also been indicated by scant city size data from India, that the Indic PMN was marching to a different drummer. These synchrony results were further confirmed by additional analysis of the city data by Chase-Dunn and Manning (1998). That study examined inter-regional synchrony by comparing constant regions rather than PMNs. PMN boundaries change over time because of the expansion of the Central PMN, whereas specified regions that are held constant over time constitute a different, but related, unit of analysis. Chase-Dunn and Manning found support for the East/West synchrony phenomenon using constant regions, and so this result is not likely to be an artifact of the way in which units of analysis have been constructed.

Power, Urban Growth, and Urban Size Hierarchies This chapter returns to the question asked in the Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) study about the relationship between urban growth, city-size distributions and the rise and fall of empires. What is the relationship between the size of settlements and power in intergroup relations? Under what circumstances does a society with greater population density have power over adjacent societies with lower population density, and when might this relationship not hold? Population density is often assumed to be a sensible proxy for relative societal power. Indeed, Chase-Dunn and Hall employ high relative population density as a major indicator of core status within a world-system (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). But Chase-Dunn and Hall are careful to distinguish between “core/periphery differentiation” and

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“core/periphery hierarchy.” Only the latter constitutes actively employed intersocietal domination or exploitation, and Chase-Dunn and Hall warn against inferring power directly from differences in population density. In many world-systems military superiority is the key dimension of intersocietal relations. Military superiority is generally a function of population density and the proximity of a large and coordinated group of combatants to contested regions. The winner of a confrontation is that group that can bring the larger number of combatants together quickly. This general demographic basis of military power is modified to some extent by military technology, including transportation technologies. Factors such as better weapons, better training in the arts of war, faster horses, better boats, greater solidarity among soldiers and their leaders, as well as advantageous terrain, can alter the simple correlation between population size and power. Ironically, George Modelski’s (2003) important study of the growth of world cities completely ignores the phenomenon of state and empires sizes, though Modelski is himself an astute scholar of international relations and geopolitical power. Modelski contends that cities are the most important driving force of world-system evolution and that we may conveniently ignore states and empires.We think that the relationship between political power and settlement systems may have changed over the millennia, so that the explicit analysis of the relationships between size and power needs to be directly examined. The most important general exception (in comparative evolutionary perspective) to the size/power relationship is the phenomenon of semiperipheral development (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997:chapter 4).The pattern of uneven development by which formerly more complex societies lose their place to “less developed” societies takes several forms depending on the institutional terrain on which intersocietal competition is occurring. Less relatively dense semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms conquer older core chiefdoms to create larger chiefly polities (Kirch 1984). Likewise, semiperipheral marcher states, usually recently settled peripheral peoples on the edge of an old region of core states, frequently are the agents of a new corewide empire based on conquest (Mann 1986; Turchin 2003).6 Another exception is the phenomenon of semiperipheral capitalist city-states— states in the interstices between tributary empires that specialized in longdistance trade and commodity production. Though these were rarely the largest cities within the world-systems dominated by tributary empires, they played a transformational role in the expansion of production for exchange and commodification in the ancient and classical systems. And less dense semiperipheral Europe was the locus of a virile form of capitalism that condensed in a region that was home to a large number of unusually proximate semiperipheral capitalist city-states. This development, and the military technology that emerged in the competitive and capitalist European interstate system, made it possible for less dense Europe to erect a global hegemony over the more densely populated older core regions of Afro Eurasia (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The more recent hegemonic

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ascent of formerly semiperipheral national states such as England and the United States are further examples of the phenomenon of semiperipheral development. The phenomenon of semiperipheral development does not totally undermine the proposition that societal power and demographic size are likely to be correlated.What it implies is that this correlation can be overcome by other factors, and that these processes are not entirely random. Denser core societies are regularly overcome or out-competed by less dense semiperipheral societies, but it does not follow that all semiperipheral or peripheral regions have such an advantage. On the contrary, in most worldsystems most low-density societies are subjected to the power of more dense societies. Semiperipheral development is a rather important exception to this general rule. Why should a city system have a steeper size distribution when there is a greater concentration of power? The simple answer is that large settlements, and especially large cities, require greater concentrations of resources to support their large populations. This is why population size has itself been suggested as an indicator of power (Taagepera 1978a:111). But these resources may be obtainable locally and the settlement size hierarchy may simply correspond to the distribution of ecologically determined resources. People cluster near oases in a desert environment. In such a case it is not the political or economic power of the central settlement over surrounding areas that produces a centralized settlement system, but rather the geo-graphical distribution of necessary or desirable resources. In many systems, however, we have reason to believe that relations of power, domination, and exploitation do affect the distribution of human populations in space. Many large cities are as large as they are because they are able to draw upon far-flung regions for food and raw materials. If a city is able to use political/military power or economic power to acquire resources from surrounding cities it will be able to support a larger population than the dominated cities can, and this will produce a hierarchical city-size distribution. Of course the effect can also go the other way. Some cities can dominate others because they have larger populations, as discussed above. Great population size makes possible the assembly of large armies or navies, and this may be an important factor creating or reinforcing steep city-size distributions. The relationship between power and settlement systems is contingent on technology as well as political and economic institutions. Thus we expect to find that the relationship between urban growth and decline sequences and the growth/decline sequences of empires varies across different systems or in the same regional system over time as new institutional developments emerge.We know that the development of new techniques of power, as well as the integration of larger and larger regions into systems of interacting production and trade, facilitate the emergence of larger and larger polities as well as larger and larger cities.Thus, there is a secular trend at the

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global level and within regions between city sizes and polity sizes over the past six millennia. But the question we are asking here is about finer temporal and spatial relationships. Do cities and empires rise and fall together? Are there important exceptions to this pattern? What are the causalities involved? We may also ask whether or not the causal relations are stable over time within regions? We expect that there may be periodic changes in the relationship between power and size as new institutions develop. The rise of capitalism as an alternative source of power to military might and changes in the relationship between military power and demographic factors most likely change the nature of the connections between size and power.We know that empires ceased to increase in territorial size with the demise of the modern colonial empires. And the contemporary world city system may be unique in the extent to which some of the largest cities are located in the semiperiphery rather than in the core. The exponential growth of cities after 1800 C.E. makes it more difficult to study growth/decline phases because the largest cities no longer decline in size. We further examine the relationship between power, urban growth, and settlement size hierarchies by comparing trends in the growth/decline sequences of city populations and the territorial sizes of empires.The main unit of analysis in this study is Constant Regions7 rather than political/ military networks (interstate systems).We also consider studying individual polities (states and empires), because the simplest form of the hypothesis of a causal relationship between power and urbanization is that larger states can afford to create larger cities. But available data are not sufficient for studying the power/size relationship within individual polities except for relatively recent states.And we examine the temporal relations between the sizes of the largest cities and empires in each region as well as size distributions of cities and empires and the relations between the largest and the second largest cities and empires when data are available. Measurement of the population sizes of cities and the territorial sizes of empires is not without difficulties, especially for early periods. How can we know the number of people who reside in Los Angeles today? We use the most recent census, a survey of “residents” conducted by the U.S. federal government. What are the spatial boundaries of “Los Angeles”? Do we mean the city of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, the contiguous built-up area that constitutes “greater Los Angeles,” or a definition based on the proportion of the local population that is employed in “Los Angeles”? Does “Los Angeles” include San Diego? Nighttime satellite photos of city lights reveal a single unbroken megalopolis from Santa Barbara to Tijuana (see figure 5.1). So where is Los Angeles? We want to use the contiguous built-up area as our main way of spatially defining cities. For early cities we do not have official, and ostensibly complete, census figures. Thus we rely on methods that archaeologists and students of early urbanization have developed to estimate the population sizes of cities.

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Power and Size

Santa Barbara

Tijuana

Mexicali

Figure 5.1 Southern California/Northwestern Mexico Conurbation (city lights from satellite photographs)

These involve, for example, determining the spatial size of the city and then estimating the population density per unit of area and so estimating the total population (city size ⫻ density ⫽ city population). Population density varies depending upon the size of families, the nature of dwellings, the amount of nonresidential area within settlements, and cultural differences.Anthropologists and archaeologists have made an important effort to produce reliable methods for estimating population sizes from residential areas (Brown 1987), and the famous historical demographer Paul Bairoch (1988:21–24) has examined the problem of urban population densities in comparative perspective. Tertius Chandler (1987) used reports about the number of soldiers to estimate city sizes, assuming that an army represents, on the average, about ten percent of the population of the city in which the army resides. Such estimates are obviously error-prone.Another problem with existing data on both city and empire sizes is that they were produced from surveys of both secondary and primary sources that are now, in many cases, obsolete because more recent and better research has been published by archaeologists, epigraphers and historians. Chandler’s compendium was mainly based on his thorough survey of the contents of the main library at the University of California, Berkeley over the four decades prior to its publication in 1987. We also use the new estimates of city population sizes produced by George Modelski’s (2003) important study.A new project to improve upon existing compendia of city sizes is under way at the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside (Pasciuti 2003). Estimating the territorial sizes of empires is also problematic. Taagepera used atlases and maps to produce his estimates of the spatial sizes of empires from 3000 B.C.E. to the present. But the boundaries of empires are not usually formally specified, but are rather a matter of degrees of control that fall off with distance from the central region. Archaeological evidence of the presence of a core culture in a peripheral region does not prove the

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existence of control, because many core polities have established colonial enclaves in distant peripheries to facilitate trade (e.g. Stein 1999). So the estimation of empire sizes is also fraught with difficulties. But, as with city sizes, a significant improvement of accuracy, temporal resolution and coverage would result from a renewed effort to code empire sizes using recently published materials. This is another task that the IROWS CityEmpire Research Working Group will undertake.8 Dating is also a major problem in studying temporal relationships in the ancient world-systems. In this paper we utilize the years originally supplied by Taagepera and Chandler. But the dating of events and city size estimations for the first millennia B.C.E. is a matter of continuing dispute among scholars of ancient history. For ancient Western Asia the Egyptian dynastic dates are used, but these have been repeatedly revised with an error margin of around 25 years.This is a threat to any study of temporal correlations. Mesopotamia The first PMN we shall examine is that of Mesopotamia from 2800 to 550 B.C.E. It is mistaken to speak of a single West Asian/North African world-system for this whole period. Rather two core areas—Egypt and Mesopotamia—were undergoing developmental processes that were only weakly linked, especially at first. As both of these systems expanded their trade networks and political/military interaction networks they came into contact with one another.The prestige goods nets (PGNs) became linked as early as 3000 B.C.E. (Marfoe 1987) or as late as 2250 B.C.E. (Wilkinson 1992), while the Mesopotamian and Egyptian political/military networks became linked by the Egyptian expedition to Syria (about 1520 B.C.E.).We examine the relationships between the population size of the largest city and the territorial size of the largest state or empire in a region as these change over time. The hypothesis of a correspondence between urbanization and the size of polities should reveal a positive correlation in these two measures over time. The data on city population sizes are especially sparse for early millennia and the time points of estimates are widely spaced, making temporal correlation risky. For Mesopotamia our data set is shown in table 5.1. Table 5.1 immediately demonstrates problems of missing data, especially for the third millennium.The time points for city sizes are far apart, and there are obviously missing cases. We have Modelski’s (1997) best estimate of the population size of Uruk in 2800 and 2500 B.C.E, but the largest empire shown in Taagepera’s data is that of Kish, a city-state that was independent of the much larger empire of Uruk in this period.This obvious error strongly demonstrates the need for upgrading the data sets we are using. In the data presented in Table 5.1 and in the figures and tables below we have interpolated Taagepera’s dates of changes in the sizes of empires to regular time intervals (every 50 years in table 5.1 and figures 5.3 and 5.4; every ten years for the other regions in table 5.2 and the figures in Appendix A; see ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/apppowsize. htm⬎).

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Power and Size Table 5.1 Mesopotamian largest empires and cities Year (B.C.E.)

Empire size (MM2)

Empire name

City name

⫺2800 ⫺2500 ⫺2400 ⫺2300 ⫺2200 ⫺2100 ⫺2000 ⫺1900 ⫺1800

1 3 5 65 25 3 10 0 10

⫺1700 ⫺1600 ⫺1500 ⫺1450 ⫺1400 ⫺1360

25 16.6 10 10 10 21.7

Old Assyria Babylon Babylon Kassite Kassite Kassite Hittites

⫺1350

5

Assyria

⫺1300 ⫺1250 ⫺1200

10 15 25

Assyria Assyria Hittites

⫺1150 ⫺1100 ⫺1050 ⫺1000 ⫺950 ⫺900 ⫺850 ⫺800 ⫺750 ⫺700 ⫺650 ⫺600 ⫺550

5 40 15 15 15 15 40 57.9 40 90 93.3 25 50

Assyria Assyria Babylon Babylon Babylon Babylon Assyria Assyria Assyria Assyria Assyria Babylon Babylon

City pop (thousands)

Kish Kish Lagash Akkadian Akkadian Ur Sumer

Uruka Uruka

80 50

Agadea,b

36

Ur

65

Mari

29

Babylon

60

Khattushash (Hattusa) Khattushash (Hattusa)

45 45

Khattushash (Hattusa)

48

Babylon

51

Calah

50

Nineveh

120

Notes a Estimates marked with an asterisk are from Modelski (2003).All other estimates are based on Chandler and Taagepera. b Archaeologists have not yet decided which of the thousands of tells in Iraq is Agade, the capital of Sargon’s Akkadian empire.

Another complication revealed in table 5.1 is as follows: in 1350 and 1200 B.C.E. the largest city is Khattushash (Hattusa), the capital of the Hittite empire, but the largest empire in the Mesopotamian region is the Neo-Assyrian Empire.This raises the issue of the proper unit of analysis— regions or polities—but it also raises a theoretical issue. The simplest version of the size-power hypothesis is that larger empires can afford larger

100 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti Pearson’s correlation coefficient = 0.450

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

0 80 00 0 –2 –25 230 000 00 0 – –2 –18 160 360 50 0 0 – –1 –13 20 00 00 –1 50 –1 –8 –6 Year (B.C.E.)

City size (thousands) Empire size (square megameters × 10)

Figure 5.2 Largest Mesopotamian cities and empires

cities, and to test this hypothesis we would need temporally fine-grained data on the size of the largest city within each empire. For this purpose the unit of analysis should be the polity (states and empires). But it may also be the case that regions or PMNs experience cyclical periods of growth and decline in which all the states and cities are growing, or alternatively that state and city growth is a zero-sum game in which growth in some results or is related to decline in others. By using and comparing different spatial units of analysis we can examine these competing hypotheses. The temporal relationship between the size of the largest city and the size of the largest empire is positive for the Mesopotamian case with a positive Pearson’s r correlation coefficient of 0.45 based on twelve time points for which we have data for both variables (see figure 5.2). This supports the hypothesis of a causal relationship between these features of the social landscape, but the positive association could also be due to other factors or to the secular trending of these characteristics.We return to these issues when we have more and better data in the cases to be discussed below. Egypt As with Mesopotamia the data for Egypt are few and problematic. But using what we have produces the results displayed in figure 5.3. The temporal relationship between city and empire sizes in Egypt is also positive, producing a Pearson’s r correlation coefficient of 0.06 based on eight time points for which we have data for both variables.Though there is a secular upward trend, both city and empire sizes also reveal decline phases and these are roughly synchronous with one another, though the few estimates of city sizes makes a firm conclusion risky.

Power and Size 100

101 Pearson’s correlation coefficient = 0.064

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 –2000 –1800 –1600 –1360 –1200 –1000 Year (B.C.E.)

City size (thousands) –800

–650

Empire size (square megameters × 10)

Figure 5.3 Largest Egyptian cities and empires

Size and Power in Regions Table 5.2 presents the bivariate Pearson’s r correlation coefficients between empire and city sizes for all of the regions for which we have sufficient data. It also presents the partial correlations controlling for year to remove the long-term upward trend between city and empire sizes.The Americas and Africa do not have enough city size data, though this deficiency could and should be remedied by a new coding project. Table 5.2 shows that five of the six regions have statistically significant positive bivariate correlations between city and empire sizes. This lends support to the contentions discussed above of a causal interaction between power and size, but these correlations do not shed light on the question of the direction of the causal effects. Once we have improved data we plan to employ the test of antecedence to shed light on this. We should also note the two of our regional “cases” overlap with one another, Mesopotamia and West Asia. One problem with the bivariate results in table 5.2 is that they may be due to the secular trends in which both cities and empires increase in size over the long run rather than to medium-term oscillations.9 We are most interested in the medium term relations between cities and empires here. There are two ways to remove the effects of the secular upward trend. The first is to compute partial correlations controlling for time. These results are presented in table 5.2.Another method of detrending is to compute first differences—the change scores from one period to the next. The irregular (and infrequent) time points of the early city size estimates make change score detrending complicated because the changes must be weighted by the amount of time that elapses between estimate intervals.We have examined the regional correlations among change scores for empire and city growth and found mixed results that only partly confirm our

102 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti Table 5.2 Regional correlations between city and empire sizes Region Egypt Mesopotamia West Asia South Asia East Asia Europe

Bivariate r

Partial r

Biv. N

Years

0.373 0.699** 0.542** 0.593* 0.610** 0.510**

0.152 0.492* 0.207^ 0.578* ⫺0.191 0.7324**

8 18 44 13 33 29

2800 B.C.E.–1500 B.C.E. 2800 B.C.E.–650 B.C.E. 2800 B.C.E.–1500 C.E. 1800 B.C.E.–1500 C.E. 1360 B.C.E.–1800 C.E. 430 B.C.E.–1800 C.E.

^ Pearson’s r significant at the 0.10 level. * Pearson’s r significant at the 0.05 level. ** Pearson’s r significant at the 0.01 level.

analysis using the partial correlation method of detrending. We think this discrepancy may be due to small variations in time lags that lower the correlations among change scores. Examination of the graphs presented in this paper shows that, while cities and empires tend to grow and decline in the same overall periods, sometimes it is cities that lead and sometimes empires. These changes reduce the correlations between simultaneous change scores, but the general middle-run positive relationships are revealed in the partial correlations. More research is needed to sort this out, but we contend that it makes sense to wait until we have better estimates rather than flogging the existing poor data. The detrended partial correlations in table 5.2 show that there are important differences among regions in the relationships between city and empire sizes. The biggest difference between the bivariate and detrended partial correlations are in the East Asian and West Asian regions.The rather substantial and statistically significant East Asian bivariate correlation of 0.61 drops to ⫺0.19 when the long-term trend is taken out by means of controlling for year. The West Asian correlation drops from 0.54 to 0.21. Another difference is that the relationship in Mesopotamia is reduced from 0.69 to 0.49.The South Asian correlation also decreased, but it was already low and insignificant. So only Europe, West Asia, and Mesopotamia show a rather substantial positive relationship between size and power once the long-term trend is controlled. South Asia, East Asia and Egypt do not have medium term temporal correlations between city sizes and empire sizes. So we find important differences across regions. It is likely that the relationship between urbanization and political power varies over time (more below), and because of geographical, climatic, and other differences across regions. The high correlation between the medium-run size of the largest empire and the size of the largest city in Europe would seem to fly in the face of the usual notions about how Europe differs from the other regions. It is usually thought that the rise of capitalism in Europe led to the emergence

103

Power and Size

of large cities based on economic power and trade centrality rather than the building of imperial capitals based on the ability to extract tribute. This might produce a lower rather than a higher temporal correlation between empires and city sizes in Europe. Looking at exactly which empires and which cities were the largest enables us to know whether or not the largest cities were the capitals of the largest empires, or alternatively whether there might be regional growth–decline phases in which both cities and empires expand and contract together despite not being directly linked. Figures 5.4–5.8 help us to sort this out. Table 5.1 earlier is also helpful for discerning what is going on in the Mesopotamian region. Figure 5.4 starts in 2800 B.C.E. The largest city in 1800 B.C.E. was Mari of the Amorite state, while Taagepera tells us that the Old Assyrian state was the largest in the region at this time. Its capital, Ashur, was not the largest city.The Babylonian empire conquered Mari in 1700 B.C.E. and the city of Babylon was then the largest in the region.The Hittite Empire was large in 1360 B.C. and so was its capital, Khattushash (Hattusa). But the Neo-Assyrian Empire grew larger than the Hittite after 1350, while Hattusa remained the largest city, until the Hittite state again became largest in 1200.Then the Babylonia Empire and Babylon surpass all from 1050 to 900. Calah (Nimrud) was Ashurnasirpal II’s capital of the Assyrian Empire before the building of Nineveh, so the match between city and empire is again direct from 850 to 650. Examination of figure 5.5 shows that indeed there is usually a direct connection between the largest city and the largest empire in West Asia, but there are a few exceptions in addition to those already pointed out in 300.0 Media

Nineveh

200.0

Sumer

Babylon

Assyria

Mitanni

Assyria

Sumer

Babylon Akadia

Calah

50.0

Babylon

100.0

Main Assyria

Babylon

Khattushash

Hittites 150.0

Ur

Square megameters × 100 Population × 100

250.0

–2800 –2730 –2660 –2590 –2520 –2450 –2380 –2310 –2240 –2170 –2010 –1940 –1870 –1800 –1730 –1660 –1590 –1520 –1450 –1380 –1310 –1240 –1170 –1100 –1030 –960 –890 –820 –750 –680 –610

0.0

Biv. Corr.: 0.784* Partial Corr.: 0.763*

Largest empire

Largest city * sig. at 0.05 level

Figure 5.4 Largest cities and empires in Mesopotamia

104 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti 1,000

5.00

Baghdad 900

4.50

Ecbatana Seleucia

Constantinople

Babylon

500 400

Population × 1,000

Antioch

600 AyyubidsMamluks

300 Tabriz

Sarai

Hittites Assyria

Assyria

Sumer

Hittites Babylon MItanni Babylon

Nineveh

0.50

Uurk

1.00

Lagash

1.50 Sumer

Ur Akrotiri

2.00

Akkadia

2.50

Fatimids

Ctesiphon Baghdad

Parthia

700

Almoravids

Sâsânians

Constantinople Merv

Media

3.00

Mari Girsu

Square megameters

3.50

800

Umayyads

Persia

Samanids

Seleucids

Achæmenid

4.00

200 100 0

–2800 –2500 –2400 –2300 –2200 –2000 –1900 –1800 –1700 –1600 –1500 –1400 –1300 –1200 –1100 –1000 –800 –700 –650 –600 –500 –430 –400 –300 –200 –100 0 100 200 300 360 400 500 600 620 700 800 900 1000 1150 1200 1300 1350 1400 1450 1500

0.00

Empire 1

Bivar. = 0.542** Partial = 0.207^

City 1

Figure 5.5 West Asian largest cities and empires

16

1,400 Muscovy-

14

USSR

12

London

Kiev

0

Spain Ottoman

Rome

2

Granada

Córdoba

Palermo

Franks

4

Visigoths

Rome 6

Portugal

800 8

Lithuania– Poland

600

Population × 1,000

1,000 Paris

10

Athens

Square megameters

1,200

Russia-

400

200

–430 –400 –300 –200 –100 0 100 200 300 360 400 500 800 900 1000 1100 1150 1200 1250 1300 1350 1400 1450 1500 1550 1580 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800

0

Bivar. = 0.510** Partial = 0.732**

Empire 1

City 1

Figure 5.6 Largest cities and empires in Europe

Mesopotamia. The Achaemenid Persian Empire did not create a new city larger than those it conquered, and so Babylon remained the largest city during the Persian expansion.The Alexandrian conquest led to the founding of Seleucia, which was then the largest city. The Sassanian Empire built

105 Hangzhou Nanking

Power and Size 1,400

Kaifeng

Beijing

City 1

1300

1800

Hangchow Osaka Beijing Yedo

Hangzhou Kyoto 1100

Kyoto 900

700

600

400

300

100

–100

–300

–1360

Bivar. = 0.888** Partial = 0.629**

Angkor

Loyang Changan

Loyang

Sian

0

–430

200

–600

400

Loyang

–700

600

Changan

(Ao) Anyang Haoqing Lintzu Loyang Lintzu Loyang Loyang Xiatu Xintian Yenshiatu Loyang Xiatu Xianyang Lintzu Loyang Soochow Lintzu Nanking Ye

800

1500

Nanking Changan

–1000

Population × 1,000

1,000

Yedo

Beijing

1700

1,200

City 2

Figure 5.7 Largest and second largest cities in East Asia

Biv. Corr.: 0.538∗∗ Partial Corr.: 0.662∗∗

T'ang-Chin-Sung

T'ang-Chin-Sung

Tufan

Tufan

Tufan

T'ang-Chin-Sung

E. & W. Turks Toba

Chin Chao [various] Eastern Chin

Eastern Han

Western Huns

30 10 0 17 0 24 0 31 0 38 0 45 0 52 0 59 0 66 0 73 0 80 0 87 0 94 10 0 10 10 8 11 0 50

−6

0 −5 0 3 −4 0 6 −3 0 9 −3 0 20 −2 5 −1 0 8 −1 0 10 −4 0

0.0

Tufan Liao Tufan

100.0

T'ang-Chin-Sung

200.0

Warring States China

Yuen Liang

300.0

Wu Wei

400.0

Chin

500.0

Northern Huns

600.0

Chin Western Han

Hsuing-Nu (Huns)

700.0

Hsuing-Nu (Huns)

800.0

Chin

Square Megameters × 100

900.0

Western Han

1,000.0

East Asia 1

East Asia 2

∗∗sig. at

0.01 level.

Figure 5.8 Largest and second largest empires in East Asia

Ctesiphon near in the old heartland of Mesopotamia.And the rise of Islam eventually created Baghdad in the same region. After the decline of Baghdad there was a period in which Byzantine Constantinople was larger than any of the cities of the fragmented Islamic caliphates. So the positive correlation in the West Asian region between city and empire sizes is both direct (a large empire created a large city) and indirect in that periods in

106 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti which there were large cities tended to be periods in which there were large empires despite only an indirect connection. The same kind of comparison for the region of Europe produces a somewhat different result (see figure 5.6). In Europe there is also a rather high partial correlation between largest empire and largest city (0.73). And the period between 430 B.C.E. and 850 C.E. shows the same kind of relationship that we saw in West Asia, where the capital of the largest empire is most of the time the largest city in the region. But in Europe we see a radical divergence from this situation after 850 C.E., in which the largest city was virtually never located in the largest empire, but there was nevertheless a positive relationship between the growth/decline phases of cities and empires. The reason for this is not too hard to discover. Europe developed a new form of imperialism in which relatively small European nation-states like Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England were conquering distant colonial empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These were large empires, and the resultant extracted riches supported the growth of the largest cities in Europe, but these colonial empires were not in Europe. Rather the largest states in Europe, as indicated by territorial size, were the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Actually if we had included Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, in our list of “European” cities then it would have been the largest city until 1800. But even with Constantinople excluded and the emergence of the colonial empires there is a positive relationship between growth/decline phases of largest cities and states in Europe. This is because the whole region went through waves of economic growth and state expansion, earlier versions of the great waves of globalization seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We also want to examine the relationships between polity size and city size within particular empires, but unfortunately we do not yet have enough data on city sizes within empires to make possible the calculation of meaningful correlations. Our examination of modern colonial empires looking at the territorial size of the empire and the population size of the capital city (e.g., the French Empire and Paris; the British Empire and London) revealed unsurprising positive correlations and significant partial correlations despite the collapse of the colonial empires resulting from twentieth century decolonization.10 When we use PMNs (expanding networks of polities that ally and make war with one another) as the unit of analysis we find results that are quite similar to those shown in table 5.2. The expanding Central PMN that began with the merger of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian PMNs in 1520 B.C.E. reveals a bivariate correlation of 0.83 and a partial correlation of 0.59 for the period from 1500 B.C.E. to 1990 C.E. The Indic and East Asian PMNs show little or no correlation between largest cities and largest empires.We return to the discussion of why this should be the case in our conclusions below.

107

Power and Size Regional Waves of Growth and Decline

Our examination of the relationships among size distributions of cities and polities did not reveal any significant associations,11 but our correlations between the sizes of largest and second largest cities and empires produced a rather fascinating finding. Do largest and second largest cities grow and decline in the same periods, or does the growth of one city result in the decline of adjacent large cities? In other words, is city growth a zero-sum game or are there regional boom and bust periods that affect the sizes of larger and smaller cities synchronously? And we may ask the same question of empires. Earlier work indicated (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000) that empires tend to grow contemporaneously—periods in which the largest empire is growing tend also to be periods in which the second largest empire in growing in the same region. This would seem to be counterintuitive, and bears further examination of both empire and city growth decline sequences. Table 5.3 shows partial correlations (controlling for the long-term trend) between the largest and the second largest cities in each of our six regions. The results in table 5.3 are significant evidence that regions experience oscillations of growth and decline periods in which both largest and second largest cities expand and then later decline. Except for South Asia, where we have only nine time points with information on the sizes of the two largest cities, all the other regions have statistically significant positive temporal correlations between city growth even after the long-term trend is removed.This is strong evidence against the idea that expansion of cities is a zero-sum game in which a growing city takes resources or territory from adjacent cities. Rather it must be processes of growth and expansion occurring synchronously within regions, as well as periods of regional contraction, that account for these relationships. Table 5.4 shows that a similar pattern of growth and decline periods operates when we examine changes in the sizes of the largest and second largest empires. We do not have enough data to examine this relationship for South Asia. But all the other regions show that empires grow and decline in the same periods.This is even more amazing than the results for

Table 5.3 Temporal correlations among largest and second largest cities Region

Bivariate r

Partial r

Biv. N

Years

East Asia West Asia Europe South Asia

0.888** 0.968** 0.524** 0.605**

0.629** 0.947** 0.611** 0.608^

31 46 24 9

1360 B.C.E.–1800 C.E. 2800 B.C.E.–1500 C.E. 430 B.C.E.–1800 C.E. 200 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.

^ Pearson’s r significant at the 0.10 level. * Pearson’s r significant at the 0.05 level. ** Pearson’s r significant at the 0.01 level.

108 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti Table 5.4 Partial correlations for largest and second largest empires controlling for year Region

Egypt Mesopotamia East Asia Europe West Asia

Period

Partial correlation between largest and second largest empires

2300 B.C.E.–550 B.C.E. 2800 B.C.E.–550 B.C.E. 1360 B.C.E.–1800 C.E. 430 B.C.E.–1800 C.E. 2000 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.

0.438** 0.934** 0.662** 0.882** 0.239**

** Significant at the 0.01 level.

cities because we know that some empire growth is at the expense of neighboring empires.The regional expansion and contraction phases must be strong enough to overcome this negative effect. We can get a better idea about how this may be working by examining which cities and empires are growing when. Figure 5.7 shows the sizes of the largest and second largest cities in East Asia. One relevant consideration about these results that should be noted is that individual cities and empires change position when the second largest passes the largest in size. Because we are looking at ranks rather than at individual cities the resulting correlations may be somewhat larger. But figure 5.7 shows that the notion of regional growth/decline phases is substantiated except for the early seventeenth century C.E. when Peking declined while the second largest city Yedo (Tokyo) was growing.12 The notion of cities growing and declining in complementary phases is less difficult to accept than the idea that the territorial sizes of empires are nonzero sum.We know that tributary states vie with each other for border regions, so how is it possible that largest and second largest empires grow and decline together over time? Let us again examine the East Asia region, and look at the empires. The partial correlation for largest and second largest empires is statistically significant but we can see several instances in figure 5.8 in which a zero-sum interaction between competing states appears. The interaction between the Western Han and the Huns is an obvious example, and a less dramatic but similar negative interaction appears between the Tang and the Tufan. The graph ends before the emergence of the Mongol Empire because its huge size would drown all earlier variation.13 Conclusions This study of cities and empires is necessarily inconclusive because of the incomplete and unreliable nature of the data that we have on city sizes and the territorial sizes of empires. Only a strong effort to improve the existing

Power and Size

109

data sets will remedy this. But we suspect that most of the findings reported above will be confirmed once we have better data. We expect that future research will continue to find important differences among regions with respect to the temporality of city and empire growth/decline phases. And we also expect that within regions there will be period differences because of changes in the relationship between demography, economic institutions and techniques of power. We have used intersocietal regions as the unit of analysis in this chapter. A different approach would be to study individual empires and their cities. Because of missing data we have only been able to do this for two states— England and France. The results for these two countries are reported in Appendix B14 and were discussed earlier. One important finding is the significant positive medium-run temporal associations between city sizes and empire sizes in Europe and West Asia, and a smaller positive relationship in Mesopotamia. These contrast with very small correlations in South Asia, Egypt, and East Asia.We do not have a good comprehensive explanation for this pattern of regional differences. The examination of which cities and which empires are growing and declining together in Mesopotamia,West Asia, and Europe suggests that the positive medium-term temporal relationship is partly due to the fact that most expanding empires build large capital cities and partly due to the periodic nature of regional growth/decline phases that affect both cities and empires. But why do these same factors not produce positive mediumrun relationships between city and empire sizes in Egypt, South Asia, and East Asia? Egyptian cities tended to be monumental centers rather than residential centers, so population sizes of cities may be a poor reflection of the actions of states. East Asia, despite much recent emphasis on similarities with Europe rather than the differences, was more centralized more of the time than other regions. But this should strengthen the relationship between empire and large cities. Figure 5.8 suggests a different explanation for the low temporal association between large cities and large empires in East Asia. Many of the very largest Asian empires in terms of territorial size were the huge confederations put together by nomadic conquerors from the Central Asian steppes—the Hsiung-nu (Huns), the Turks (Wigur), the Tufan, and the Mongols. These horse-riding nomads were notorious in their disdain for cities and city life, and so they rarely used the fruits of conquest to erect large urban centers. The other big finding is the nonzero sum nature of the relationships between largest and second largest cities and empires in Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Asia, West Asia, and Europe. For South Asia we do not have much data on second largest cities or empires. These results strongly indicate that regions go through periods of growth in which both the largest and the second largest cities (ditto empires) are growing followed by periods of decline in which these are declining together. This is especially surprising in the case of the territorial sizes of empires because we know

110 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti that contending empires fight with each other over border areas and sometimes one conquers another and incorporates its territory.Though we do find instances of this kind of zero-sum interaction in the graphs,15 the overall relationship is positive even when the long-term trend is taken out by computing a partial correlation that controls for time.This supports the notion that regional interaction networks were behaving systemically. Our tentative results support the idea that it is the development of economic and political interaction networks as well as the emergence of new techniques of power that have been the major factors in the relationships between territorial power and demographic size. Notes 1. An earlier version used city size estimates from Chandler.The analyses have been rerun using the improved estimates presented by Modelski (2003) and we have performed additional analyses. 2. This chapter is the product of a collaborative project that studies the processes of social evolution and historical development by comparing regional world-systems, and by studying changes in institutional characteristics over long periods of time.The Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside (http://www.irows.ucr.edu/) is beginning the process of upgrading the earlier coding of city and empire sizes by Chandler and Taagepera.We are collaborating with a group of scholars associated with the World Historical Systems subsection of the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association. 3. The size distribution of cities in a region is composed of the relative population sizes of the largest cities. Quantitative indices of the relative steepness of the size distribution are usually calculated using the population sizes of the largest four or five cities. Because of the scarcity of city population size data we calculate a size distribution using only the largest and second largest cities. And we use a similar approach to the size distribution of states and empires using the territorial sizes estimated by Taagepera. 4. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) propose a nested network approach to the spatial bounding of worldsystems that includes (in order of ascending size) bulk goods nets (BGNs), political/military nets (PMNs), prestige goods nets (PGNs) and information nets (INs). 5. In order to indicate our sympathy with the efforts of world historians to signify sensitivity to inescapable Eurocentrism, we employ the conventions B.C.E. (before common era) and C.E. (common era) to delineate time. 6. See the discussion of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of assabiyah in chapter 1. 7. The regions we study are: 1. Mesopotamia, including the drainages of the Tigris and the Euphrates. 2. Egypt, the lower valley of the Nile. 3. Europe, including the Mediterranean and Aegean islands, that part of the Eurasian continent to the west of the Caucasus Mountains, but not Asia Minor (now Turkey). 4. Africa. 5. West Asia including Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, the Levant, and Bactria (Afghanistan). 6. South Asia including the Indus river valley. 7. East Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but not Indonesia. 8. See http://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html. For a fascinating animation of the territorial expansion of the Mogul Empire in South Asia after 1500 C.E. see http://ecai.org/projects/ ProjectExamples/SouthAsianAnimations.html 9. Indeed the recent sharp upturn in city sizes since 1800 C.E. is the reason why we end our analyses in that year. Including the years after 1800 would dwarf variation in earlier periods. This can be remedied statistically by logging the city population sizes. 10. See Appendix B, ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/apppowsize.htm⬎. 11. Our calculation of the cross-regional correlations between both city and empire size distributions did reconfirm the finding reported above of an important degree of East/West synchrony in

Power and Size

12. 13. 14. 15.

111

changes in the size distributions of cities and empires. The switch from Chandler’s to Modelski’s estimates of city population sizes did not reduce the size of the temporal correlation between changes in the size distribution of cities at separate ends of Eurasia from 600 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. Appendix C contains graphs of the largest and second largest cities in South Asia, Europe, and West Asia; see ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/apppowsize.htm⬎. Appendix D contains graphs of the largest and second largest empires in Europe, and West Asia; see ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/apppowsize.htm⬎. See ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/apppowsize.htm⬎. See figure 5.7 and Appendix D at ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/appendices/ apppowsize.htm⬎.

References Alvarez, Alexis. 2003. “Cycles of Primacy in Afroeurasia: 200-1850 CE.” Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside ⬍http://home.earthlink.net/~alexisalvarez/propaper.htm⬎. Bairoch, Paul. 1988. Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barfield,Thomas J. 1989. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Bosworth,Andrew. 2000.“The Evolution of the World City System, 3000 B.C.E to A.D 2000.” In Robert A. Denemark et al. (eds.), World System History, pp. 273–284. London: Routledge. Brown, Barton M. 1987. “Population Estimation from Floor Area.” Behavior Science Research 21:1–49. Chandler,Tertius. 1987. Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth:An Historical Census. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press. Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1985.“The System of World Cities:A.D. 800-1975.” In Michael Timberlake (ed.), Urbanization in the World-Economy, pp. 269–292. New York: Academic Press. ——. 1992.“The Changing Role of Cities in World-Systems.” In Volker Bornschier and Peter Lengyel (eds.), Waves, Formations and Values in the World System, pp. 51–88.World Society Studies, volume 2, New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers. —— and Alice Willard. 1993. “Systems of Cities and World-Systems: Settlement Size Hierarchies and Cycles of Political Centralization, 2000 B.C–1988 A.D.” A paper presented at the International Studies Association meeting, March 24–27, Acapulco. ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/ papers/irows5/irows5.htm⬎. —— and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO:Westview Press. —— Susan Manning, and Thomas D. Hall. 2000. “Rise and Fall: East–West Synchrony and Indic Exceptionalism Reexamined.” Social Science History 24, 4:727–754. —— Daniel Pasciuti, and Alexis Alvarez. 2005. “The Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian WorldSystems.” Forthcoming in Barry Gills and William R. Thompson (eds.), The Evolution of Macrohistorical Systems. London: Routledge. ⬍http://www.irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows14/ irows14.htm⬎. Kirch, Patrick V. 1984. The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kowalewski, Stephen A. 1982. “The Evolution of Primate Regional Systems.” Comparative Urban Research 9, 1:60–78. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marfoe, Leon. 1987.“Cedar Forest and Silver Mountain: Social Change and the Development of LongDistance Trade in Early Near Eastern Societies,” In M. Rowlands et al. Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, pp. 25–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Modelski, George. 1999. “Ancient World Cities 4000–1000 B.C: Centre/Hinterland in the World System.” Global Society 13, 4:383–392. ——. 2003. World Cities, ⫺3000 to 2000.Washington, DC: Faros, 2000. Pasciuti, Daniel. 2003. “A Measurement Error Model for Estimating the Populations of Cities.” ⬍http://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/estcit/modpop/modcitpop.htm⬎. Stein, Gil J. 1999. Rethinking World-Systems: Diasporas, Colonies and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

112 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Álvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti Taagepera, Rein. 1978a. “Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size.” Social Science Research 7:108–127. ——.1978b. “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.” Social Science Research 7:180–196. ——.1979.“Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.” Social Science History 3, 3–4:115–138. ——.1997. “Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia.” International Studies Quarterly 41, 3:475–504. Teggart, Frederick J. 1939. Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turchin, Peter. 2003. Historical Dynamics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walters, Pamela Barnhouse. 1985. “Systems of Cities and Urban Primacy: Problems of Definition and Measurement.” In Michael Timberlake (ed.), Urbanization in the World-Economy, pp. 63–86. New York: Academic Press. Wilkinson, David. 1987. “Central Civilization.” Comparative Civilizations Review 17:31–59. ——.1992a. “Decline Phases in Civilizations, Regions and Oikumenes.” A paper presented at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, Atlanta, GA. April 1–4. ——.1992b. “Cities, Civilizations and Oikumenes:I.” Comparative Civilizations Review 27:51–87 (Fall). ——.1993. “Cities, Civilizations and Oikumenes:II.”Comparative Civilizations Review 28.

CHAPTER

SIX

Lamb, Rice, and Hegemonic Decline:The Mongol Empire in the Fourteenth Century E . N. A nde r s on

After the spectacular conquest of China and most of the rest of the known world, the Mongols settled down to rule the empire they had won. In China, this was not an easy or rewarding endeavor. Fierce local resistance gave way to resignation, but full tranquility was difficult to win. Shaky administration, thanks in part to the excessive fondness of the Mongol elite for alcohol and feasting, led to inexorable decline in the mid-fourteenth century. By 1368, the strange, brilliant, and slightly mad Zhu Yuanzhang could unite China against the Mongols. Zhu founded the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The Mongols moved back to the steppes with evident signs of relief.Their empire continued to flourish there, remaining a formidable threat to China for another century. An odd insight into the times is provided by two cookbooks. In 1330, Hu Sihui, court nutritionist and almost certainly of Chinese Turkic origin, compiled a great work of nutritional medicine, cooking, and food science: The Yinshan Zhengyao (“Necessary Knowledge for Drinking and Feasting”).This cookbook is international, with a Central Asian focus; most of the recipes are Near Eastern or Central Asian, and most of them involve lamb.Very few include rice, that characteristic Chinese food.Around 1400, Jia Ming, a centenarian of eastern China, was prevailed upon by the Ming court to write up his secrets for long life. His book reflects a totally different culinary world. Ming China turned against lamb and back to rice. The internationalization of Mongol times had changed; links across Asia declined, while attention to eastern and coastal resources rose. Blocked by the Mongols from focusing on Central Asia, the Ming expanded their sea trade, until that too declined after 1430. Nothing in all history is quite like the rise of the Mongols under Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan, ca. 1162–1227). Starting as an obscure steppe warrior, harassed by rivals, Chinggis managed to unify the Mongols into a fighting force that swept across Asia, creating within a few years one

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of the greatest empires the world has known. He took advantage of the segmentary patrilineage system typical of Asian nomads. This system is characterized by its ability to build upward along kinship links, real or imagined. All Mongols claimed descent from mythical founding ancestors (Gray Wolf and Beautiful Doe—animal founders are common among ethnic groups throughout East Asia).They were, therefore, all kin in some very remote sense. On the other hand, this unity can equally easily break down along kinship links. Every branching point is a potential breaking point.The whole system is perhaps best summarized by an Arab proverb:“I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my cousin, brother and I against our village, and our village against the world!” Chinggis began by fighting his brothers and ended by conquering the world (see Rossabi 1988; Ratchnevsky 1991; Mote 1999; Buell et al. 2000). Chinggis’s genius lay in his ability to go beyond the segmentary lineage system and appropriate the bureaucratic systems that prevailed in settled parts of Asia. Begun long ago in Mesopotamia and China, bureaucratic rule had been perfected, especially by the Persians and Chinese. When the Mongols swept down on the Central Asian oasis states in what is now Tadzhikstan, Uzbekistan, and Kirghizstan, they took over the rather feeble Persian-style bureaucracies that existed there.Their subsequent conquest in the Near East allowed them to upgrade vastly their political sophistication. They became masters of highly civilized and administratively competent Persian,Turkic, and Arab states. The horrific tales of Mongol massacres of whole cities are much exaggerated. Many can be traced back to Mongol propaganda; the Mongols deliberately circulated stories of their atrocity, to scare cities into surrendering without a fight.The tactic worked well, but left the world a heritage of tall tales. Far from massacring everyone they caught, they recognized that they needed skilled workers, skilled administrators, and taxpaying citizens. They were no angels of mercy (nor has anyone ever been in Central Asia— as Americans learned, and proved, in 2001–2002). However, neither were they the wild destroyers of European legend. They not only appropriated administrative ability; they also took over technical knowledge. Recognizing that they could not rule great agricultural cities and empires as they had ruled steppe nomads, they pressed into service any experts they could find: irrigation engineers, metalworkers, potters, architects, and all the professionals of that brilliantly civilized time. In particular, they needed military experts.They learned to deploy military arts learned in one region against enemies in another region that was yet a stranger to said arts. They were, for instance, the people who introduced gunpowder and its military applications to the western world. Contrary to myth, the Chinese had long used gunpowder for military purposes, but few outside China knew much about this—until the Mongols. Conversely,West Asian siege arts and Central Asian strategies and tactics were deployed against China.

Lamb, Rice, and Mongol Hegemonic Decline

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Chinggis Qan’s empire was eventually divided among his grandsons. Qubilai Qan (1215–1294) schemed to get China as his portion, and eventually succeeded. He had a hard fight ahead of him, however, in conquering this vast and powerful realm. In 1234, North China fell to the Mongols. Non-Chinese courts had long ruled the north: first the Liao, then the Jin Dynasty, whose rulers spoke a Tungus language ancestral to Manchu.The south, still ruled by the powerful Song Dynasty, offered more resistance. Mongol subversion and propaganda, as well as warfare, was deployed, and Song fell in 1279. The Mongols kept their court in Beijing, established by Liao as a capital city. Beijing was conveniently near the mountains and steppes that the Mongols loved and preferred. A splendid city arose—different indeed from the collection of tents that had been Chinggis’ capital in Mongolia. The Mongols controlled China as few have done before or since. A tangible mark was their success at controlling the Yellow River, known as “China’s Sorrow” because of its floods and changes of course.The Mongol dynasty was the only one to control it fully, until the Communists finally tamed it in the 1950s and 1960s. The Mongols brought administrators from all over Asia to govern China. However, the Mongol court succumbed to luxury. Qubilai died grossly obese—killed, probably, by good living (Rossabi 1988). Successors were no better. Moreover, the Mongol dynasty was succumbing to the inherent problem of segmentary lineage society—rivalry among brothers and cousins when there is no common enemy. By the early 1300’s, the Mongols in Beijing seem to have become much more interested in food, alcohol, and intrigue than in the wild steppe living that was their heritage. Evidently, something had to be done.There was only so much that could be done about the intrigue, but at least the high court officials could do something about the overindulgence. Thus it came to pass that Hu Sihui compiled his great work, publishing it in 1330. My coworker Paul Buell and I have edited and translated this work (Buell, Anderson, and Perry 2000).1 Hu’s book is a paean to moderation. Chinese medicine is as staunch in its advocacy of this virtue as are traditional and modern Western medical traditions. Certainly, the Mongols needed to hear this lesson. But Hu’s book goes much farther. He provides all sorts of traditional Chinese advice, ranging from unimpeachable medical wisdom as well as shaky claims for longevity potions and frankly magical lore.There is very little of the latter, and most of Hu’s book is solidly grounded in the best of fourteenth century medical science. More interesting to world systems theorists, however, is the range of recipes. Especially interesting is the section titled “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavors.” This section consists of 95 recipes. Most of them are Near Eastern or Central Asian. Many are Chinese. Only a few are Mongol. Many of the Near Eastern and Central Asian recipes have been Sinicized; Chinese ingredients have been worked into them, considerably changing

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the flavoring. Sometimes this is clearly a mere substitution of something available for something unavailable, but often it seems to be a deliberate modification intended to create a new and blended recipe. Most of these recipes are based on lamb—72 or more out of the 95. Not only is every part of the animal used, from head to feet, but also lamb fat appears to be the preferred cooking oil. Lamb is, of course, the standard Near Eastern and Central Asian meat, but is not popular with most Han Chinese. Conversely, pork, always the meat of choice in most of China proper, figures in only one recipe.The Siberian tribal heritage is shown in recipes for meats such as bear and wolf and fowl such as hazel-hen and crane. One can imagine the horror of a refined court chef when an uncouth chieftain threw a dead wolf in front of him, saying,“Here, cook that!” At least it would probably not be a Mongol chieftain, for the Mongols, being descended from a wolf, avoided eating the animal. Vegetable oil, the usual favorite in China, is called “lesser oil,” depreciatively. Moreover, from context, it is almost certain that the vegetable oil in question is sesame oil, a Near Eastern favorite but not native to or very common in China (though widely used).The main Chinese ingredients are flavorings, such as large cardamoms (the Chinese caokou) as opposed to the small ones of west Asia; Chinese bunching onions instead of, or as well as, western onions; ginger; soy sauce. Some 45 of these recipes are clearly Central Asian or appear to be basically Central Asian with major Chinese (and sometimes also Near Eastern) influence. Many of these are hard-core nomad recipes for such things as sheep’s thorax and horse intestines. Many, however, are highly sophisticated urban cuisine, associated with the courts of steppe and oasis rulers. Many of these are specifically Turkic in their basic identification. One, for example, is a recipe for eggplant with yogurt and mint—still a standard recipe in Turkey today. Others are for noodle dishes still eaten in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. In general, the hard-core nomad recipes show the least influence from China, but virtually all the Central Asian recipes call for spices and flavorings that would have been, at that time, obtainable only from China. Some also call for Near Eastern spices and/or Chinese vegetables. Sixteen recipes are clearly Chinese. Most of these are for fish, pork, and other foods not widely eaten in the steppes. Eleven are so eclectic that it is impossible to decide what origin they have; they appear to be basically Central Asian dishes that have absorbed major influences from Iran and China. Most of these form a single group that combines eggs, carrots, Chinese spices, and green vegetables in complex ways.They have analogues in other “conquest dynasties” cookbooks, but no close analogues today, though carrots remain distinctively common in mixed dishes in Iran, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. Eight recipes are clearly Near Eastern, centering on Mesopotamia, and are variants of the common Mesopotamian technique of cooking lamb with chickpeas, spices, and often other vegetables, and then—typically— mashing the chickpeas into a paste.The basic or canonical one is a standard


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Mesopotamian recipe, known all over the Near East today. An interesting aside is that it appears in a collection of folk recipes from old New Mexico ( J aramillo 1981). New Mexico’s Hispanic population includes the descendents of many “New Christians”—Spanish Muslim and Jewish families forcibly converted to Christianity—who were sent to the wild frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to get them as far from Spain as possible. It is thus not very surprising to find a Yinshan Zhengyao recipe in New Mexico. Indeed, many parts of Latin America are museums of medieval Arab and Jewish food ways. Five recipes are clearly Iranian, but with varying degrees of Central Asian and Chinese influence on the flavoring. One of these is specifically stated by Hu to be “Western Indian,” but is a standard Iranian dish. No doubt it, like many another Iranian delicacy, spread to Western India very early. Three simple dishes are typically and purely Mongol. One is for pitbarbecued whole sheep.Two are Arab—variants of a single recipe still common in Arabia. Two are East European or possibly Near Eastern; one is a recipe for poppy seed rolls, the other is the same recipe substituting fennel seeds.The poppy seed roll recipe is absolutely identical to the standard East European one used in countless delis in the United States today. Two are simple recipes for boiled grain—untraceable because universal. One is Kashmiri (it is labeled “Nepalese” by Hu but is in fact a recipe still standard in Kashmir, not in Nepal. Geographical terms meant different places in 1330 than they do today.This dish has Persian analogues or ancestors). Most of the recipes show cross-influences. Similar recipes from different areas are juxtaposed. The poppy seed recipes, for instance, are followed by a recipe for Chinese steamed buns (of a sort one can find anywhere in China today).The rest of Hu’s cookbook includes a large number of more strictly medicinal preparations. A large number of these are syrups and preserves that are purely Near Eastern and are given Near Eastern medical values. Another group is Chinese, with its Chinese virtues ascribed.There is also a very long section of what might be called ethnobiology: descriptions of food plants and animals, with their medical and nutritional values according to Hu. The animals and plants include standard Chinese foods, Mongolian game animals, and wild steppe plants gathered by the Mongols. Specifically Near Eastern foods are notably absent. In general, he followed traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia in ascribing nutritional values to these items. However, there is probably some Near Eastern influence. By this time, extensive interpenetration between these two systems had been going on for at least a thousand years (Anderson 1988), so it is not possible to separate out the Chinese from the Near Eastern in this material. There are also several more extensive passages on nutritional and herbal medicine. These are purely Chinese, and, indeed, are usually copied from earlier Chinese works. In short, the book is eclectic in its cooking and medical lore. It displays a gradient from largely Near Eastern and Central Asian feast recipes to largely Chinese medical theory.

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Nothing could better show the degree to which the Mongol empire had become a world-system. Recipes from the entire continent of Asia, from Siberia to India and from Baghdad to Peking, were united in a single work. This was not without precedent. China had always looked to the west for new culinary ideas. Earlier North Chinese dynasties of Central Asian background had greatly accelerated the process of westernization, beginning probably with the Wei Dynasty in the fourth century A.D. Some of the Yinshan Zhengyao recipes are found in earlier cookbooks from the preceding Jin Dynasty. However, the scope and importance of foreign foods in the Yinshan Zhengyao are unique. I believe that they show a conscious attempt to make the court a genuinely international, or world, court. This worked on two levels. First, the court had to show hospitality to distinguished visitors from all over Asia (and Europe—not that it bulked large on the horizon). Second, the court was evidently showing its power and its all-encompassing rule. It could command Asia, and showed this by serving foods from all parts of its far-flung realm. This book was not the only example of knowledge transfer from west to east under the Mongols. More impressive still was the Huihui Yaofang (Kong 1996). This was a huge encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine, compiled under the Mongols. It is written in literary Chinese, with drug names given in Arabic or Persian as well as in Chinese translation or transliteration. Only a small part of the work survives, but even this fragment is impressive—a huge volume, tightly packed with detailed information on drugs and treatments. The entire work was evidently one of the greatest single examples of cross-cultural information transfer in the history of the world. It was quite comparable in size and scope to Science and Civilization in China, the series begun by Joseph Needham and now running to some 40 large books. At the same time, veterinary medicine was flooding from west to east, to change forever China’s ways of dealing with animals (Buell, ongoing research). Clearly, nothing could be farther from the truth than the claims that the Mongols were uncultured barbarians. Quite the reverse: they put together the first truly global world-system, complete with self-conscious globalization of knowledge and economy. Yet, within a few years, Mongol control was slipping. (The best account of the following events is found in Mote 1999; see also references therein.) Fratricidal wars between brothers and other close relatives fatally wounded the dynasty. Chinese rebels took advantage of the situation. Chinese ethnic nationalism, per se, was already a force, but apparently not a very important one. However, after 1340, the Mongols were weak, and Chinese rebellion crystallized around hatred of these conquerors. Chinese groups slowly evolved from being mere “bandits” to being more and more substantial and formidable armies of revolutionaries. Finally, an organized large military movement was organized by Zhu Yuanzhang, an enigmatic and conflicted soul with a checkered background (he later declined into frank paranoia). In 1368 he led the conquest of China and established the Ming Dynasty.


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The Mongols, not entirely unhappy at abandoning a difficult and annoying chunk of real estate, migrated back to Central Asia. Here they established a state that continued to harass the Ming. It was to flourish for several more centuries. The Mongols did not so much “fall” as retrench (still less were they absorbed, as were many of China’s conquerors). However, their world-empire ended. Not long afterward, the Ming Dynasty discovered that a centenarian named Jia Ming lived in central eastern China. He was asked to tell his secrets of longevity. He proved incredibly garrulous. His words were carefully written down and arranged in a book known as “What You Need to Know about Drinking and Eating” (Heshi Xuzhi—exactly the same title as Hu’s, except that the words chosen are more colloquial, less formal). The book begins with a list of common drinks and foods. He lists no fewer than 25 kinds of water (including ice and snow).Then, after a brief list of some other liquids and of various kinds of cooking fire, he gets down to the serious business of rice. About half a dozen kinds are discussed, along with other grains. Then follow wheat and barley, given minor place. Animal foods are far into the text, and begin with fish. Hu’s book, in its zoology section, describes eight kinds of fish—basically those of north China’s inland waters. In Jia’s work, we have no fewer than 40 kinds (plus the porpoise, stuck into the fish section though not actually called a fish). Meat is at the end. Lamb is there, but clearly is a minor part of Jia’s universe. The book describes many foods, discusses the dreadful consequences of unfortunate food combinations, and otherwise dispenses homely (and usually dubious) advice. It reflects a world of water: rice, fish, frogs, and irrigated vegetable farms. Clearly, China’s focus has changed. The Ming Dynasty continued to reprint Hu’s book and other Central Asian collections, but its own contributions to food lore are clearly focused on the rivers and seas of the east. Nothing could exemplify more clearly the literal “sea change” that was sweeping the entire Old World. The fall of the Mongols ended the whole notion of a world-system based on Central Asia and the Silk Road. A fateful change in world fortunes was at hand: Sea trade was becoming more economical and important than the caravan trade by land. This change fed on several innovations first made in the China seas: the compass, fore-and-aft rigging, watertight compartments, keels and rudders, and the whole idea of giant long-range cargo ships as a routine institution. All these were probably transferred directly to the west, though some may have been independently invented in the west. In any case, they all came together in both China and Europe in the 1300s and 1400s. The Ming Empire and the Japanese dominated the eastern seas; Ming ships voyaged to Africa, bringing back live giraffes for the court and littering the Kenya coast with blue-and-white shards. But Ming pulled back from what looked like an inexorable expansion. The reasons are still somewhat unclear (see Mote 1999 for the most up-to-date study), but the Ming explanation is still probably the best one: it simply didn’t pay. China was

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losing real money to import useless giraffes.The more profitable trade with Southeast Asia continued apace, but discoveries westward were no more. It was left to Portugal to lead the world. Portugal had almost nothing but coastline, and depended on deep-sea fishing for very survival. It did not have the Ming option of turning inward or confining its attention to local trade. Braudel (1972) and many others have pointed out that the explosion of Europe followed a long history of developing sea trade throughout the Mediterranean. The fall of the land-based Near Eastern/Central Asian world-system and the rise of the sea-based Western European one was perhaps the greatest “rupture” in history.Yet, there is an important sense in which this was not a rupture. If a social scientist had been present at the Mongol court, partaking of the wonderful lamb dishes prepared under Hu Sihui’s direction, he would have easily foreseen the Mongol collapse. Every empire, every dynasty, had its cycle, as the Chinese well knew. The Mandate of Heaven would eventually pass to another. If this social scientist had been thoughtful enough, he would have wondered: Who would make the best use of the incredible collection of technological and institutional wisdom put together by the Mongols and their neighbors? It would have to be some small region, insulated by distance and isolation from the collapse of the Mongols and the inevitable post-dynastic wars. It would have to be, however, closely involved in trade with China or the Near East, so that it could quickly learn about and take advantage of the new opportunities. The possibilities were: south China; Southeast Asia; peninsular South Asia; and Europe. Of these, the first was within Mongol power, and was also trapped in a highly involuted system of rice agriculture that made innovation difficult (Geertz 1963; Huang 1990). Southeast Asia was too thinly populated and technologically unprogressive to be a very hopeful candidate at the time. South Asia was too vulnerable to constant devastating invasions from Central Asia and Iran, and perhaps not dependent enough on external trade. Only Europe was perfectly situated to continue the Mongol project of modernization through eclectic appropriation of everybody’s recipes, technology, and administrative skills.2 Perhaps a sort of western counterpart to the Yinshan Zhengyao is the Tacuinum Sanitatis, Europe’s Medieval development from an Arab textbook of nutrition and lifestyle (Arano 1976). This book brought to Europe the wisdom and delight of Near Eastern nutritional science. Europeans added and developed this work; it influenced the famous Salernitan Rule (Harington n.d.), which joined the Tacuinum as guides for health-conscious Europeans over many centuries. It advised its readers on moderation, on the values of food, on the benefits of exercise, on drinking, and on life in general. Much of this advice is with us yet. It was good enough to become standard in medical lore, and it surfaces today, vastly transformed but still recognizable, in the health sections of today’s newspapers.


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So lamb and rice have their roles in the shifts of trade and empire. Food habits reflect the long, slow shifts in core and periphery.Today’s worldwide spread of hamburgers and cola drinks is not unprecedented—nor is their expected decline from grace in future years.The current world-system will not last much longer, based as it is on unsustainable resource consumption. Perhaps the Mongols will ride again, and my grandchildren will come to know the delights of roast wolf and fermented mare’s milk. Notes 1. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Buell for advice on this essay and all that it covers. 2. Europe, of course, had other advantages: a history of being at the center of things in former centuries (Rome, Byzantium); a long-standing close connection, often competitive, with Near Eastern societies; and even such accidents as the effects of the bubonic plague.The plague decimated the urban elites of the Near East, already impacted by dynastic wars and the Mongol invasion; in Europe, by contrast, the plague hit the rural and urban poor harder, driving up the price of labor and preventing involution (Dols 1977).The Salerno medical school, which drew on Islamic learning, dates from the eighth century, and was early in the business of translating Arabic texts, including the Tacuinum.

References Anderson, E. N. 1988. “The Food of China.” New Haven:Yale University Press. Arano, Luisa Cogliati. 1976.“The Medieval Tacuinum Sanitatis.” New York: George Braziller. (Tr. Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook; Italian orig. ca. 1975.) Braudel, Fernand. 1972. “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.” New York: Harper and Row. (Fr. orig. 1966.) Buell, Paul D., E. N. Anderson, and Charles Perry. 2000. “A Soup for the Qan.” London: Kegan Paul International. Dols, Michael. 1977.“The Black Death in the Middle East.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1963. “Agricultural Involution.” Berkeley: University of California Press. Harington, John. N.d. (1966; orig. 1607). “The School of Salernum: Regimen Sanitatis Salerni.” Salerno: Ente Provinciale per il Turismo (Salerno Tourist Bureau. Modern edition; Latin provided with the English, allowing the reader to see how Harington added his own inimitable spark to the old rule.) Huang, Philip. 1990. “The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988.” Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jaramillo, Cleofas. 1981. “The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes.” Santa Fe: Ancient City Press. (Orig. 1942.) Jia Ming. 1988. “Yinshi Xuzhi.” Beijing: People’s Publishing Co. Kong,Y. C. 1996. Huihui Yaofang. (In Chinese with English-language appendices.) Hong Kong: author. (Orig. ca. 1400.) Mote, Frederick. 1999. “Imperial China, 900–1800.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ratchnevsky, Paul. 1991. “Genghis Khan.” Oxford: Blackwell. Rossabi, Morris. 1998. “Khubilai Khan.” Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

The Rise of European Hegemony:The Political Economy of South Asia and Europe Compared, A.D. 1200–A.D. 1500 Eri c M i e lants

In her study on the world-system, Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) titled her paragraph on South Asia: “On the Way to Everywhere.” The heading indicates that the socioeconomic developments occurring in South Asia had the possibility of going in any direction. Yet in her contribution she does not elaborate upon the long-term impacts of social structures and historical developments that surround elite economic strategies. This was, however, a major element in the subsequent patterns of social change in South Asia.To what extent did the different path dependencies of the political economies of South Asia and Europe explain why European powers were capable of imposing their hegemony over South Asia, rather than vice versa? After an economic downturn in the post-Gupta period (ca. A.D. 600– ca. A.D. 900) (Thakur 1989:25; Chattopadhyaya 1974), parts of the South Asian peninsula were, by the eleventh century, experiencing “rapid urban growth and an upsurge in maritime trade” (McPherson 1993:107). During the period A.D. 1100–1500 the Malabar and Gujarat coasts in particular benefited from an intense trade with the Arabian peninsula: one transported “from South Asia to Aden rice, sesame, soap, cushions, pillows, table cloths, arabi cloths manufactured on the Malabar coast, and to South Asia Arabian horses and madder, the latter in large quantities” (Shihab 1996:25–26). Since “horses of excellent breed were a rarity in India throughout her history [and] an indispensable element of the army” (Chakravarthi 1996:149), it follows that they were regularly imported on a massive scale as well. But trade from the South Asian coast with Eastern Africa was also of tremendous importance, from Egypt in the North—substantial from at least the eleventh century onwards (Goitein 1954)—to Kilwa and Sofala in the South1 (Pearson 1998).

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The more gloomy representations of South Asia, as if it was suffering from economic self-containment, while in reality most trade consisted of high-value luxuries (e.g., Gopal 1965:157; Palat 1988:283, 447), are increasingly being challenged during the last 30 years (e.g., Prakash 1971:203; Subrahmanyam 1994:12–13).2 As far as South Asia was concerned, during the period of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, trade had certainly not been “confined to the regional market” (Jain 1990:35). On the contrary, bulk commodities were, as in Europe, widely bought and sold over large regions: grains, sugar, oils, salt, potteries, leather, timber and metal goods, rice 3 but, even more importantly, textiles, were transported in considerable quantities over large distances (Abraham 1988; Jain 1990:57–70)4 and some of the exchanged commodities were being handled by large traders, not just peddlers (Gunawardana 1987:88; Chandra 1997:196). From the eleventh century onward, a notable “increase in the tempo of trade” occurred, as was indicated by the presence of South Asian traders on Java (Varadarajan 1987:105), by a notable resurgence of urbanization (Kulke 1995:13) and by increased activities of South Asian merchant corporations (Champakalakshmi 1996:224, 312). Furthermore, the impact of long distance trade did not limit itself to the immediate coastal towns, as “the nature of commodities [foreign] traders acquired in South Indian ports— pearls, areca-nuts, spices, and cotton products—required a regular ongoing relationship with the hinterland to allow locally produced goods to reach the coastal centers of international exchange” (Hall 1977:208). A considerable number of people in coastal areas were capable of living entirely of maritime trade. Already in Cola times there existed a “considerable commercial activity in the South Indian hinterland and well organized trade networks supplied the commodities demanded by foreign traders” (Hall 1977:208). In addition, during the eleventh and twelfth century, forced labor in South Asia became gradually “commuted into money payments” (Sharma 1965:243), while the sophistication of credit and banking increased (Jain 1990:201–207). As the economy was expanding in the northern as well as in the southern part of the peninsula, it gradually affected the entire Indian Ocean region (Palat 1988). As far as the textile trade is concerned, the peaceful trade that characterized the Indian Ocean up to the intrusion of the Portuguese,5 caused this region to become more and more closely integrated by an expanding division of labor (Gibb 1994:827). This is clearly illustrated by the extensive specialization of workers (tailors, weavers, and dyers) involved in the industry, as is demonstrated in the case studies of Gujarat (Jain 1990:63) and Bengal (Ray 1993) or even the deep South (Hall and Spencer 1980:131). Technologically, the South Asian textile industry was probably more advanced than in contemporary Europe (Ramaswamy 1985b). Thus, the relative lack of direct South Asian sources on longdistance trade in the period 1000–1400 does not imply that foreign trade was insignificant. Quite the contrary: in the South Asian peninsula “the

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expansion of overseas trade was an important factor in, as well as a reflector of economic growth” (Indrapala 1971:101) during the tenth through the thirteenth centuries (Hall 1980:111). Chinese and Arab sources confirm this (Jain 1990:71–72; Gibb 1994:813).The South Asian subcontinent was after all “the midway location between West Asia on the one hand and Southeast and East Asia on the other” (Prakash 1998:12). Gujarat and Bengal in particular, in addition to their fertile tracts and rich handicrafts, carried on a brisk overseas trade. The Gujarati traders played a large part in the trade of the Middle East and Africa; Chittagong in Bengal was a flourishing port for trade with China, but also in the Southern part of the peninsula ample evidence exists of Chinese ceramic potsherds (Karashima 1992:174–176). In the thirteenth century, Delhi became one of the largest cities in the world, and Multan, Lahore, Kara, and Cambay also emerged as major urban centers.The multiple Mongol invasions certainly had a negative impact on some northwestern cities (Chandra 1997:64–73), but in general the period A.D. 1200–A.D. 1400 was characterized by a flourishing urban economy and concurrent increase in craft production (use of spinning wheels and treadle looms) and commerce.Textiles, wine, paper, and sugars were produced in Bengal (Ray 1993:83), and Chinese and Egyptian silk was imported. In the early fifteenth century “Bengali ships carried their exports to China. Bengal served as a link between China and Malacca and contributed substantially to the growth of Malacca as an entrepot [. . .] Malacca’s growing prosperity was a direct consequence of the expansion of Indian trade” (Ray 1993:130). Especially the trade in cotton textiles and rice, exported from Bengal to Yuan China was considerable (Ray 1993:132–133), and because of this the Bengalis were very prosperous, even from the Chinese point of view (Ray 1993: 105–106). It is important to bear in mind that if China and Europe represent two extremes in Eurasia, the interesting case of the South Asian subcontinent falls somewhere in between. While Europe was completely fragmented after the collapse of the Roman Empire, China was during most of its history a unified Empire (Mielants 2002). South Asia, however, constantly fluctuated between the two. The Mauryas (320–185 B.C.), the Guptas (A.D. 320–500), the Sultanate of Delhi, especially under Ibn Tughluq (ca. 1350), and finally the Mughals (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) all attempted to unify the whole Southasian continent, but failed in conquering it as a whole, most notably the South (Nizami 1985:71). One of the most important variables at play is that the nobility on the South Asian subcontinent was overall much stronger than in Western Europe. It is of course a natural propensity of all rural nobles, wherever they may have been located, to extract as much wealth as possible from “the rest” of the society (peasants, merchants, and clergy) through extra-economic coercion.6 Yet what made Europe so exceptional was the weakness of its nobles in relation to the urban based merchant class. The Danish king Waldemar IV, who mobilized all his resources against a coalition of Dutch


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merchants and the Hanseatic League, was in a nine-year war ultimately forced to submit to his financially superior enemy in the humiliating Peace of Stralsund (1370) (Malowist 1972:93).7 Throughout Western Europe many citizens of city-states were armed, a situation which was intrinsically interlinked with defending their privileges (monopolistic rights) and urban autonomy if not outright independence, against other city-states, but more importantly, also against economic claims of the nobility or territorial overlords in the vicinity. In Central and South Asia, the urban population did have more autonomy than in the Chinese Empire, as the existence of the erivirapattinam testifies (Abraham 1988:111–112), but to equate this with the European example would be exaggerated (e.g., Barendse 2000). Inhabitants of most Central and South Asian cities were not expected to arm themselves (and in the process acquire institutionalized political power).8 Cook (1988:134) illustrates this quite well in his account of eleventh century Balkh, one of the most important metropoles in medieval Central Asia: “Balkh was under the rule of the Ghaznavids, but while the Ghaznavid ruler was away making war on the Indians, Balkh was taken off him by the Qarakhanids. Soon after this, however, the Ghaznavid ruler returned and repossessed Balkh. Now the people of Balkh—perhaps unusually—had not remained passive through these events. They had vigorously resisted the Qarakhanid invaders, with considerable loss of life and property. What then was the reward they received for their loyalty? What the Ghaznavid ruler did was to treat them to a homily on the importance of minding their own business.Warfare, he admonished them, is for rulers, not for subjects; it was their duty to pay taxes to whoever had them in his power. The notables of Balkh duly apologized for their misconduct, and promised not to repeat it.The Ghaznavid ruler, I suspect, spoke for Muslim rulers as a whole.” The fact that “citizen armies” cannot be found in Islamic history (Cook 1988:133) was symptomatic for large (semi) imperial polities that were dominated by their nobility.9 The different experience in Western Europe in which urban militias were an important leverage for institutional power vis-à-vis the nobility as well as an illustration of symbolic capital vis-à-vis the overlord(s), is a case in point. As was illustrated by the European city-state, the armed mercantile bourgeoisie (in alliance with the weakened lower nobility) benefited mostly from their maritime ventures to outflank, outmaneuver and frequently raid a Eurasian land-power whose main strength lay in its armed cavalry and infantry. This stated, one could not claim that the European naval powers managed to do this quickly. In the more distant Asian waters, similar attempts were even more difficult, as high mortality rates (due to a different climate) and regular desertions plagued the companies. Imposing effective control over much more than the coastal areas of the South Asian landmass did not take place until the late eighteenth century, since a profound conquest of the interior (and a subsequent transformation of production sites on a large scale) took enormous amounts of energy, costs, and time. It is

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therefore a gross exaggeration to claim that already in the sixteenth century European naval forces were capable of “dominating the Indian Ocean [as] they imposed their own restrictions not only over the oceanic trade and commerce, but also on the settlement of one population group in another littoral territory. The ancient Indian Ocean system was modified in order to suit the new colonial masters” (Nag 1987:157). It is important to challenge the Eurocentric assumption of unavoidable growth of European settlements on the South Asian coast by highlighting the “dynamism and flux in the Indian world of that time” (Arasaratnam 1989:75). Indeed, even if one looks at the eighteenth century, one cannot assume teleologically that “ports controlled by the multiple European (colonial) powers would have been able to ‘supersede’ the commercial network of South Asian ports” (Arasaratnam 1989:92). Thus, while it is true that throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans were “just one more strand in the already complex fabric of Asian maritime trade” (Reid 1999:155), many debates resolve around the question when European powers were capable of getting the upper hand within the Indian Ocean World-Economy at the expense of Asian traders, or—to frame it within World System terminology—when the Indian Ocean became “incorporated” and ultimately “peripheralized” (Wallerstein 1987).10 Some authors (e.g., Pearson 1976) even have the tendency to dismiss the Portuguese intrusions in the Indian Ocean as mere “piracy,” only occasionally affecting trade routes and markets whenever they could muster enough force to wage war in the immediate area, but without important implications for the regional economy as a whole (Perlin 1980:274).11 On the other hand, scholars like Steensgaard (1974) and Reid (1993) have pointed to the fundamental changes brought about by the intrusion of a European chartered company such as the VOC into the Asian trade networks and to its success in establishing a relatively successful monopolistic control over the commercial routes in seventeenthcentury Asia. The latter’s success is something which has been contested by scholars as Subrahmanyam (1988) and Perlin (1993:284–285). Understandingly, European scholars often focus on the (presumed) impact of Europeans and their joint stock companies in East Asia, whereas Asian scholars want to highlight the activities generated from the South Asian hinterland, outside of European controlled ports, or on the multiple ingenious strategies of Asian merchants to repeatedly outflank and outmaneuver, by regularly altering commercial routes and outlets, the attempts of European powers to impose a system of monopolistic control to increase their profits. The latter was indeed extremely difficult to accomplish. The Portuguese of course did attempt to disrupt the spice trade to the Levant since from the Europeans’ point of view it was the most profitable one, but many of their efforts failed to achieve their ambitious aims (MeilinkRoelofsz 1964:189).12 Thus, it should be clear that in the period A.D. 1250–1650 Europeans were not in a position to “dictate” anything in most Asian markets. Although more European merchants were capable of


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penetrating the Eastern markets than has previously been recognized,13 once they were faced with “powerful Asian states on the mainland” (Meilink-Roelofsz 1972:172), their freedom of action was extremely limited. As has been duly noted, one of the main problems European merchants in the early modern period faced in the South Asian subcontinent was that its inhabitants hardly had any interest in the commodities offered to them (Richards 1993:198). Indeed, all the way up to the late eighteenth century (when the European powers finally were capable of establishing more “direct” colonial rule on the ground and of affecting production quota), at least 80 percent of the cargoes originating from Western Europe contained silver and gold (Meyer 1982:301). There was of course a way around this problem.14 The enormous textile production in South Asia, exported to the entire Indian Ocean region, but especially Southeast Asian markets, was intrinsically linked with the massive import of spices from that area, which were then consumed in South Asia itself, or later on resold to the Middle East and Western Europe (Sen 1962:92).The European merchants therefore were bound to immerse themselves in the inter-Asian trade in order to be able to make ends meet and obtain the spices “and the fabulous profits expected that attracted them” (Sen 1962:93). The settlement of the European colonial powers on the diverse islands and archipelagoes across the Indian Ocean littoral is therefore not coincidental: it was a logical copy of the colonization of the Byzantine Empire’s insular possessions and an adequate response to the consequence of unequal bullion flows to the East, legitimized by a neo-mercantilist strategy propagated at home.15 If profits were to be made, the Europeans “simply” had to obtain naval bases and strategic locations from which they could hope to dominate the sea—and hence a very large segment of the trade routes. It is difficult to assess the amount of overland trade in comparison with the commodities exchanged by sea for this period, but since transportation over water was much cheaper, most commodities (especially bulk goods) were probably transported by ship (Krishna 2000:44). It may nevertheless be a gross exaggeration to claim that in Asia “already before 1400 long-distance trade went almost entirely maritime” (Wink 1988:43). After all, “a great deal of the trade volume with Central Asia was transmitted through pastoral nomads, who traversed the pastures between the Indus and Oxus rivers” (Gommans 1991:55). It seems equally doubtful that one can still claim, as Borsa (1990:9) does, that by the early seventeenth century the Europeans had already obtained a “dominant share of the inter-Asian trade.” The European share in Asiatic trade was probably up to 1800 only a minor one (Wink 1988:65). Despite the fact that the impact of overland trade should not be underestimated in certain areas (Sun 2000), there is some truth in the statement “whoever controlled the sea, controlled most of the trade” ( Jain 1990:90) within the Indian Ocean World-Economy, since Eastern Africa and Madagascar, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, and Southeast Asia were of course mostly linked to each other by maritime trade routes. The

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fact that the European share of Asian trade was still limited up to 1800, was primarily because of the Europeans’ incapability of effectively dominating all the major maritime trade routes, let alone any of the land routes. European attempts to control these trade routes and eventually engage in a systematic policy of colonization and conquest in the Indian Ocean region were not one smooth and steady process, but a very difficult and lengthy undertaking. Whereas in the early sixteenth century Cortes destroyed the Aztec Empire with only 600 men and 14 cannons, and Pizarro dismembered the much larger Inca Empire with even fewer men, the more formidable empires in the Indian Ocean were strong enough to withstand any invasion on this scale. Since, from the point of view of the Europeans, the South Asian hinterland consisted of an open frontier which could not easily be remolded and incorporated into an exploitable periphery due to the enormous military capabilities of the Safavid, Mughal, and Vijayanagar states, the outright conquest and colonization (as it was brought about in the Atlantic islands and Brazil) could not seriously be considered (Subrahmanyam 1988:139–140). A mixture of peaceful trading by individuals and usage of collective military force to obtain money (e.g., through the imposition of a passport system in the Indian Ocean) was relied on to make profit. To succeed in the latter, an almost monopolistic control over the usage of violence over the most widely used maritime trade routes was a sine qua non that had to be achieved.16 What is of major importance here is that the European strategies to dominate the seas were much facilitated by the fact that “even under favorable circumstances Asian rulers were not always able to defend their merchants against attacks at sea” (Labh 1996:9). More importantly, on an aggregate level, was the dire reality that in South Asia there did not exist “a central power strong enough to exert any sort of political influence over overseas countries” (Coedès 1964:12). This was a determining factor for Asian merchants in the long run. Without the limited naval strength of Asian governments, the European chartered companies would of course never have been capable of imposing the cartaz system on them (Pearson 1987a) and enabling their compatriots to plunder South Asian vessels.As a corollary, South Asian merchants’ demands for full compensation for losses suffered at the hands of European pirates “turned out to be unenforceable because of the superior naval strength of the European companies” (Prakash 1979:47) even at the time of the Mughal Empire. In other words, it was possible for South Asian polities to retaliate against European merchants whenever they appeared to trade on the mainland, but it was fundamentally impossible for them to retaliate directly against the countries that financed and directed major military naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean in the first place. Aside from the successful use of force by European companies that internalized their protection costs (Steensgaard 1974), the companies also had a considerable advantage in their “ability to gather information and to survey the situation in the whole of Asia (and in Europe as well) [enabling them] to compare market conditions in Amsterdam,Taiwan and Persia” (Van Santen 1991:93).


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This was of course also a fundamental disadvantage for Asian merchants. Chaudhuri (1985:15) calls this phenomenon an enigma: the successive political Dynasties of the Indian subcontinent were fully occupied in upholding their political and economic power over unbroken terra firma and never seriously considered overseas colonial ventures as logical corollaries of sea borne trade. India of course had a crucial role in Indian Ocean commerce, not only in terms of geographical contours but also in terms of the overall volume and the value of the commodities exchanged. [This makes] the Indian lack of interest in sea power in the pre-modern era distinctly enigmatic. [. . .] the large territorial kingdoms of India, with their capital cities far from the sea, showed no real interest in maritime mastery. The “enigma” Chaudhuri refers to disappears, however, when one takes into account why the nobility’s option to use the power of the state to construct a huge navy and ward off European attacks, was never implemented.This is of course related to the fact that it was not in their proper interest to do so. Although in South Asia some noblemen and even the Mughal Emperors themselves occasionally participated in commercial activities (Chandra 1987), the majority of revenues had always been derived from the land (Wink 1988:54; Palat 1988:318).17 This was not particularly exceptional about Northern South Asia (the heartland of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire). In Southern South Asia (Palat 1988:71), Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire as well, “land remained their principal resource and customs duties were only a minor item in the state budget” (Wink 1988:57). This is in sharp contrast with thirteenth century England,18 but even more so with a medieval European city state, whose policies were explicitly designed to increase revenue from trade19 and which, because of its institutional autonomy, could limit the extortion by local rulers (Borsa 1990:10). In 1293 the return of taxes derived from Genoa’s sea trade alone “postulated a taxable income of nearly 4 million Genoese pounds, roughly ten times the receipts of the French royal treasury for the preceding year” (Lopez 1975:45). One should therefore keep in mind that “the possibility of harnessing large agrarian surpluses meant that in contrast to the historical experience of early modern Europe, where political authorities and commercial entrepreneurs were tied to each other in a symbiotic alliance, state-builders in late medieval South Asia were less dependent on merchant-financiers for the resources needed to maintain their coercive forces” (Palat and Wallerstein 1999:39–40). This does not imply, however, that one should recreate an ideal-typical dichotomy between dynamic “mercantilist” trading states on the one hand and static agrarian “inward” looking states with anti-mercantile practices on the other hand (Matthee 1999:89). This is unfortunately a recurrent theme in Western social science. An ideal-typical model of “absolutist government,”

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which stifles economic growth, is juxtaposed with a “democratically oriented” state model that fosters economic growth, which in itself is then presented as a precondition for the Industrial Revolution (De Long and Shleifer 1993). As in Western Europe, rural overlords in South Asia stimulated the economic growth of agricultural productivity and commerce in various ways (Sastri 1966:328–333). Both the Delhi Sultanate and the Cola state created and supported multiple infrastructural projects (e.g., highways, inns, roads, bridges, canals, aqueducts, dams, water tanks, and other irrigation facilities), which considerably facilitated the increase of commerce (Habib 1982:83–84; Nizami 1985:90; Karashima 1984:20), and attempted to provide a certain measure of safety for itinerant merchants. In the Delhi Sultanate this was achieved by hunting down robbers and extortionists (Sarkar 1978:20) while constructing police and postal departments (Sinha and Ray 1986:234). The commercial benefits of safe traveling in a large empire should not be underestimated (Lewis 1976:461), although political stability was less guaranteed than in China.The Vijayanagar Empire also stimulated artisan and commodity production to increase state revenue (Chibber 1998:20). Mercantilism was, however, less capable of being implemented in South Asia by its merchant class since—with the exception of the Southeast Asian (city) states such as Malacca (Reid 1993:71–73)—it failed to create institutional structures from where it could wield significant power. As Hall and Spencer (1980:147) put it: “[In South Asia] there was no widespread sociopolitical urban ‘movement’ comparable to that of medieval Europe, no emergent burgher class which directly confronted and undermined existing patters of urban and rural overlordship.” Quite indicative of the latter is that the town—countryside distinction, so characteristic of Western Europe, did not apply to South Asia at all (Chattopadhyaya 1994:181–182).This does of course not imply that South Asian merchants were “passive”: the larger merchant organizations 20 performed important functions since they were “entrusted by kings and royal officials with the collection of taxes, dues, tolls, [. . .] and looked after religious establishments [while] even arbitrating in disputes of a more special type” (Wijetunga 1968:506–507). Even more important was their maintenance of armed troops (sometimes labeled mercenaries) to protect their property while traveling across large distances throughout the entire Indian Ocean area (Spencer 1976:413; Abraham 1988:78). Last but not least, merchant “regiments” participated in the plundering expeditions of the South Asian polities by assisting “regular” royal troops so that upon their return they could share their booty with their merchant associates (Hall 1980:193). Nevertheless, these “large collegial bodies of merchants” remained overall “subordinated” to imperial [Cola] power (Palat 1988:85), to a degree unparalleled in late medieval Western Europe. Wealth, generated from raiding and plunder, was a permanent feature inherent to the process of empire formation in the South Asian subcontinent (Spencer 1976, 1983):21 the need of the Delhi Sultanate to defend itself against continuous nomadic (e.g., Mongol) invasions (Wink 1997:202–211),


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constituted a necessity of raiding the outer fringes of the empire: the spoils of war constituted a significant part of state income (Sinha and Ray 1986:280) with sporadic attempts at incorporating the weaker parts into the state structure or at least at imposing a tributary status over neighboring states and tribal formations (Jackson 1999;Wink 1997:158). Still, aside from the importance of these raids, and the slow but steady growth of the monetary economy of the Delhi sultanate (Chandra 1997:161), “the main source of the state’s income [remained] land revenue which generally averaged one-fifth of the total produce” (Sinha and Ray 1986:280). In addition, the growth of the urban economy, though substantial, was heavily characterized by slave labor (Habib 1978:297), and not based on a putting out-production system as in Western Europe.22 Thus, unlike European polities, income generated by (occasional) plunder and tribute and (more regular) taxes on land, were factually much more important than taxes derived from commerce (Thapar 1966:206), which in turn had profound consequences on state policies and economic “development” in the long run (Habib 1980:38). Essentially, the failure of a unified empire that spanned the entire South Asian subcontinent thus caught the area into a particular conundrum: on the one hand it was unable to provide merchants a long-term protection as in the Chinese case, on the other hand, cities’ autonomies were quite limited, and unable to compete with the military strength of the powerful rural aristocracy (nattar; chittiramëli), which through its crystallization into Nadus (Heitzman 1997:16), managed to control the local nagarams (market centers).The power of the rural nobility therefore resulted in the long run always in attempts to create their own dynasty or vigorously oppose formal incorporation into the imperial structure, especially whenever a form of imperial overextension occurred (Palat 1988:86), which because of the nature of imperial claims, was bound to happen in polities that make a claim to the construction of a “world-empire.” Basically one cannot get around the reality that in South Asia “imperial expansion was primarily agrarian expansion” (Heesterman 1991:40) and that the lack of political and military power of the mercantile class weakened its capacities when more and more European intruders poured in, backed up from their bases at home. It may very well have been that South Asian merchants from the Coromandel Coast could compete successfully with different European joint-stock companies “as long as they were able to operate in freedom and stability” (Arasaratnam 1986:143). But this caveat was bound to be challenged by European merchants who precisely—and systematically—attempted to create a coercive business environment through the “judicious use of violence” (Prakash 1998:82) that precisely facilitated the implementation of “monopolistic claims.” This, in turn, would bring them in a position to dictate prices in their own interest. The above-mentioned bullion flows and disinterest in European commodities by Asians themselves, made it painstakingly clear for European merchants that profits could not be made by trading peacefully.

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As Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote to the directors of the VOC in 1614,“Your Honours should know that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of Your Honours’ own weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade; so that we can not carry on trade without war, nor war without trade” (Reynolds 1974:145). Not surprisingly, the systematic militarization of the Indian Ocean basin and the subsequent territorial conquests of strategic points across the Ocean’s littoral constituted a logical policy of profit-seeking European merchants (Heesterman 1991:46). In the South Asian case, the clear lack of interest in naval warfare and the various state-mechanisms, as well as the geopolitical choices available, have to be explained by a major variable in history, which cannot be ignored: the role of pastoral nomadism. Nomadic attacks not only constantly threatened the Chinese Empire, but in South Asia, nomadic incursions on the Northwestern frontier constituted a formidable threat as well (Chandra 1997:19–73). The well-known “tribal breakouts” of the early eighteenth century that had enormous repercussions for Central Asia from the Safavid Empire to the Mughal Empire in South Asia itself (Bayly 1988), were of course not an isolated phenomenon of that particular century. On the contrary, they were a permanent feature of interaction within Central Asia, while Western Europe never had to deal with them after the invasions of the Magyars in the tenth century (Crone 1989:150;Wink 1997:24). Although an artificial dichotomy between “civilized” agrarian states and “barbarian” nomads in constant enmity which other would be misleading, since both needed each other for an exchange of the commodities which each had to sell, one can not ignore the fact that many of their interactions occurred in a rather hostile way: the role of the tribes in the spectacular destruction of states (e.g., Sung China) is just one example. But the attempts of states to annihilate tribes should not be forgotten either. On many occasions, the political authorities of strong Asian states hoped “to force or induce [nomads] to settle down permanently or to expel them beyond the state jurisdiction” (Chaudhuri 1990:266).While the latter was sometimes a temporary possibility, in South Asia, Iran, and to a certain extent even China, the durability of tribal structures in the steppe and on the frontier of the empires made it for the states very difficult to absorb them “so that traditional states responded by leaving them alone, the combination of tribal resistance and lack of material resources in the relevant areas making it pointless for them to attempt more than minimal control; and so the tribes were left to further develop their tribal way of life” (Crone 1993:367), while constantly interacting and intervening with the empires around which they were situated. Granted, the interaction occurred in both peaceful and hostile ways, depending on the historical context, but the point is that a permanent pacification of the perilous frontier was impossible for the state polities surrounding Central Asia. State polities were simply not strong enough to subdue tribes around them indefinitely, but conversely, when nomadic invasions took over a state by outright conquest (as the Mongols


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in China), this did not solve the problem either: as Saunders (1977:59) pointed out “pure nomadism could never hold an empire” and thus the nomads’ absorption into sedentary society was a sine qua non if they wanted to control it continuously (as in the case of the Yuan Dynasty).Yet when they did remain “in the conquered land, they fell victim to the process of socioeconomic and political differentiation that they escaped at home and merged with the conquered population; but those who stayed at home remained tribesmen, meaning that the process could start again” (Crone 1993:367).23 An alternative was some form of coalition between a state structure on the one hand and one or more tribal formations on the other hand, during the process of “empire building.”The case of Tamerlane in Transoxiana in the early fifteenth century or Nadir Shah in Persia in the early eighteenth century, are striking examples. These coalitions were however always very temporary and often broke apart at the death of the sovereign who created them. More structurally, tribal formations did not make excellent governments either, as they were rather “oblivious to the long-term demands of the central government” (Crone 1993: 370), and a coalition could only be a temporary one, as long as bounty and plunder were available nearby and the violence that tribal formations were capable of generating could be successfully channeled outside the state structure that provided the very basis for the coalition. The very profitable overland trade from South Asia toward Central Asia was of course unimaginable without these nomads operating in the area, being attracted by the richness of the South Asian peninsula. “In their capacity as potential participants in Indian sovereignty and wealth, they did not remain idle behind their Hindu Kush mountain strongholds [. . .] It should not surprise us that the official Afghan accounts prefer their eagerness for the jihad against the kuffar of Hind (India) as the main motive behind migration, although even the classic Khulasat al-Ansab makes mention of the temptation of the rich Indian bait, referring to gismat-abkhwur (share of fortune)” (Gommans 1991:55). The constant nomadic threat Northern South Asia experienced is illustrated by the Ghaznavids, the Turkish Ghurids, who captured Lahore in 1186 and Delhi in 1193 (Wolpert 2000:108), and also by the strength of the Mongols. From the reign of Sultan Iltutmish (1211–1236) who was confronted with the danger from Afghanistan (as it was occupied by the Mongols), as well as under sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din Balban (1266–1287) who had to fend them off, the nomadic threats were very serious indeed (Jackson 1999). The permanent danger on the South Asian northwestern frontier and the ensuing campaigns (Chaudhuri 1990:274–275) gradually increased and threatened Delhi itself under Sultan ‘Ala-ud-Din (1296–1316), most notably in the period 1296–1308, and even in 1327 under the reign of the most powerful Sultan Mohammed Ibn Tughluq (Sinha and Ray 1986:240). These attacks, however, did not hinder the formal expansion of the Sultanate of Delhi, as ‘Ala-ud-Din was capable of conquering Gujarat (1297), Rajasthan

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(1301–1312) and of imposing tribute on several Hindu kingdoms in Southern South Asia (1307–1312) (Wolpert 2000:114). Yet the multiple raids of the Sultans of Delhi against Hindu princes in the Deccan, as far South as Tamilnadu, under Muhammad ibn Tughluq (1325–1351), cannot be separated from the nomadic element either. The permanent military efforts against the Mongols implied an urgent need for cash, and this was easily obtained from plundering expeditions in the southern part of the peninsula (Jackson 1999:123–147). Thus, the southward expansion of the Sultanate under both ‘Ala-ud-Din and ibn Tughluq (Sinha and Ray 1986:226–244) should be understood, not only within the internal dynamics of empire formation (as temporarily a second capital was built in the Deccan), but also because of the need for easily obtainable booty and rewards for regular state armies of the Sultanate which had to defend it from Mongol attacks (Jackson 1999) which—ironically—often recruited Mongol prisoners of war into their ranks (Chaudhuri 1990:275). During the reign of Ibn Tughluq, the Sultanate of Delhi achieved its largest territorial expansion. In the last years of his life, however, this gradual expansion came rapidly to an end: wars on too many fronts shattered the empire as the Deccan became independent again in the period 1330–1347 due to Hindu opposition (Wolpert 2000:118). The power of the Delhi Sultanate in Northern South Asia was ultimately broken by the successful nomadic invasion of the Mongols under Timur, who sacked Delhi itself (1398–1399). This destruction enabled large areas such as Gujarat of becoming independent once again (Wolpert 2000:119). In the short run the Lodi dynasty (1451–1526), itself from Afghan descent, was capable of recovering some terrain for the Sultanate because of largescale immigration from Afghanistan, but the same waves of nomadic immigrants that initially militarily strengthened the sultanate also caused its demise: multiple rebellions by these forces eventually brought about a new invasion by a descendent of Timur, the Mongol (Mughal) Babur, who— after having been expelled from his homeland nearby Samarkand by other nomadic forces—profited from the situation to launch a major campaign from Afghanistan that destroyed the Lodi dynasty in the Battle of Panipat on April 21, 1526. The attempts to unify the entire South Asian continent (mainly under Ibn Tughluq) in the early fourteenth century—as well as under Aurangzeb in the late seventeenth century—ultimately failed since the Empire never succeeded in forcing upon the powerful Hindu nobility an exclusive claim of allegiance. Permanently threatened by nomadic invasions from Afghanistan and Lahore in the period 1200–1530 and facing strong Rajput resistance against the imposition of tributary relations in the Southern part of the peninsula, the Sultans were unable to create a strong and enduring centralized empire.The failure of the Sultanate under Ibn Tughluq in creating such a firm centralized polity resulted in political fragmentation remaining “the norm in central and southern India” (McPherson 1993:107). The multiple different state polities thus continued to be strong enough to create a balance of power and keep each other’s growth in check.


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In the traditional Marxist historiography, South Asia’s sphere of the market must have been limited as it had to exemplify the stereotypical—or rather ironically ideal typical—precapitalist society (Subhramanyam 1994:7). The imagery of such a state, traditionally defined by “Oriental Despotism” or “Asiatic Mode of Production,” clearly has to be relegated to history’s dustbin as was brilliantly pointed out by O’ Leary (1989) in his scathing critique of both Marxists and other Orientalists. Historical materialism, however, should in my opinion not be discarded, but saved from the recent reappraisals of cultural or religious frameworks in explaining the rise of the West (e.g., Lal 1998) or subsequently the non-rise of a non-Western society (cf. Morris 1967). There is no point in having the image of contemporary India being projected back into the past and declaring that they could not have developed in the long run because of their cultural values. But at this point the question has to be raised as to why it was ultimately the Europeans who were capable of colonizing and underdeveloping India, and not the other way around.The answer—in my opinion— lies not in the much-discussed events of 1757 or 1857. It is the extremely important prelude to the drama of de facto colonial annexation and the context that made peripheralization possible—which is mostly ignored. As Crone (1989:15) points out correctly, in most preindustrial societies, the “vast majority of people had to be peasants” and its overall economic growth was generally limited and not recurrent. Yet peripheralization changed this conundrum. A systematic policy of colonization and imposed deindustrialization of the periphery (Habib 1985) precisely enabled Western powers to achieve long-term economic growth. This does of course not imply that the production and the export of “raw materials” (e.g., agricultural commodities) could not be very lucrative in the short run. In different years of the long sixteenth century the trade balance between Eastern Europe and Western Europe was negative for the latter. This is where the importance for the longue durée comes into the picture: producing commodities with a higher value added and selling them to peripheral areas was a much more successful economic strategy in the long run, as the relation between Western Europe and Eastern Europe testifies. The failure or success of imperial and colonial conquests—rather than misguided debates on failures to (proto)industrialization (Perlin 1983)— should be taken into account. One of the crucial features of polities in the South Asian peninsula was precisely the strong position of the rural nobility. Especially the succession to the throne in South Asian polities was problematic: as the Mongol Empire experienced inherent succession problems whenever a Khan died (Fletcher 1986), the South Asian peninsula also suffered from conflicts and instabilities due to endless power struggles between the king and his lineal descendants attempting to centralize the state, and their collateral relatives desiring to preserve their entitlements over parts of the state.This “lack of strict rules of succession” also applied to the Indianized Southeast Asian polities (Hagesteijn 1989:112), and although one should not exaggerate the negative impact of warfare as compared to Western Europe’s feudal military chaos, the constantly recurring centrifugal

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tendencies in South Asia were quite a destabilizing factor in successful empire formation ( Veluthat 1993:19; Pouchepadass 1996:706–707). More importantly, since the nobility’s armies were generally much larger than in Europe ( Jackson 1999:239–240) they could not only inflict more damage 24 but were also capable of preventing the merchant class from obtaining institutionalized power. Essentially, “the world of mercantile capital occupied a subordinate position” in the “temple urbanism of South India” (Heitzman 1997:115). In Vijayanagar the nayankara system, in which prominent commanders received land grants and privileged status as Nayakas (local lords or governors), resembled some sort of military feudalism on the fringes of the imperial polity.This appeared to function quite smoothly when the central authority was strong, but provided territorial bases for the Nayakas to build semi-independent hereditary holdings in times of imperial weakness, for instance during an inevitable succession crisis (Karashima 1992:72). The imperial rulers were of course aware of the power of the provinces and tried to counter it by appointing members of the royal family as governors of the militarily more important (but not necessarily more lucrative) provinces. On the whole, however, the device was not successful because succession rivalries, as in the northern Muslim kingdoms, tended to produce filial disloyalty to the throne and even rebellion (Wink 1984). Though it is now easy to discard the model of “Oriental Despotism”— partially because it has so few proponents left to defend it—the political entities mired in succession disputes should not be dismissed as fundamentally “weak” either. It is questionable to what extent Stein’s (1985) model of the segmentary state is applicable to the South Asian peninsula, as it depicts rulers as exercising their authority in pure ritual and symbolic rather than in political terms (Wisseman-Christie 1986:68).25 Geertz’s (1980) model of the Southeast Asian political structures goes even beyond that of the segmentary state.What makes Geertz’s (1962:375–376) assessments even more suspect is the depiction of Asian trade as “splendid and trifling.” These statements are not only factually incorrect (Wisseman-Christie 1986:69; Kathirithamby-Wells 1990), but this anthropological approach tends to depict South Asian polities as almost stateless (Kulke 1986:4; Chattopadhyaya 1995:225), implicitly referring to the European state formation process as something uniquely dynamic, while relegating the South-Asian historical experience as one in which castes were more important than states (Inden 1990:208–209). The subsequent depiction of a homo anthropologicus, and especially in South Asia a homo hierarchicus (e.g., Dumont 1970), as a fundamentally different human being from the European homo economicus is quite a deplorable outcome of this line of reasoning (Subrahmanyam 1996:22–23). Although forms of ritual sovereignty (in the Cola and Vijayanagar Empires) did exist (Stein 1985:396), one has to be careful in their assessment (Thakur 1989:xxii–xxiii) 26 so one does not reconstruct an artificial “supposed duality between materialist and spiritualist civilizations” (Thapar 2000:51). As Kulke (1995:43) points out: “existence of ritual policy and ritual sovereignty was an important partial aspect of genuine policy rather than a substitute of it.”


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The development of the early modern South Asian state is therefore an important variable in the explanation of its different socioeconomic trajectory in the long run. But a consensus on its nature is by no means to be found in the existing academic literature. Since the Asiatic mode of production has but few defenders left, most of the (theoretically informed) debates revolve around the acceptance of “Indian feudalism” (Sharma 1965, 1995; Yadav 1973, 1974; Thakur 1989) within a Marxist historiography, the acceptance of the above-mentioned segmentary state (Stein 1980) or a variant (of the relatively weak state model) in the patrimonial state, inspired by Max Weber. Most Indian historians have problems “imposing” a European (or African) model on the South Asian experience (e.g., Subrahmanyam 1986:375) and many are keen to point out the impossibility of coming up with one model for the South Asian subcontinent because of its inherent diversity.Any “received” model (especially one not originating from the Indian world of academics) is therefore prone to attacks from specialists defending the “uniqueness” of their respective region of specialization as if it were a chasse guardée (e.g., Subrahmanyam 2001:93, 98).The corollary of providing no theoretical alternative whatsoever (aside from a “let one thousand micro-studies bloom” narrative) is to be deplored, since it implies a (therefore not implicitly applauded) return to a form of histoire événementielle (Bois 1995). Given the paucity of data available for this period, it is of course difficult to present an “ideal-typical” model of an early modern Asian state polity, which is why so few historians are eager to give it a try. Nevertheless, some important issues regarding state formation and its impact on long term socioeconomic development have to be scrutinized. A necessary corollary of the (alleged) fundamental weakness of the early modern South Asian state polity in the segmentary state model above implied that (unlike Western European powers) South Asian states were not powerful enough to impose a form of peripheralization in conquered territories:“the emphasis upon long-distance plundering expeditions [most notable of the Cola state into the Bengal and Southeast Asia in the eleventh century and Ceylon] must have been largely compensatory, offsetting a weakly integrated political system [. . .] these expeditions were nothing more but brief raids” (Spencer and Hall 1974:59). Therefore, mere “lucrative military escapades” such as those of the Colas (Heitzman 1997:235), or those in South East Asia (Hagesteijn 1989:59, 91), though grandiose at first sight, were rather limited in creating any dependencies, as they were the outcome of a relatively weak state formation in the first place. At the very best they could lead to (temporary) forms of nominal (ritual) claims of sovereignty and to occasional tribute from the intimidated areas (Spencer and Hall 1974:59). In a sense the temporary predatory expansions of the Cola kings have to be understood as central to the problematic constraints inherent to the South Asian state in this period, as these campaigns provided a “direction of common enterprise among the diverse elements of a markedly decentralized socio-political system” (Spencer 1976:406).

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But what is most important here, is not so much the characterization or the attributed functions of the South Asian polity (Inden 1990:265), but rather: who was “in control” of the state apparatus, using it to achieve certain ends? The image of South Asian development being “trapped” in a fundamentally weak state polity is of course as erroneous a depiction of historical reality as the traditional Western imagery of Oriental Despotism (a ruler having absolute power), portraying “Indian civilization as being static, despotic in its orientation and outside the mainstream of relevant world history” (Thapar 2000:6).The reality lies probably somewhere in between: a powerful state, with a relatively well-organized central administration (Subbarayalu 1982:295–301; Karashima 1984; Palat 1988:440 and Heitzman 1995:174 on the Colas), especially in the case of Vijayanagar, which—unlike the Colas—was capable of gradually weakening the local power of the nobility (the nattar) by undermining the nadu (its collective body) in the countryside (Chibber 1998). This also applies to the North where the Delhi Sultanate was capable of maintaining “a strong standing army, centrally recruited, centrally administered and centrally paid” (Nizami 1985:73). In Western Europe, however, monarchical dynasties had to battle city-states, but were unable to do so effectively (ca. 1200–1450) until the increasing economies of scale, territorial enlargement and military innovations enabled them to accumulate more power. The early modern South Asian polity was similarly restrained, but was facing the organized local nobility (nattar) in their nadu (Chibber 1998:24). As in the emerging Western European polities, the resisting elites in the local territories had to be effectively incorporated into their state structure, providing (and appeasing) them with offices, functions, annuities and a new form of status, thus attempting to make them accept the newly imposed sovereignty in the short run, and to make them dependent on the enlarged state polity in the long run (Chibber 1998:28). In Europe, this process eventually succeeded, but it were the urban merchants who were capable of grafting themselves into the power structures of the most important capitalist states (Isaacs and Prak 1996).27 In the South Asian continent, however, despite long entrenched practices of taxfarming being handed out to the nobility, the polities were not capable of obtaining a long lasting allegiance from the upper social strata to a particular “imperial” state (or dynasty) (Richards 1993:294).As a corollary,“most Southeast Asian supraregional political systems lacked organic solidarity [and] continual coercive power” (Hagesteijn 1989:141, 144). Although the development of a coherent supraregional power was much more successful on the South Asian subcontinent than in Southeast or Central Asia, the policy of granting prebendial territorial assignments (iqta) on a temporary basis, and the transfer of the holders of these assignments (muqtis or walis) to collect the kharaj (land tax), ghari (house tax), and charai (cattle tax) in the Delhi Sultanate (Habib 1978:295–296) did not prevent the relatively rapid fracturing and disintegration of the state, once external pressures became too strong (Heitzman 1997:218).28 A similar (but improved)


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assignment of jagirs in a highly elaborate rank (mansab) system by the Mughal Dynasty did not fare much better:“the mansabdari system did not remove its structural weakness: a strictly enforced temporariness of the jagir assignments led to a nearly unlimited exploitation of peasants, and thus to agrarian unrest and social crisis” (Kulke 1995:32).29 And since in the long run the state was not capable of maintaining the temporariness of the jagir assignments, “the ensuing heritability of territorial assignments was bound to lead sooner or later to a fragmentation of political authority” (Kulke 1995:32).30 Similarly in the South, the “iqta system was adopted mutatis mutandis by the Vijayanagar emperors as the nayankara system” (Kulke 1995:32), described above. Thus in both the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries and in the seventeenth century, peasant rebellions caused by heavy taxation (Stein 1985:401; Nandi 1987:274–275; Palat 1987) occurred on such a scale that they contributed to the breakdown of the various South Asian “imperial” systems (Habib 1985:49). Chibber’s (1998) ultimate dismissal of South Asia’s failure to experience a transition to capitalism, hinges however upon the dubious assertion that South Asian peasants were not market-oriented and were fundamentally averse to any risk. Equally unconvincing is his position that “increases in artisan production were propelled by elite consumption and therefore incapable of generating an endogenously driven growth trajectory” (1998:32), as if the overwhelming majority of produced textiles were not exported throughout the entire Indian Ocean region.What seems more convincing is the crucial fact that merchants were kept outside the structures of institutionalized power and decision-making processes.31 Their power ultimately transformed Western Europe into a core area within an expanding global axial division of labor. The South Asian merchants’ lack of power within the South Asian continent is illustrated by their weak control over the labor process in the textile industry (Palat 1988:263), in contrast with mercantile power in Western Europe (Mielants 2000). Arasaratnam (1980:267), studying eighteenth century India, presents evidence that weavers who had received cash advances for their work (as most of them did) retained considerable control over the production process—which is confirmed by Parthasarathi (1996:97): “Both [Indian] weavers and merchants were free to cancel the contracts at any time. But while the weaver bore no cost for canceling (he simply had to return the advance to the merchant) the merchant forfeited his advance if he canceled [. . .] weavers possessed the freedom to accept advances at will and sell completed cloth to any buyer [which] gave [them] great power to set cloth prices, which, naturally, adversely affected merchant profits. The asymmetry of contract also made it difficult for merchants to enforce cloth quality standards [. . . and] the lack of institutionalized and legally enforced systems for debt repayment made it extremely difficult for merchants to recover debts.” In conclusion, Parthasarathi (1996:98) states that in the eighteenth century “merchants were excluded from the state within the south Indian political order. Unlike many parts of Europe where the economic power of

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merchants was supplemented by political power, in south India merchants had no access to the powers of the state.” Even Subrahmanyam and Bayly, the most ardent defenders of South Asian political and economic dynamism right up to the early nineteenth century, have to admit that in South Asia “there is little evidence to show that merchant guilds controlled production or defined and defended regions of mercantile activity against rivals” (1988:406). Both Ramaswamy (1985b:81, 144) and Hall (1980:115) remain rather noncommittal about the existence of a putting out system.The latter nonetheless states that under the Colas “there is no evidence that merchants exercised wage controls over artisans or for that matter that production standards were set or that fines were levied for poor craftsmanship.” Alavi (1982:49) is even more specific:“the relationship between the creditor and the weaver inherent in the Indian system is quite distinct from that of the putting out system in England where the merchant was directly involved in the purchase and provision of materials and even equipment (that he often hired) to weavers [. . . whereas in India] with the system of cash advances there was no such involvement by the merchant in the organization of production and provision of materials and equipment.” Although the political and—especially financial—power of early modern South Asian “portfolio capitalists” should not be underestimated, merchants who wielded significant political power should be seen as an exception rather than the rule, as the absence of European type putting out systems demonstrates (Pearson 1998:102). In Western Europe, however, the combination of merchants’ growing power over the proletariat at home, due to a highly unusual alliance between the state and the bourgeoisie (Crone 1989:167) and subsequent increasing revenues due to a financial windfall by colonial conquests overseas—first in the Mediterranean and eventually in the New World— explains why Western European “core” polities were capable of eventually achieving world domination. This explanation does not replicate “the image of the eternal East, as a counterpoint to the vibrant, dynamic and therefore dominant Occident” (Chakravarti 1998:98).32 It is erroneous to present world-systems analysis as a theory that regards Asia as a “traditional and stagnant economy” (Subrahmanyam 1996:24). It is on the contrary important to emphasize that when the Portuguese intrusion in the Indian Ocean occurred, the greatest commercial expansion of the South Asian state polities still had to begin, and European dominance did not manifest itself in Indian Ocean waters until the late seventeenth century at the very earliest, and only in a very limited number or areas. European colonial supremacy in East and South Asia or the “great divergence” as Pomeranz (2000) coined it, is by some considered as a relatively recent (early nineteenth century) phenomenon, and therefore viewed as nothing more than a footnote in history (e.g., Frank 1998). Yet the traditional focus on the (often claimed endogenous) Industrial Revolution as the watershed event that brought about the colonization of the world by European powers, seems to me a misguided one. It is because of the European bourgeoisie’s


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successes in achieving institutionalized power33 that a systematic peripheralization of the external arena occurred. Obstinately refusing to admit similarities between colonial (and imperial) encroachment in Asia and elsewhere, because of a blind belief in historical uniqueness, leads to the idea that the Western powers accidentally ruled most of the world up till the mid-twentieth century.34 The fact that Europeans eventually achieved dominance over the maritime trade routes in the Indian Ocean and hegemony over East Asia, does not imply, however, that Asians were “static.” There is no question that, from the vantage point of the longue durée “Asia and not Europe was the leading maritime continent of the world” (Chakravarti 1998:99) and that the merchants engaged in it were not “mere peddlers” as once was claimed by European scholars (Pearson 1987b).Thus, Pomeranz (2000) is of course correct in claiming that the scale of trade networks and the multitude of exchanged goods and the wealth accumulated in urban centers in Asia, are dazzling when compared to Europe throughout most of the pre-nineteenth century era.Which is all the more surprising why Europeans—a minority of the world population to this very day—were capable of dominating Asian trade routes and eventually colonizing most of the continent. From the medieval sugar plantations in the Mediterranean to the slave plantations of the New World, from the construction of a social division of labor between core and periphery embodied in the city-state and its countryside (as well as its outright insular colonies in the case of the Mediterranean) to the systematic construction of a periphery by core nation states after the long sixteenth century, the external arena has always been remolded, by sheer force, into an exploitable area for its raw material resources (Mielants 2000). The question Brenner (1989:33) poses: “can merchant capital, by itself, induce pre-capitalist economic actors to adopt capitalist rules of reproduction?” must be answered with a resounding “no.” One merely has to look at the massive accumulation of capital by non-European merchants under the Chinese Empire and in the South Asian peninsula or elsewhere during the Pax Mongolica.What was different about Europe, was merchants’ power, institutionalized in city-states, estates, and nation-states, which enabled them to forge coalitions with the lower nobility and the monarchy to implement strategies of capital accumulation which in the long run brought about a context of trade based on exploitation and unequal exchange.35 The fact that Smithianism (North and Thomas 1973) is unconvincing in depicting the rise of trade and the unfolding of benign contractual relationships during the expansion of a capitalist system, as if everyone will benefit from it, does of course not imply that class warfare in a specific region is the “prime mover” either (Brenner 1989). Class struggles, as well as the increase of trade, are only variables in determining what kind of position a region will have in the expanding capitalist world-economy. Thus, the incorporation process of multiple areas from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century (when the entire globe had become an intrinsic

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part of the capitalist world-economy), was not a one-dimensional process. When, how, and why a certain zone became incorporated (and remolded into a periphery) depended not only on the strength of agencies wanting to create a capitalist structure that facilitates the ceaseless accumulation of capital, but also on the internal structures of the regions in the external arena.To avoid reifying an a-historical and a-temporal concept such as “the external arena” (as the Asiatic Mode of Production in Marxism), it is necessary to investigate the different regions closely, in all their complexity, in order to understand differences and similarities in the long run. Only then can one attempt to explain why capitalism originated in Europe, and not elsewhere. The transformation of agricultural rent in kind to that in rent in money was due to increased trade and growing markets, but this did of course not have a “liberating” effect everywhere. It depended primarily whether one was situated in the core or in the periphery of the European world-economy: in the area of the Low Countries, increased trade flows did generally result in this transformation.There, peasants used the presence of cities as a free haven to escape from extra-economic oppression imposed by landlords. By contrast, in the periphery of Eastern Europe, the nobility was capable of imposing ever harsher levies on the peasantry because the landlords themselves engaged in profitable trade with the core, as they guaranteed its urban belt primary necessities, such as grains, cattle stock, and timber (Gunst 1989:62). Therefore, the absence of a breakdown of feudal relations in Eastern Europe was not just a result of the outcome of class warfare between nobility and peasantry as orthodox Marxists claim. It was because the nobility could profit from increased trade from the periphery to the core, and because Eastern European merchants were primarily local middlemen, without significant institutional power in small cities, that the nobility was capable of imposing its own interests on the majority of the population through extra-economic coercion. In addition, these Eastern European cities “failed to generate any autonomous economic drive [. . .] none could be called a real town in the West European sense” (Gunst 1989:58), and none of them could develop into a political force to be reckoned with.36 In South Asia, by contrast, merchants lacked the institutionalized political power structures to effectively proletarianize their workers at home and effectively peripheralize other geographical areas within the Indian Ocean region. Although abundant city-states did exist across the littoral of the Indian Ocean—both on the East African coast (Pearson 1998) and in the Indonesian archipelago (Kathirithamby-Wells and Villiers 1990)— the European city-state, ruled by a coalition of merchant-entrepreneurs and noblemen, was a quite different entity. Despite the fact that city-states like Malacca and Hurmuz also controlled key nodes in maritime trade (Subrahmanyam 1995), they remained fundamentally different from those in Western Europe. Even Meilink-Roelofsz (1970:152–153) had to concede that the position of the mercantile community in


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Southeast Asia was “in no way comparable to that of the contemporary, late medieval merchant magnates of Europe. In Malacca as elsewhere in South-East Asia, the merchants were entirely at the mercy of the ruler, who could dispose capriciously of their property. Although merchants of SouthEast Asia sometimes were able to seize political power by means of force, they were bereft of all those autonomous rights and civil freedoms which are such an intrinsic feature of medieval European society and which exercised a definitive influence on the development of European politics.” Thus, as opposed to the Indian Ocean region, city states in the Western European region were capable of experiencing economic growth through an implemented strategy of capital accumulation at the expense of their hinterlands and multiple (semi)colonial peripheries, practices that were later on copied by mercantile states. The break-up of the Roman Empire and the parcellization of political power created a political vacuum in which ultimately autonomous urban enclaves could emerge. Although K. N. Sastri (1975:447–448) has been chastised for years by a multitude of scholars after once having had the audacity to compare the Cola state to the Byzantine Empire, I think the historical comparison is essentially correct in so far as one compares the Empire’s relation and subsequent subjugation to European city states on the one hand and South Asia’s relation and subsequent subjugation by European chartered companies on the other hand. At the risk of getting the same treatment, I believe it is relevant to quote Haldon (2000:107–108) at length: Leading elements [of Italian city states] were at the same time businessmen whose wealth and political power was often dependent as much on commerce as on rents [from the agricultural hinterland]. Therefore the economic and political interests of the leading and middling elements were identical with the interests of the city, its political identity and its independence of outside interference. State/communal and private enterprise were inseparable.The economic and political well being of the city-state was thus to a large extent coterminous with that of the social elite and its dependents.The Byzantine state, in contrast, played no role at all in promoting indigenous enterprise [. . .] and viewed commerce as simply another minor source of state income. Once nomadic incursions and tribal outbreaks outside or at the margins of the imperial polity disrupted the existing order, “the reduced income derived from the appropriation of surplus through a tax on a smaller and constantly shrinking territorial base; the fragmentation of territory and

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political authority; and the lack of serious naval power with which to defend its interests, were fundamental variables” (Haldon 2000:110) in the gradual destruction of the Empire. Despite a 500-year time lag and a different geographical zone, the processes in eighteenth century India seem structurally similar. Although Kieniewicz (1991:85) goes in my opinion too far in his depiction of the Indian Ocean regional economy as consisting of “small cargoes, small-scale but numerous contacts, and an intensity of meetings limited to a relatively narrow group of people [which indicates that] there is no sign that these societies integrated around the ocean” (cf. Palat and Wallerstein 1999),37 I do agree with his final analysis that the sixteenth century Indian Ocean system “was subordinated neither to any core of any worldeconomy, nor to the distant markets, not even to the traders dominating within them” (Kieniewicz 1991:86).This is a completely different statement. Although there was a marked increase in trade throughout the Pax Mongolica one has to disagree with Abu-Lughod (1989) in defining the entire zone as one “system.”Although the fourteenth century decline of the Pax was very important, it did not slow down commercialization in South Asia. So contrary to Abu-Lughod (1989), there is no evidence of socioeconomic decline in the fourteenth century in this particular region (Arasaratnam 1984:112–113). This implies that by 1400 there did not yet exist a single world economic system of which all world regions were an integral part, but that South Asia was a different historical system (Palat and Wallerstein 1999), in the sense that it was not capitalist. This does not mean that international trade within the Indian Ocean region or with other areas was consisted of mere luxuries (Perlin 1991:241). This was not even the case in medieval Europe (Mielants 2000), let alone in other areas of the world. In conclusion, much Eurocentric writing still remains to be revised. For instance, one should no longer depict Asian traders as mere peddlers 38 (Pearson 1987c:24–25), or look upon early modern Asian commodity flows as somehow less important in quantity or quality than those occurring elsewhere (especially in Europe).To a certain extent a “reorientation” is therefore justified (Frank 1998) in the sense that—at least from the vantage point of the Indian Ocean—(but not from the Caribbean, e.g.,) the world remained essentially polycentric up until the late eighteenth century. But the claim that Asia was therefore the center of some kind of worldeconomy (or world-system) from Time Immemorial up to A.D. 1800, as Andre Gunder Frank claimed throughout the 1990s, is something completely different: it essentially substitutes misguided Eurocentrism with misguided Sinocentrism or anachronistic Central Asianism (Krader 1992:116).Although both South Asia as well as East Asia were the final destination of massive bullion flows from Western Europe (and subsequent areas controlled by it), this does not imply that the former benefited significantly from this “drain” in the long run (Tucci 1981:125), since ultimately the Chinese or South Asian state polities did not attempt to create (let alone


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succeed in imposing) a highly exploitative capitalist system (of labor control) upon their respective peripheries (Pomeranz 2000:268, 289), because of different institutional features and social practices. Indeed, the main features of the global capitalist putting out system continue to exist up to this very day. Not wanting to minimize the significance of bullion-flows, they should not be interpreted as the “prime movers” of world history (Frank 1998). Nor should class struggle be interpreted as the major variable that enabled the great divergence to occur (Brenner 1989). Instead, the fundamentally different state polities outside Europe (and their respective social structures within) and how they related to each other, help us explain why it was not China or South Asia that ultimately “developed” at the expense of other regions (Mielants 2000, 2002). In this sense, one can only agree with Bayly (1988:19) that “the origins of the modern world system must be sought in Asia and Africa as much as in Europe.” Notes 1. In the thirteenth century, porcelain, cotton, and copper were brought on Gujarati, Arab, and Persian ships to Oman and the Persian Gulf and exchanged for African commodities (Varadarajan 1987:101). 2. Chandra (1997:169) claims that from the tenth century on, there was a revival of towns in north India, which can be related to concurrent monetization of the economy (Champakalakshmi 1995:289), as throughout the Indian Ocean new networks of exchange, formation of trade guilds and money production occurred (Chattopadhyaya 1995b:325). 3. According to Pearson (1987b:75) rice was traded by sea in the Bay of Bengal, in Indonesia and the west coast of India. 4. Especially textiles were exported from Gujarat to Malabar and China, but also metals, timber and cereals were frequent export commodities ( Jain 1990:98–104).Artisan production of handicraft articles, metal-working, and cloth production were important economic features in Southern South Asia (Heitzman 1997:219). Gujarati, Coromandel, and Bengal cloth was sold in substantial quantities to Malacca, Indonesia, and the Ryu Kyu islands (Das Gupta 1987:248). Opposing Stein (1982:42), Ramaswamy (1985b:70) claims that in this period the foreign trade in textiles was perhaps of greater importance than the internal trade. 5. Especially Chaudhuri (1985:63) stresses the fact that the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean abruptly ended the system of peaceful oceanic navigation in the region.Yet the peacefulness of the Indian Ocean prior to A.D. 1500 should not be exaggerated: there were after all pirate activities (Gunawardana 1987:84), especially near Indonesia and the Andaman islands (Krishna 2000:50). These were, however, of a different scale than the Portuguese efforts to monopolize and eventually tax maritime trade routes. Chaudhuri (1985:16) thus correctly points out that in Asia commercial traffic was in the hands of highly skilled professional merchants, who operated as private individuals with little substantive state support whereas in the Christian Mediterranean, with the rise of the Italian city states, the institutional basis of world trade underwent a new development. His most important statement is that the commercial rivalry between Genoa and Venice, and the Venetian encounters with the Muslim fleets fused together the interests of the merchants and the state, which according to him was reproduced later in Lisbon, Amsterdam and London. Some do claim that the Cola naval expeditions are an indication of state interest in foreign trade (e.g., Abraham 1988:130, 152). Nevertheless, the degree of mercantile influence in determining royal diplomacy and military intervention was very limited compared to Western Europe (Lewis 1976:469–470; Keay 2000:222). 6. A result of the nobility’s or the state’s increased revenue demands was usually an intensification of monetization and commercialization, as peasants were forced to sell their produce in order to pay their taxes (Hall 1999:442). This is a quite uniform phenomenon throughout the entire early modern world. 7. Another example of the mercantile city-state’s strength and the nobility’s weakness in Western Europe during the Middle Ages is illustrated by a comparison of the military capacities of the King

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of England and the city Firenze: the former could muster 3,000 knights and 25,000 infantry for war in Scotland in 1298, while the latter could mobilize 2,000 knights and 15,000 infantry for war against Lucca in 1325 (Mundy 2000:254). There were of course forms of institutionalized clusters of local communal and regional concentrations of power (e.g., the nadu or nagaram), or port city states (Malacca, Calicut, Hormuz) which had substantial autonomy (Pearson 1987:13; Subrahmanyam 1995) and in which the mercantile classes had some degree of administrative power (Hall 1978:83, 90), but these classes did not have the ambition or possibilities to funnel their energy in the enlargement of their territorial base (port city) at the expense of others. The European city state structure, characterized by its institutional autonomy, was absent from South Asia (Heesterman 1980:87). Consequently, there did not exist any merchant republic as in Europe (Bouchon and Lombard 1987:61). Although Balkh is not in South Asia, the Delhi Sultanate bore an indelible stamp of both Sassanian and Ghaznavid traditions (Nizami 1985:142–157), making Cook’s (1988) remarks quite relevant to my comparison. Although in South Asia certain mercantile towns were protected (e.g., erivirappattanas) and some itinerant trading communities were intrinsically linked with the existence of mercenary groups (Champakalakshmi 1995:289), it was not uncommon for the imperial forces (e.g., Colas) to station army units in big trading centers (Champakalakshmi 1995:292). In general, merchants’ institutionalized power vis-à-vis the nobility and the overlapping state polity was much more limited than in Western Europe. I want to emphasize that the Indian Ocean World economy was, despite its splendor, not a capitalist world-economy (Pearson 1988:61). Although South Asia is central to the Indian Ocean, its merchants did not “peripheralize” the areas they were trading with. Just like the misguided opinion of the Mughal governors in South Asia (Chaudhuri 1981:224). Although the Portuguese attempted to construct a complete monopoly, they only had a very tenuous hold over the spice trade, let alone other trades and far from breaking up the Straits system, they merely provoked the emergence of alternative Muslim trading centers in the area (Kieniewicz 1991:81).The rulers of large territorial states of South Asia, however, did not undertake any action to destroy the Portuguese intruders, as they did not constitute a serious threat to the aristocracy’s power in the region. Sino-European commerce especially boomed during the Pax Mongolica (Mielants 2002) but some European merchants also ventured far into South Asia (Reid 1999:161). This problem was of course not a new phenomenon, but was raised already in the thirteenth century by European merchants in East Asia (Lopez 1973:445). But at this point Europeans were of course completely unable to exercise any form of coercion in Asia. This would change when the first Europeans started to penetrate the Indian Ocean.The decline of the central Asian caravan trade and the increasing importance of the maritime routes after the breakdown of the Pax Mongolica (Reid 1999:64), followed by the political turmoil in Central Asia, raised overland transportation and protection costs considerably (Rossabi 1990). Ironically, this relative shift of land routes to maritime routes strengthened the European’s position in the geopolitical and commercial arena of the Indian Ocean. Guerreau (1996:99) observed correctly that the assimilation of commerce to war is one of the main features within mercantilist thought. I elaborate upon the parallel with the Byzantine Empire below. This was not a uniquely Portuguese strategy, or a sixteenth century one for that matter. Already in A.D. 1182 the French nobleman Renaud de Châtillon ordered the construction of seven galleys near Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba. From this base his ships raided the Red Sea area, and in A.D. 1182–1183 he was capable of raiding the Arabian coast near Aden, hoping to control the spice route to South Asia.The destruction of the Latin Kingdom in A.D. 1187 by Saladin, however, made an end to these early European attempts to penetrate the Indian Ocean (Mollat 1964:249–250), but they were clearly a harbinger of the events to come. Borsa (1990:11) claims that not more than 5 percent revenue in the Mughal Empire was derived from customs, even within Gujarat, where major ports were located. The main source of India’s wealth was agriculture and the proverbial fertility of her soil (Sinha and Ray 1986:283). In Southern South Asia as well, the mobilization of agricultural produce was the primary consideration of the elite, since wealth generated from artisan and mercantile activity was a necessary but not sufficient component (Heitzman 1997:235). According to (Risso 1995:42) the Delhi Sultanate derived its most dependable revenues from agricultural production and taxation [and] the selfsufficiency reduced the impulse toward long-distance maritime trade. Steensgaard (1987: 129) even


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claimed that at least up to the sixteenth century long-distance trade still remained marginal to the economies and empires around the Indian Ocean. Already under Edward I the royal revenue from dues of foreign merchants (paid in return for a license to trade with England), became about equal to the entire domanial revenue (Cazel 1966:104). This applies to the overwhelming majority of Western cities where on average 75 percent to 80 percent of all incomes were derived from indirect taxes on trade and consumption (Boone 1989:113).This in sharp contrast with the so-called agrarian “rice cultures” in Asia (Palat 1995). The Ayyayole 500 or the Tamil Tis’ai Ayirattu Ainnurruvar is the most renowned example (Abraham 1988:41–71; Krishna 2000:92–93). The importance of plunder and booty from campaigns is widely accepted as an additional source of revenue for imperial polities such as the Colas (Shanmugam 1987:59), but this does not imply that this is an indication of weak political centralization (Spencer 1983:6) or that plunder and tribute were more important as regular forms of income than land taxes (Shanmugam 1987:145). Nevertheless, Keay (2000:220) claims that the conspicuous generosity inherent in the patronage of an imperial polity, did necessitate access to substantial revenue, making the rich pickings of predatory warfare essential. This does not imply that in South Asia slaves were exclusively used for economic enterprises (Gopal 1965:78) as they mainly performed domestic services (Chandra 1997:171–172). See Chaudhuri (1990:270). Gopal (1965:255) gives examples of several South Asian cities completely sacked in wartime. Spencer (1983:98) also approves the segmentary state model. Reid (1999:176) claims that although the military power of the Dutch was far beyond that of their Iberian predecessors, they used it for calculated commercial advantage instead of symbolic victories, and they encouraged Southeast Asian rulers to retreat from economic and military concerns to symbolic and spiritual ones where they did not jeopardize Dutch ambitions. Prosopographical research by Bulst (1996:115) shows that in late medieval France the majority of royal officers and administrators originated from the bourgeoisie.The same thing is true elsewhere in Western Europe. It is precisely the institutionalized strength of the urban-based bourgeoisie in the period 1200–1450 that enabled it to forge a coalition with the nobility, ultimately leading to a process of social osmosis, crucial to the European transition from feudalism to capitalism as well as to the genesis of modern state formations in the West. Sinha and Ray (1986:257) emphasize that the all-India character of the Empire was never a reality and that it remained throughout a loose fabric of virtually separate units ruled by Muslim governors or Hindu chiefs over whom the central government could wield no authority. Essentially the South Asian state seems more prebendal in its heyday of bureaucratic strength, and more feudal during the period of its waning power (Champakalakshmi 1995:301). Farmer et al. (1977:439) point out that the mansabdar who had received a temporary revenue assignment knew that, since he was to be transferred in three to four years, there was no need to invest in the future prosperity of his jagir, but that it was in his interest to squeeze the maximum profit out of it in the shortest possible time. For this reason the jagirdari system, although it did reduce the political clout of the mansabdars, had very negative consequences for the economy. One finds similar prebendal rights in the Deccan (mokasa) or in the Mughal empire (jagir) (Perlin 1985:458). In his study on the Colas, Hall (1980:75, 83, 205) pays much attention to merchants’ success in resisting state centralization and subsequent tax increases.Although one cannot deny that merchants’ control over local militias and armed mercenaries (as well as their considerable wealth) sometimes gave them the opportunity of having some autonomy and even power over local assemblies (Hall 1980; Ramaswamy 1982:314), the political importance of merchants in the Cola polity should not be exaggerated (Vanaja 1982:331). Heitzman (1995:193) concludes that the major political figures in the Cola state were several layers of nobles and landowners, resting on the fruits of peasant cultivation, who interacted with the kings and constituted state institutions. The locally dominant landowners, organized in chittiramëllis, were thus capable of shifting most of the burden of taxation to the rest of society: smaller peasants, tenants, artisans, and merchants (Palat 1988:89; Chaudhuri 1990:386). Despite the fact that often taxes continued to be collected by local bodies, merchants’ leverage, unlike in Western Europe, was quite limited: taxation, for instance, was a royal prerogative not subject to institutionalized and extended forms of negotiation and conditionality (Shanmugam 1987:8, 141). In Northern South Asia the political position of merchants was even weaker (Mahajan 1963:98–100).

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32. While it is true that the possibilities of successfully accumulating capital was greater in South Asia than in China (due to the lack of a unified Imperial structure), and that this was exemplified by the fact that merchants (vaisyas) were on a higher pedestal than peasants (sudras) and artisans (Jain 1990:210), I doubt one can go as far as to claim that in South Asia a prosperous and powerful class of merchants tended to dominate the political, social and economic fabric of the region or that merchants attained a status as high as that of the brahmanas in learning, and as that of the Ksatriyas in war as Jain (1990:209) suggested.While there is evidence of occasional contact between merchants and aristocratic rulers (Pearson 1972:125), and that some South Asian merchants were indeed enormously wealthy (Pearson 1972:122; Krishna 2000:88, 108), especially compared to their European counterparts (Digby 1982:135; Chandra 1997:196), the European fusion between the interests of the state and mercantile activities did not occur.To a certain degree, money meant power and influence everywhere in the early modern world, including early modern South Asia (Pearson 1972:129).The proverbial rub is: where did it structurally wield more power and, most importantly, why? The power of the European merchant class was institutionalized in a variety of ways and the lack of this institutionalization process in South Asia implied that in the long run sections of the population engaged in productive activity—particularly the mercantile classes—were to a lesser or greater degree treated as milk cows by those having the power and the authority to coerce them (Prakash 1972:280), and that conversely, those who built their wealth through commerce rarely seemed to have acquired land in order to use it as a base for political power (Thapar 1974:119). Political power for merchants could— to a certain extent—limit extortion by the nobility or the imperial bureaucracy, but this was less apparent in South Asia (Spodek 1974:462; Mahapatra 1987:259). 33. Barendse (2000) claims that there was nothing exceptional about European municipal power.Yet this is again an overstatement of reality in order to debunk ingrained Eurocentrist dismissals of nonEuropean dynamism. Ramaswamy, hardly Eurocentrist or pessimistic about pre-European artisan productivity and commercialization, nevertheless has to admit that unlike the European guilds, Vijayanagar guilds did not attempt to standardize prices or products (1985a:426). The European experience of merchant power in city-states was different, and the recognition of its success in obtaining and preserving monopoly power over scarce resources and trade routes (often interlinked with the ability to use military force) is crucial in order to debunk the myth of dominant laissezfaire historiography (Chaudhuri 1981:238; Alavi 1982), that is, that Europe succeeded to take off because of laissez-faire policies (Steensgaard 1981:253). 34. Subrahmanyam (1996:24) sarcastically refers to the inevitable triumph of the European capitalist core which was played out once more, as South Asia was “incorporated” into the capitalist worldsystem. While one should pay attention to the multiplicity of existing “colonial models” and consider the way local structures were disrupted and dismantled in favor of the increasing hegemony of Europe (Perlin 1983:90), while keeping in mind how the different nature of states and societies in the external arena made a big difference in terms of how they responded to Europeans (Pearson 1988:31), it is quite another matter to critique, in the name of event history, any Western theory by suggesting that it merely substitutes superficial secondary material for authentic documentation, as Subrahmanyam (1989:142) does who even goes as far as to wonder whether unequal exchange even existed in “his” region (1989:146). The point is of course that prior to the industrial revolution—according to Pearson (1988:45) long before 1750—Asia was on the road of peripheralization as European companies began to assume an increasingly dominant role, gradually subverting the Asian trading nexus and local Asian economies to an international division of labor and commodity circuits centered in Western Europe itself (Perlin 1983:60),— ultimately resulting in their maritime economies increasingly imposing their will in Asia, which in turn lead to deindustrialization (Perlin 1983:90). Thus, the ancient Indian Ocean system was modified in order to suit the new colonial masters (Steensgaard 1987:157). 35. The emergence of mercantile companies in Western Europe has to be understood as a direct outcome of this balance of power. Through these companies, recognized by the state as sovereign powers with privileges—the right to export bullion, raise armies or navies, build forts, make treaties, make war, govern their fellow citizens, and coin their own money—the European merchant class was capable of maintaining its autonomy and channeling its aggression in the nonEuropean world much more effectively than it otherwise would have been capable of. 36. All this enabled the Polish nobility to monopolize the grain trade and reduce the standard of living among peasants, so that a large part of the arable production could be sent to the West (Malowist 1972:69). Increased hardship and labor conditions were thus a direct result of peripheralization in the capitalist world economy, not a result of “internal” class relations. In Poland, peripheralization


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was intrinsically linked with the increasing needs of the (proto)industrial core in the West. Thus, the expansion of West European markets and the slow but steady process of harsher living conditions in the East, when Polish landlords reduced their serfs to near-slavery for the sake of large-scale export farming of rye to Western Europe in A.D. 1400–1700 (Crone 1989:23), cannot be separated from one another (Gunst 1989:82). If production had been based on hired labor, landowners would not have been able to sell at the prices offered in Gdansk. Increased coercion was profitable and feasible because of increased trade connections to the core. 37. The itinerant “valiant merchants” [vira valanjigar] of the Coromandel Coast undoubtedly had a great cultural impact on Southeast Asia, as the influence of Hindu civilization, and the spread of Muslim conversions testify. But these merchant traders—despite the depictions of some nationalistic twentieth century scholars—did not attempt to “colonize” these areas in order to exploit them as peripheries. 38. This is still implicit in some of Palat’s (1991:27; 1995:66) arguments.

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CHAPTER

EIGHT

Contentious Peasants, Paternalist State, and Arrested Capitalism in China’s Long Eighteenth Century Ho-Fung Hung

The Enigma of China–Europe Divergence Now it is widely recognized that the “rise of the West” and the “fall of the East” were two complementary, mutually constitutive processes. But when and how the East, China in particular, fell behind Europe is a topic of continuing debate. Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1989) and Mark Elvin’s (1973) contention that China turned stagnant after its fifteenth-century retreat from the maritime world is recently challenged by Frank and others. It is shown that China’s post-medieval economic slowdown was only temporary, and was soon followed by a resurgence of commerce and productivity growth in the early modern period (Frank 1998; Atwell 1998; Goldstone 2000). Qing China was reputed as the “sink of silver” that absorbed most of the bullion originating in the Americas, and was the largest market formation in the eighteenth-century global economy. As pointed out by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997:189–192), in most of the early modern period, Europe at large was a peripheral zone in the Afroeurasian prestigegood networks, and Europe’s “long-distance trade with China was one of unequal exchange in which the Chinese were gaining greater returns” (1997:191). Commercial prosperity and political stability in China were admired by many contemporaneous philosophers and court-advisers in Europe, such as Quesnay and Voltaire, who wrote emphatically and convinced the absolute monarchs that China was the model to follow regarding the development of laissez-faire economy and absolutist rule (Hung 2003). Europe’s global hegemony was never a reality before the latter half of the eighteenth century when China’s market economy continued its quantitative expansion without any qualitative transformation into

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capitalism, while the capitalist development in Europe entered a new phase of industrial expansion.1 Hence, the central question was why the early modern market economy in Europe led to the rise of capitalism, whereas a more advanced market formation in China did not give rise to capitalism. Currently, the geopolitical and ecological arguments were the most popular explanations of China–Europe divergence. The geopolitical explanation asserts that it was the fragmented political system in Europe that led to incessant interstate competition for mobile capital and stimulated the private and ceaseless accumulation of capital there (Wong 1997; cf. Arrighi and Hung 2002). The ecological explanation inferred that the European conquest of the New World created a vast new frontier for Europe and enabled the latter to surpass the ecological constraints that put a ceiling over productivity growth in both China and Europe (Pomeranz 2000). Notwithstanding the insights that these two perspectives offer, their explanations are far from sufficient. Both perspectives try to explain the dynamic emergence or nonemergence of capitalism in terms of unchanging political economic structures. Bin Wong contends that the nonemergence of capitalism in China had almost been predestined by the end of the Warring States Period in 221 B.C.E. (Wong 1997:73–104). Kenneth Pomeranz contends that the great divergence between Europe and China was predestined from the point of the European conquest of America.The complex socio-political processes and unfolding of events that linked up the macro-geopolitical or ecological settings concerned and the outcome of transition or nontransition to capitalism are missing. A more historical and less deterministic account of the China-Europe divergence is not possible unless historical actors are brought into the picture. To Wallerstein (1974, 1989), the transition to capitalism in Europe was as much the emergence of new actors—the section of aristocratic elites that shifted to capital accumulating activities as a new strategy of class reproduction—as the emergence of a new system. Likewise, recent sociological studies of “the rise of the West” suggests that the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe was actually a consequence of a chain of contingent calculations of the feudal elites who were in constant conflict with one another and part of whom, given the particular socio-political milieus in which they were embedded, unintentionally converted themselves into full-scale capital accumulators (Lachman 2000; cf. Goldstone 2000, 2002). In this essay, I follow this line of argument and explicate the complex socio-political processes that led to the nontransition to capitalism in China by focusing on the class reproduction process of the gentry elites. I argue that in early modern China as in early modern Europe, the expansion of generalized commodity exchange opened a new window of opportunity for the preexisting elites to reproduce themselves by participating in commerce and accumulating monetary wealth. However, the particular habitus—structured structures and structuring structures that constrained

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and enabled actors’ actions as defined by Bourdieu (1990:52–65)—in which the Chinese gentry embedded had deterred their self-transformation into full-fledged capital accumulators. Great Transformation, Chinese Style Commercial Expansion and Ecological Pressure China’s long eighteenth century, beginning in 1683 and ending in 1820, is generally known as the Shengshi (Age of Prosperity) or the High Qing period in China (see figure 8.2).2 The long-term economic boom was attributed by many to the massive influx of American silver and the huge demand for Chinese products in the world market, as the imported silver stimulated commercial growth by vastly increasing the monetary supply in the economy (e.g., Quan 1987, 1996a; Frank 1998:108–111, 160–161; Naquin and Rawski 1987:104; Rowe 1998:177; Atwell 1998). Besides commercial expansion, the long eighteenth century was also characterized by mounting ecological pressure.Thanks to the political and social stability after the late seventeenth century and the popularization of such new world crops as sweet potato and maize that turned originally unproductive lands into productive ones, population of China tripled between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century. The total acreage of cultivable land, however, only doubled during the same period (Wang 1973:7; Naquin and Rawski 1987:24–26; Ho 1959).The diminishing land–man ratio, together with the depletion of natural resources caused by rapid commercial expansion, led to a looming ecological crisis in the empire (Marks 1996; Elvin 1998). The dual increase in monetary supply and population pressure triggered a century-long inflation known as the “Chinese price revolution” of the eighteenth century (Quan 1996b). Through the century, the price level of China had increased three to four times (Wang 1980; Guo 1996; Quan 1996b, 1996c). The inflationary pressure was not distributed evenly over space, as it hit the economically advanced regions most. Price level was the highest in the Lower Yangzi Delta, lowest in the Southwest, and intermediate in the Mid-Yangzi region (Quan 1996d).3 The inflation and inter-regional price difference touched off extensive regional specialization and economic growth driven by Smithian dynamics.4 While the Lower Yangzi region and the southern–southeastern coast witnessed sweeping urbanization and proto-industrialization, and increasingly concentrated on producing high value-added products such as silk and cotton textiles, areas with lower inflationary pressure such as the Upper Yangzi region and the empire’s Southwest were transformed into peripheral zones that supported the development of the economically advanced regions by exporting foodstuffs and other raw materials like timber, silk cocoon, and raw cotton to the latter (Wu 1983; Naquin and Rawski 1987:214–216; Fan 1992;

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Marks 1996, 1998; Quan 1996d; Fan 1998:ch. 2; Rowe 1998; Li 1999). An empire-wide market with a core–periphery division of labor was in shape (Hung 2001:491–497). Class Formations The eighteenth-century expansion of commerce and population brought forth profound social transformations. The predominantly serf-based manorial order gave way to a peasant economy in the countryside. Though the transition had already begun in the Ming dynasty (Elvin 1973:235–267), a substantial portion of the agrarian economy was still dominated by large estates in early Qing, especially in North China.When the serf population expanded alongside with the rest of the population, estate owners were increasingly incapable of making ends meet as most estates were fixed in size. To get rid of the increasing burden of feeding their serfs, many estate owners partitioned their estates into small slots and rented them out, or came to rely on hired-laborers to work on their land. Commercialization of land ownership also triggered the polarization of the peasantry into labor-employing rich peasants and labor-selling poor peasants (Huang 1985:85–96). The noblemen–serf stratification based on hereditary status was henceforth replaced by a landlord–tenant–hired laborers stratification based on contractual relation, and alienable ownership of land and labor. This transition was reflected in the revised Qing legal code and changing legal practices in the late eighteenth century when landlords, tenants, and agrarian laborers began to be treated as equal commoners (Huang 1985:97–105; Buoye 2000). Whereas serfdom was in decline, the somewhat meritocratic gentry elites remained to be a dominant socio-political force. In Qing China as in previous dynasties, the class reproduction of the gentry elites were carried out through the accumulation of imperial degrees, bureaucratic-officials titles, and land. Given the sweeping commercialization in the eighteenth century, accumulation of monetary wealth through mercantile activities became a legitimate and desirable means of class reproduction as well (Brook 1990; Rowe 1990). Accordingly, the gentry elites were differentiated into gentry-officials, gentry-landlord, and gentry-merchants (Jing 1982:163–164). Attainment and maintenance of gentry status were usually lineage-based and intergenerational. Many powerful lineages dispersed their risks by adopting different strategies of class reproduction simultaneously. At the bottom of the society, a substantial portion of the peasantry experienced downward mobility in the eighteenth century as a result of commercialization and population expansion. For the per capita acreage of cultivable land was decreasing, poor peasants working on small plots of land were increasingly exposed to the risk of bankruptcy at times of bad harvests, which would force them to sell their land in the market for food. In the early eighteenth century, the enlarging population of landless peasants was effectively absorbed by the agrarian frontiers such as Sichuan


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and Taiwan (Entenmann 1982; Shepherd 1993). However, by the mideighteenth century, most fertile lands in the frontiers had been filled up. The landless migrants were left with the choices of settling in the infertile highland, participating in the non-agrarian sectors (by working as peddlers, miners, or boatmen) or becoming vagrants (Kuhn 1970:39; Kuhn and Mann 1978; Leong 1997).This marginal population was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature (if they were cultivators in the ecologically fragile area) and market (if they worked in the commercial sector). They were excluded from the safety net of the lineage-based social organizations, and were beyond the reach of the imperial public order grounded on the baojia system. As we shall see, this subaltern class was a major source of social unrest after the mid-eighteenth century. State Formation Synchronic with the rise of absolutist states in northwestern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Qing regime during the same period fostered centralization and rationalization of its governance. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Manchu monarch had leveled the powers of local warlords and noblemen (Wakeman 1985).Then, through the successive empire-wide land surveys and a “rationalizing fiscal reform” in the 1720s and 1730s, the Manchu rulers successfully stamped out bureaucratic corruption and tax evasion of local elites (Zelin 1984). New institutions and techniques of government, such as the Grand Council and the secret palace memorial system were invented (Bartlett 1991).5 The centralization process was in tandem with the military mobilization and territorial expansion of the empire, which was to exterminate the threat posed by the nomadic states in Central Asia. Contrary to what the traditional “oriental despotism” thesis suggests, the Qing state was very active in facilitating commercial growth. Pro-commercial stance of the Chinese state gestated in the late Ming period when a growing commercial economy began to be recognized as an unalterable reality. Since the late sixteenth century, hostility toward silver, internal commerce, foreign trade, and merchants in traditional Confucianist thoughts had lost ground to the school of thought emphasizing the “natural law” of the market economy and proposed that the market economy would flourish under appropriate facilitation but not control by the government. This pragmatic attitude toward commerce continued to grow in the Qing bureaucracy and had become a mainstream position by the eighteenth century (Lin 1991:9, 13–17; Zheng 1994:133–150; von Glahn 1996:215–216; Rowe 2001).The Qing government actively promoted commerce through various means such as developing the empire’s commercial transport infrastructure and stimulating new production and marketing sectors by offering incentive packages for entrepreneurs (Rowe 1998:184–185). The idea of paternalist and benevolent rule was another major component of the state ideology. Relieving the burden of the poor was

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claimed to be the first priority of the imperial government. At times of regional famines, the central government never hesitated to grant tax breaks to the affected areas. When local conflicts between lower classes and local elites broke out, the emperor often sided with the former and blamed the latter (as we shall see in detail later).The Qing government also instituted an extremely conservative fiscal regime in the name of enhancing the livelihoods of the peasants. In 1713, the Kangxi emperor promised that the government would never increase its subjects’ burden by permanently fixing the tax quotas.This promise was closely kept by his successors (Guo 1996:13–14). The paternalist ideology was to enhance the imperial hegemony of the Manchus, who were despised by many Han Chinese as inferior nomadic invaders subjugating China by naked violence. It was also to prevent the recurrence of massive social unrest in late Ming caused by unchecked privileges of local elites and heavy tax burdens. The organic articulation of the pro-commercial and paternalist dispositions of the Qing state was best illustrated by the official granary system. Though the Qing government relied primarily on the free circulating of grains in the market to feed the expanding population, the government established a large-scale granary system as a regulatory apparatus to protect its subject from the vicissitudes of the grain market. Under this system, public ever-normal granaries were built all over the empire. Local governments were to purchase grains from the market to stock the granaries when grain price was low, and sold the grains back to the market at submarket price when prices were unusually high. If the stock in local granaries was not sufficient to bring down rice prices, stocks in other areas would be mobilized under the coordination of higher-level officials (Will 1990; Will and Wong 1991; Rowe 2001:155–185).What we can see was a market economy under strong regulation of the imperial state. After the mid-eighteenth century, this activism of the state began to decline. Following the success of the Qing’s military campaign of 1755–1760 that incorporated vast zones of Central Asia into the empire, the constant urge of military mobilization was gone, and the conservative notion of “sustaining the prosperity and preserving the peace” (ciying baotai) became the central goal of the regime. In conjunction with the growing conservatism of the reign was a fiscal crisis in formation.With the tax quota frozen at the 1713 level, the real income of the government dropped when inflation picked up over the century. When government spending on payroll and public projects shrank in real terms, underpaid officials began to resort to bribery to maintain their luxurious ways of live, and local governments at the brink of bankruptcy were urged to appropriate unsanctioned surtaxes to pay for their bills (Kuhn and Mann 1978:119–130; Zelin 1984; Guo 1996:14–15). Local tax bullies reemerged and the competition for resources between the central and local government intensified. It is noted that in the 1770s onward, government’s capacity in regulating the grain market via the granary system decreased precipitously, and the officials gradually adopted a hand-off policy toward the market


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(Will 1990:289–301; Will and Wong 1991:75–92). The falling state power vis-à-vis the society was aggravated by the ever expanding size of the population and increasing complexity of the society. The Changing Elite’s Habitus and Strategies of Class Reproduction The rise and fall of state power in the first and second half of the eighteenth century was reflected in the changing patterns of unrest in the two periods. Figure 8.3 sketches the general trend of unrest level in eighteenth-century China. Two peaks of unrest can be clearly seen, one in the 1740s and the other in the 1790s. The compositions of unrest in the two peaks are different.The wave in the 1740s was mainly made up of localized conflicts including actions directed at the state (such as protests asking for government food relief) and class conflicts (such as food riots). Most events in the 1790s peak were armed uprisings, usually organized by heterodox religious sects. In the first half of the century, with the presence of a hegemonic and paternalist state, many of the unrest were well contained and remained to be localized and brief. In the second half of the century, in contrast, the state capacity had dropped to the point where the recalcitrant and everexpanding subaltern class could survive government suppression and launched large-scale, sustained rebellion. The hegemony of the paternalist state and the spread of localized unrest in the first half of the century on the one hand, and the decline of state power and large scale social disorder in the later half of the century on the other, constituted two distinct habitus for the gentry elites. Below, we shall see how they formulated different strategies of class reproduction to cope with the two situations. The 1740s: Gentry Elites in between a Paternalist State and the “Moral Economy of the Crowd” The 1740s was a decade of empire-wide food shortage. Hikes of rice price were widely reported (Quan 1996e; Rowe 2001:179–183). It is debatable whether the price hike was caused by population growth or by the rapid increase in silver supply of the empire (Quan 1996a).6 But the hike was unmistakable. A natural response of the gentry-merchants to a local food crisis was to maximize their profits by hoarding their grains, or to sell them at other regions with even higher prices. On the other hand, the poor, who had few financial and institutional means to cope with a sudden rise in the cost of living, often answered the merchants’ profit-maximizing activities by storming grain storehouses, or forcing the merchants to sell their grains locally with discounted prices. Events of food riots were documented in virtually all regions of the empire, from Hubei to Guangdong, from Jiangsu

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to Guizhou (CSUE;Wong 1982).These food crises and food riots were not specific to China, but were widespread phenomenon throughout the early modern world (e.g., Rudé 1964:ch. 1, 2, 7; Tilly 1975; Thompson 1991:ch. 4; White 1995). What was specific to China was how the Qing government handled them. From the vantage point of the imperial state, the most straightforward way of alleviating a food crisis was to mobilize the granary system and transporting the stocks from rice-abundant area to localities in crises. But in the 1740s, particularly in the years 1743 and 1748, the granary system was overloaded with too many crises at the same time. The government then resorted to squeezing the gentry-merchants. The Qianlong emperor repeatedly reminded the bureaucracy that local food crises were always exalted and sometimes caused by “wicked merchants” ( jianshang), and those “rich but not benevolent” (weifu buren) people, who deliberately stockpiled grains and pushed up rice price. Hence, one of the best ways to cope with a food crisis was to urge local merchants to sell their stocks at submarket prices. But it had to be done in the way that would not stir up popular contentions against the rich (QSL-QL juan 193:13–14; 273:26–28).While at some places local officials carried out the emperor’s will well and solved local food crises smoothly (see Rowe 2001:167–183), in many other places local food crises deteriorated into escalating unrest. A case in point was the food riots of Suzhou—the largest and wealthiest city in the Lower Yangzi Delta—in 1748. In 1747, in response to the escalating rice price and imminent social unrest, the provincial governor of Jiangsu pressed the gentry-merchants in Suzhou to sell their rice at low prices. For fear of government punishment, the gentry sold out most of their stocks in a panic. In the next year, after another bad harvest in the adjacent areas, rice price upshot even more steeply. Most private stocks in the city had already gone because of the panic sell-off in the previous year. Large-scale riots in the city and several other locations in the vicinity followed suit. Besides the seizure of food, the rioters also requested the comeback of a trusted and respected ex-local official who was believed to be more capable of managing the crisis. Rice wholesalers were looted and local government offices stormed. The resolve of the local government to restore law and order by physical force only further messed up the situation. The arrest of a popular figure identified as the ringleader unleashed other rounds of protests and riots demanding the release of the arrested. The angry citizens were pacified only after the central government gave in to the protesters’ demands and let the beloved ex-official go back to the area and handle the situation (QSL-QL juan 314:25–26; 314:31–33; 316:4–8). Another case was the salt riot in the mid-Yangzi commercial city of Hankou in 1740. To alleviate an occasional spike of salt prices in Hubei province, the provincial governor encouraged the salt merchants in Hankou, the richest city in the province, to export its salt to the regions with the highest prices.When the salt price in Hankou soared subsequently,


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a riot in the city broke out. Major salt houses were encircled and smashed by thousands of angry citizens.The merchants were held hostage and were forced to sell their salt locally. Despite the scale of disorder, no suppression or arrest was reported after the incident. The rioters were only seen by Qianlong as “stupid people” (yumin) who “did not have the patience to wait for the handling of the situation by officials” (bu jingting banli). The local officials were told to patiently explain to the angry citizens to make them “content with their lots” (ge’an benfen). Also, local officials urged the merchants to lower the salt price, so that both the merchants and the people could get a fair deal (liangde qiping). After a lengthy investigation of the event in the central government, the provincial governor of Hubei, who encouraged the Hankou merchants to sell their salt to other regions in the first place, was demoted as he was identified as the person responsible for causing the price hike and the riots (QSL-QL juan 117:7; 117:20–21; 118:6–7; 120:28; 122:16–17; 123:5–7). The cases of Suzhou in 1748 and Hankou in 1740—the two wealthiest cities in the empire—were emblematic of food riot and government’s response to it in the eighteenth century. In these two cases and many other similar cases, the poor attacking the rich were not punished severely, while the rich and the officials in charge were to be blamed. Time and again, the emperor compared both the “wicked merchants” (jianshang) who “turned a blind eye to their neighbors’ sufferings” (moshi xiangmin kunku) and the “contentious people” (diaomin) who “have the intention to rob” (cun rangduo zi xin) to disobedient children who needed education and discipline by their parents—that is the imperial state (QSL-QL juan 185:6–9; 193:13–14; 273:26–29; 291:17–19).Viewed in this light, it is well probable that in the emperor’s eyes, the “wicked merchants” were elder brothers who tormented the younger ones, and the practice of the government to press them to sell their commodities cheap was like parents disciplining a bullying son. The food crises, food riots, and the government management of them in the 1740s showed that though the imperial government was prone to rely on the market and to enhance the wealth of the empire and the livelihoods of its subjects in ordinary times, the merchants were squeezed from above (through the paternalist discipline of the imperial state) and from below (through popular contentions) whenever the livelihoods of ordinary people were disrupted by the vicissitudes of the market. Gentry-merchants hardly had the chance to transgress the constraints put on them by the paternalist state and the “moral economy of the crowd” (cf. Thompson 1991). Their profit-maximizing activities were well contained. The 1790s: Gentry Elites in between a Paralyzed State and Millenarian Rebellions We have seen previously that commercialization and demographic expansion had created an ever enlarging subaltern class in Qing China.This uprooted

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population was far more susceptible to the calling of heterodox religious sects—in which they found social support and spiritual comfort—than the appeals of the Confucianist orthodoxy. The growing population of this subaltern class and the falling capacity of the state in maintaining social order led to the exponential growth of sectarian activities toward the end of the eighteenth century. Most heterodox religious sects in early modern China were dominated by the White Lotus tradition, the origins of which could be traced as far back as to circa 1100 C.E. It represented a merging of the religious traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Manichaeanism. The core of the religion was the idea about the cycling of kalpas ( jie), a classical Sanskrit term meaning immensely long periods of time between successive transformations of the world. The followers of the religion worshipped the Eternal Venerable Mother (wusheng naomu), the supreme deity controlling the cycle of kalpas. Each kalpa was governed by a particular Buddha, and the present kalpa was governed by the historical Shakyamuni Buddha. When the current kalpa ended, the material world would be destroyed by horrific famines and diseases. Then the Venerable Mother would send the Maitreya Buddha (lile fo) to earth and initiate a new kalpa. Followers of the religion were told to practice vegetarianism and led an ascetic way of life so that they could attain salvation and would be brought back to the womb of the Venerable Mother during the catastrophic kalpic transition (Overmyer 1976, 1981; Harrell and Perry 1982:290–291; Yu 1987a; Ownby 1999). The White Lotus religion spread rapidly in China among the lower classes in the early modern period. Independent and competing sects ramified (Gaustad 2000). Many, though not all,White Lotus sects developed a rebellious disposition.The content of the religion gradually mutated with a utopian twist. It came to prophesize that during the imminent kalpic transition, the Maitreya Buddha would be reincarnated and his followers should aid his work of cleaning the world of corruption to earn their salvation. The new kalpa would be the dawn of an egalitarian world in which there would be no distinction between men and women, rich and poor, old and young (Harrell and Perry 1982:290–291; Yu 1987a). This utopian vision was often reflected in the egalitarian organization of the sects (Entenmann 1982:192; Yu 1987b; Liu 1988:788–793). Notably, the mid-fourteenth-century revolt against the Mongols and many early-sixteenth-century revolts that contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty were strongly influenced by the White Lotus religion (Yu 1987a). In the eighteenth century, though the religion was persecuted rigorously by the Qing government, it was never rooted out. On the contrary, the religious movement experienced unprecedented development when the expanding subaltern class became a major social base of sectarian activities (Harrell and Perry 1982:297–301).The first outbreak of sectarian rebellion that caught serious attention of the imperial center was in 1746, when a White Lotus sect know as Dacheng in Sichuan was found to be


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preparing for an armed uprising (KYQ 640–647).The rebellion aborted as the rebels’ plan to storm a city near the provincial capital was unveiled before it materialized. The followers of the sects were found to be mostly migrants from other provinces (QSL-QL 242:30; 245:10; 249:31–32; 251:6; 265:11–12; 265:37–38; 267:31). Notwithstanding the assiduous crackdown of heterodox sects after 1746, religious uprisings erupted one after the other in the latter half of the eighteenth century (KYQ 648–734). In 1748, amid the empire-wide food crisis, members of a vegetarian hall network in northern Fujian revolted (QSL-QL 309:38–44). The rebels were mostly hungry Hakka migrants residing in the infertile highland areas (QSL-QL 317:29–30). Waving the banners of “urging the rich to aid the poor” (quanfu jipin) and “executing justice according to the Heavenly Will” (titian xingdao), they felt free to confiscated grain storages and property of local wealthy elites (QSL-QL juan 309:4–5; 309:8–9; 309:38–44; 312:12–13). Other major uprisings influenced by the White Lotus religion included the uprising of the Clear Water sect in Shandong in 1774 (KYQ 746–771; Naquin 1981) and the uprising of the Fujian migrants in Taiwan in 1787 (Ownby 1996:55–81, Appendix; KYQ 772–818). Though the Qing government was able to suppress these rebellions without many difficulties, the outbreaks showed a general trend of increasing scale and duration.The Dacheng rebellion in 1746 never materialized, the Fujian uprising in 1748 lasted a few weeks, the Shandong uprising in 1774 lasted a few months, and the Taiwan uprising in 1787 lasted nearly a year.This trend can be seen as a reflection of the falling state capacity in maintaining social order as well as the growing size and despair of the subaltern class.The successive waves of uprising culminated in the White Lotus rebellion of 1796–1805. From 1792 on, rumors about the imminent end of the kalpa and arrival of the Maitreya Buddha were spreading in the White Lotus sects active in western Hubei (Naquin 1981:155; KYQ 863). The rumors triggered a spiral of sect activism and government suppression in the mountainous border areas of the Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Hubei provinces.These areas were densely populated by poor migrants from central China who failed to find any decent piece of land in the overcrowded Sichuan lowland (Kuhn 1970:39; Goldstone 1991:394–399). When the general uprising broke out in spring 1796, it was immediately joined by a large number of social outcasts who were identified by the Qing authority as “perverse and lawless people” (wulai bufazi tu) including shack people (pengmin), salt smugglers, pirate coin makers, and bandits (KYQ 825). The rebellion persisted for nearly ten years and cost the Qing regime more financial resources to put it down than any other military campaign in the eighteenth century. The guerrilla tactic of the rebels made the large imperial army impotent. When the government realized that the war against the rebels was in a deadlock and the imperial arm force was unreliable in suppressing the revolt, it changed its strategy and encouraged the local gentry in the unrest area to organize local militias, which were to stamp out any possible

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foothold that the rebels could find in the vast rural space separating walled cities (Kuhn 1970:40–50). Though this strategy turned out to be effective and accounted for the final dissolution of the rebellion, it opened the pandora’s box of political and military decentralization of the empire. In the aftermath of the White Lotus Rebellion, the capacity of the state continued to decline and rural disorder continued to grow. Banditry and sectarian activities ramified in both economically advanced and backward regions (e.g., Perry 1980:48–95; Bernhardt 1992:43–83). The rescinding constraint from the state and enlarging threat from below enabled as well as urged the local gentry elites to shore up their efforts of establishing local militias. Private military networks spanning from provincial elites to gentry and ruffians at the county level mushroomed (Wakeman 1966; Kuhn 1970:41–50; McCord 1990; Perry 2002:31–39).These networks were usually financed by the personal wealth of gentry leaders, together with special taxes extracted from agricultural production and mercantile activities in the communities concerned (Kuhn 1970:87–92).The coercive and predatory activities of the militarized local elites led to a rapid decline in agricultural productivity and further growth in social unrest (Wakeman 1975:21–23; Polanchek 1975:220–222; 226–228; 246; Perry 1980:86–87; Bernhardt 1992:80). The result was a vicious circle of escalating unrest and elite militarization in the nineteenth century.While “religious rebellions crowded the records of every decade after the middle of the eighteenth century” (Yang 1961:219), militarization of local elite accelerated after the Taiping Rebellion of 1851–1864, during which the first professional provincial army virtually autonomous from the command of Beijing was formed.This vicious circle threw China in disarray and made it incapable of coping with the military and economic threats posed by the imperialist powers, let alone undergoing a successful capitalist transformation (as Japan did).This paved the way for the final disintegration of the Qing empire in 1911 and the protracted civil war that followed. Conclusion In early modern northwestern Europe, a section of the aristocracy transformed themselves into capitalists and became the locomotives of Europe’s “transition to capitalism.”This elite transformation was facilitated by the particular habitus in which the aristocratic elites were embedded. The continuous decline in seigniorial income after the fifteenth-century crisis of feudalism, in conjunction with the escalating interstate competition for mobile capital after the collapse of the medieval system of rule, induced a section of the aristocracy to engage in commercial activities and exchanged its financial power for the protection from the absolutist states (Wallerstein 1974, 1989; Arrighi 1994). At the same time, the “new periphery” of the Americas served as an ecological relief of Europe and absorbed the “surplus population” displaced by ecological pressure as well as the


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commercializing economy. Resources imported from the New World also prevented the living standards of the poor from falling too much during the era of primitive accumulation. These contributed to the relative stability and lack of large-scale peasant war in northwestern Europe in most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Rudé 1964:20; Bailyn 1986; Bercé 1987:183–196; Pomeranz 2000:82–84; 282–284). Aided by the state from above and shielded from large-scale rebellion from below, the embourgeoisement of the aristocracy went unfettered in the core zones of Europe. By contrast, the particular habitus of the gentry elites in eighteenth-century China led them to embark on different paths of class reproduction. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, the imperial authority had been anxious to keep the mercantile elites at bay and at times backed down to the demand of the contentious poor. Profit-maximizing activities were checked both from above and from below. Given the availability of other means of class reproduction (such as participating in the imperial examination and performing bureaucratic services), it was unwise for the gentry lineages to throw too much resource into the accumulation of capital. The full-scale embourgeoisement of the gentry class was forestalled, and the transition from market economy to capitalism in China was therefore arrested. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the capacity of the paternalist state declined and the lid put on the expansion of local elites’ power was lifted. Meanwhile, the increasing rebelliousness of the subaltern class gave rise to a general breakdown of social order. Freed from the political constraints from above and threatened by the subaltern class from below, the gentry elites took on a peculiar path of class survival and reproduction through militarization. In other words, though the paternalist discipline of profit-maximizing activities from the imperial state had gone, the gentry elite embarked on the accumulation of means of violence instead of the accumulation of capital.The transition to capitalism was detoured. Ironically, what China witnessed in the nineteenth century was a transition to a sort of feudal order characterized by crumbling central authority and expansion of regional military-predatory networks in the countryside. Capitalist activities did flourish in a handful of treaty ports (particularly Shanghai) after the Opium War of 1839–1842. However, these commercial metropolises were nothing but vulnerable capitalist islands in a sea of feudal chaos. The militarization of local elite continued well into the twentieth century when many local despots developed or were integrated into warlord regimes, which grew under the sponsorship of imperialist powers. These military-predatory elites were exactly the “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” class, which fettered the growth of China’s “national bourgeois” according to Mao Zedong’s famous analysis of China’s social formation in the early twentieth century. To sum up, the paternalist ideology of the Qing state and the increasing militancy of the subaltern class were the key variables accounting for the non-emergence of capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

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China. The lack of interstate competition for capital in China is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of a paternalist state.The paternalist ideology of the Qing government was equally rooted at the fact that the Manchu elites invaded China as an ethnic minority and were anxious to establish the legitimacy of their rule over the Han majority. Similarly, the lack of a large, surplus-labor-absorbing frontier comparable to the Americas can only partially explain the radical revolts of the subaltern class. Though the expansion of the subaltern class was attributable to the mounting ecological crisis in the empire, their militancy and quasi-anti-capitalist vision can only be understood if we take into account the millenarian tradition of the White Lotus religion that predated the population explosion of the eighteenth century. A last remark is that after the disintegration of the Qing empire, China continued to be haunted by the specter of religious utopianism and the collective memory of a paternalist state. After the Chinese Communist Party joined hands with the militant sects in the countryside in the late 1920s,7 these late imperial ideologies merged with the Marxist ideology and helped turn China into an epicenter of socialist revolutions in the twentieth century. But it is another story. Notes 1. Here, I adopt Arrighi’s (1994:1–26) definition of market economy and capitalism. While market economy is an economic system based on generalized commodity exchange, or the formula of C-M-C, capitalism is an economic system based on the ceaseless accumulation of capital, or the formula of M-C-M’ (see also Braudel 1992). 2. The year 1683 marked by the end of a deflationary depression (Kishimoto-Nakayama 1984), and the year 1820 approximately marked the beginning of another round of deflationary depression (Lin 1991). This period covered the late Kangxi reign (1662–1722), the Yongzheng reign (1723–1735), the Qianlong reign (1736–1795), and the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820). 3. The Lower Yangzi region corresponded roughly to the southern Jiangsu province and northern Zhejiang province, the southern-southeastern coast to the Fujian and Guangdong provinces, the Upper Yangzi region to the Sichuan province and the Southwest to the Guangxi and Yunnan province. 4. For a discussion of the Smithian dynamics in China, see Wong (1997: part I) and Pomeranz (2000). 5. While the Grand Council system was to allow the emperor and his closest advisors to surpass the bureaucracy and handle the most urgent matters directly, the Secret Palace Memorial system was to enhance the emperor’s access to information on local affairs as well as control of local officials. 6. The 1740s was the decade when the rate of population expansion was the highest (45 percent over the decade) (Lin 1989:299). 7. For the intentional or unintentional use of millenarian religion as an organizational and ideological resource by the Communist activists, see Perry (1980:208–224) and Aminzade and Perry (2001:165). For the continuity between the socialist state under Mao and the late imperial paternalist state, see Solinger (1993:154–155).

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CHAPTER

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Space, Matter, and Technology in Globalization of the Past and Future Ste ph e n G. Bunke r and Paul S. C i ccante l l

In this chapter, we apply the materio-spatial logic of new historical materialism (Ciccantell and Bunker 2002) to analysis of the technological, financial, political, ideological, and social organizational innovations that sustained the successful campaigns of five nations—Portugal, Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan—to dominate world trade. We use this logic to explain how the ascent of each national economy has moved the world economy further toward globalization by increasing its material intensity and the spatial expanse. While technological innovations must conform to the naturally produced materio-spatial features of the particular raw materials that they use, the economic, political, ideological, and financial institutions that generate the strategies to create these innovations are fundamentally social. This means that in order to explain how matter, space, and technology shape globalization, we must discover regularities in the ways that the interactions between the materio-spatial opportunities and constraints each ascendant nation confronted and the social and cultural organizations and institutions that nation mobilized to create the technologies, markets, financial instruments, and skills necessary to its ascent. Much of the literature on globalization implies that the phenomenon is recent, unique, and relatively “dematerialized” and “deterritorialized.”This view seems to emerge from the novelty of information technology and its capacity to move capital and to coordinate production cheaply and rapidly across national borders. Our analysis of the ways that increasingly efficient transport systems incorporated extractive exports of greater volume of lower value materials over ever greater distances from the Amazon, Canada, Australia, and other extractive peripheries around the world over the last four hundred years opens all three of these characterizations to doubt (Bunker and Ciccantell 2003).1

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The notions of recency and uniqueness are subject to disproof by any persuasive account of historical trends to progressive spatial expansion of the world economy. There are numerous such accounts in a diverse set of studies focused on three broad questions: (1) the dynamics driving the material intensification and spatial expansion of production and trade in the world economy; (2) the successive ascents of particular nations to dominance within the world hierarchy of economies; and (3) the causes and consequences of inequality between national economies. These three have long been core questions in a wide range of fields concerned with economic change and development, and with international relations. We examine the material and spatial history of globalization’s causes and consequences by searching for links between and mechanisms common to explanations for all three of these questions. Particularly robust arguments indicating long-term trends to material intensification and spatial expansion of capitalist economies have emerged from world-systems theory. Arrighi (1994), for example, shows that each successive hegemonic cycle, or systemic cycle of accumulation, over the past 800 years, has significantly intensified material production across expanded commercial space. Each cycle has built upon, and thus expanded, the material and spatial scale of previous cycles. In this view, what is today seen as globalization, far from being unique, recent, and dematerialized, is better described as the latest, materially most intensive, and spatially most expansive in a centuries-long, cumulative series of cycles. Arrighi, however, tends to emphasize finance and politics, acknowledging the importance of but neglecting to analyze or explain the ways that each cycle expanded production and thus heightened national dependence on and consumption of raw materials that occur in limited and exhaustible quantities in specific places. He thus acknowledges, but does not problematize, the need of ascendant national economies to transport vastly increased volumes of more different types of raw materials across everlarger distances and to maintain and coordinate stable exchange and cargo relations with the sources of these raw materials. He considers each systemic cycle of accumulation as an intensification of material production driven by a dominant national economy. He posits that each cycle surpasses and supercedes the production, productivity, spatial expansion, and capital accumulation of the preceding cycle. He claims that capitalists invest in newly developing economies in order to overcome the falling rates of profit that result from accumulating excess investment in the mature hegemonic economy. He invokes this mechanism to explain the spatial expansion of integrated commerce. In other words, he sees expansion as a response to over-accumulation of capital in the mature, or tradedominant, hegemon. In this regard, he follows David Harvey’s (1983) explanation of “the spatial fix” or the geographic expansion of capital investment as a response to the “internal dialectic of capital.” For Harvey, capitalists compete with each other by investing increasingly large capitals in increasingly productive but site-specific infrastructure, machines, and

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plants that over time saturate product markets and are themselves made obsolete by even more productive, and more capital-intensive, new technologies. Capital tends to install these costly new technologies in new frontiers with markets adequate to absorb their expanded output. Harvey explains the expansion of capitalist commerce exclusively as the spatial fix for the site-specific devaluation of capital, so does not consider the expanded material requirements of increasing economies of scale. Arrighi pushes this partial explanation even further. He assigns explanatory primacy to finance and politics, which he claims, function autonomously, from material production. He thus neglects systematic theorization of the material, spatial, and technological components of particular national economies’ rise to trade dominance. Arrighi does connect the questions of trade dominance, global expansion, and growing international inequality, but he does not explicitly theorize the connection or propose a single mechanism or dynamic driving all three phenomena. Arrighi, like most theorists of hegemony, explains transitions from one systemic cycle to the next in terms of devaluation, maturity, senescence, and decay. He explicitly invokes Braudel’s image of autumn as the time when capital has reached its fullest growth, beginning to decline at the same time it harvests its mature fruits. In contrast, the materio-spatial analysis we propose enables explanation of causal dynamics in spring and summer, when the expansion of production requires expanded sources of raw material. Capital’s financial power increases as it draws on accumulating profits from expanded production to meet the heavy investments required for this spatial expansion. The world economy expands toward globalization not only as a spatial fix for capital over-accumulated in a mature dominant economy searching for financial investments at the higher rates of profit available in less mature economies (cf.Arrighi 1994), but earlier, and even more decisively, as a material fix for the expanded consumption driven by economies of scale. In other words, economic expansion toward global economies comprises three separate but integrally linked nodes of growth. Expanded production expands financial capabilities. Expanded finance makes possible investments in the expanded scale of technology and infrastructure needed to import the increased volumes of material consumed across expanded commercial space. Peter Hugill (1994), in World Trade since 1431, takes as his point of departure a different affirmation that Harvey elaborates from Marx—that technology mediates between human society and nature—to analyze the history of technical innovations that have intensified material process and expanded the spatial extent of the world economy. Hugill thus explicitly embraces the historical material aspects of political economy, but does not systematically explore the financial and political innovations and collaborations that have undergirded particular nations’ development and use of these innovations in each successive rise to world trade dominance. Nor does he relate his stories of technological advance in particular nations to progressive increases in international inequality.We use a material historical


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analysis combining Arrighi’s focus on finance and politics with Hugill’s focus on technology and space to explain how secular increases in the scale of production drive the spatial expansion of integrated commerce. This approach allows us to explain the links between trade dominance, globalization, and international inequalities. By integrating material history—including a search for physical, chemical, biological, geological, and technico-mechanical regularities that affect economic processes—with political and financial processes in a comparative history of national trade dominance, we hope to explicate the materio-spatial expansions and intensifications that constitute globalization. We ground our explanation by specifying the geographically differentiated materialization of space into the hydrographic, topographic, geological, climatogical, and atmospheric attributes that determine how different parts of the world participate in the world division of production. We then integrate these materio-spatial components of globalization into a fuller analysis of how capital’s material processes sustain the financial logic of its internal dialectic. To construct a common ground that allows coherent comparison of national economies whose ascent to world trade dominance occurred at very different moments in the technological, financial, and geo-political, 600-year-long trajectories of the world-system, we develop a synthetic model of how financial and political mechanisms and processes interact with the technological, spatial, and material mechanisms and processes.We use this model to examine a set of questions nested within our central query: (1) Did similar dynamics drive each nation’s ascent to hegemonic dominance? (2) If they did, did the same dynamics exacerbate inequality between national economies? (3) If so, did they simultaneously drive globalization? We focus first on transformation and intensification of material processes in the ascendant economy at the beginning of each systemic cycle of accumulation, starting with Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then Britain from the seventeenth through the nineteenth, the United States from its colonial beginnings through the twentieth century, and Japan’s rise and subsequent troubles in the late twentieth century. We next consider how social processes and attributes intersect with spatial and material features both of the ascendant nations and of the raw material peripheries on which they depend. Topographic, hydrological, and locational advantages in access to the raw materials most voluminously used in the dominant technologies of production and transport at the time contributed crucially to the economic and geopolitical ascent of each of these nations. Each succeeded, however, by devising social, political, economic, and financial institutions adapted to the opportunities that their materio-spatial configuration offered domestically and to the technological and trade opportunities the world-system offered internationally. Each ascendant economy enhanced its natural advantages in access to raw materials with socially produced innovations in

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technology and infrastructure for transport that further reduced the cost of its raw materials and thus made it more competitive in other branches of production and trade. In all cases, these innovations—in ships and shipbuilding and in locomotives and railroads, in ports and docks, in loading systems and in warehouses—entailed increases in the size, motive power, and carrying strength of vehicles and of the environment built to enable their transit and carriage across space. The capital costs and politico-legal complexities of developing and building such large-scale technologies and infrastructure exceeded the capacities of existing firms and institutions.These nations therefore could only turn their physical advantages into world-dominant economic power by creating new forms of productive, financial, and political organization. The expanded production and trade that supported the dominant position of each successive hegemon depended on effective integration of physical conditions and social organization both domestically and in the ever-wider peripheral sources of raw materials. The transport systems devised to organize and cheapen their movement across space had to articulate material, spatial, socio-economic, political, and demographic features of both periphery and core. The national societies that achieved trade dominance first succeeded in integrating their naturally produced material and spatial advantages with technological and organizational forms sufficiently adapted to these natural conditions to enable production, finance, and trade strategies that would transform world raw material markets and transport systems to their own advantage. Securing the cheapest access to critical raw materials enabled them to create the expanded economies of scale that marked each transition between systemic cycles of accumulation.The resulting material intensification and spatial expansion finally appears as global, but globalization is best understood as a continuation of historical processes at least as old as capitalism. Our logic is as follows: Globalization has emerged as the culminating, or at least most recent, manifestation of the expanded reproduction of capital and the long-term increase in the productivity of labor. The expanded reproduction of capital and increased productivity of labor require new technologies that generate economies of scale. Economies of scale reduce the amount of capital and of labor in each unit of production, but only by increasing the total volume of production. They thus depend on greater total amounts of capital and labor. They also require increased volumes of raw material, even though some of the technological innovations may reduce raw material consumption in each unit produced. The raw materials most voluminously used in industrial production occur naturally in fixed locations, volumes, and quantities around the globe and are subject to depletion (e.g. iron, coal, oil). Known deposits exploited under one technological regime may be inadequate in size or quality for subsequent, larger-scale technologies. In earlier times, the most voluminously used raw materials needed lengthy production times (e.g. oak or pine). Depletion, delayed replacement, and technically driven increases in


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quality and volume required for competitive extraction and transport all mean that the increased volume of matter consumed in expanded economies of scale must be brought across greater distances.The economy of scale thus creates a diseconomy of space. National economies can compete successfully only if they resolve this contradiction between economies of scale and diseconomies of space. This resolution depends on technical innovations in transport. The radical improvements in technology and vast extensions in built environment that initiated each national ascent to trade dominance had a series of self-reinforcing consequences. First, they reduced the cost of transporting raw materials to that nation, thus making its production more competitive in international trade. Second, the reduced cost of raw materials lowered the cost of constructing the ships, trains, ports, rail lines, and loading and unloading equipment. This saving further lowered the cost of transporting raw materials. The national economy that pioneered these innovations came to dominate world trade in ship or train building and in port construction. Third, the capital costs and social requirements of devising and implementing these technological improvements and the infrastructure on which they depended fostered new organizational forms, knowledge, and powers in states, firms, financial institutions, and sectoral associations.These phenomena are socially produced in the nation that rises to trade dominance, and they simultaneously maintain and transform the hierarchical structure and inequalities that characterize the world system and the global economy. Raw material costs and quality determine the productivity of labor and the organic composition of capital. The physical and thermodynamic constraints on supplies of the most voluminously used raw material raise costs and reduce revenues for most economic actors. Firms, sectors, and states tend, therefore, to collaborate in their search for cheap, stable supplies. Successful solutions to the contradiction between economies of scale and diseconomies of space require innovations in transport technology and massive investments in transport infrastructure.These innovations and investments can only occur if the benefits to be realized attract enough different political and economic actors to generate the kinds of political and economic organization, knowledge, skill, and collaboration that an ascendant national economy needs to transform world raw materials markets and transport systems in its own favor. Such transformation necessarily intensifies and expands production, trade, and finance. Comparative analysis of these transformations shows that the sequentially cumulative effects of this intensification and expansion have resulted in what we now call globalization.

Matter, Space, Technology, and Finance in Successive Stages of Globalization: A Comparative History In this section, we compare the ways that each ascendant nation expanded the then prevailing mode of heavy industry. In each case, this expansion

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involved: (a) technical and organizational innovation in raw materials procurement, transport, and processing; (b) rebuilding the environment on an expanded scale of infrastructure for material transport, handling, processing, and manufacture; (c) new forms of finance to deal with the expanded volume of these investments to coordinate the multiple capitals involved in this scale and volume; and (d) new and more closely coupled relations—collaborative and regulatory—between the state and firms involved in these investments and the formation of political and economic institutions appropriate to these relations. Each nation started its economic ascent by exploiting materio-spatial advantages in its access to raw materials and by adopting new technologies to transport and process them. Sustained financial and institutional support from the crown combined with Portugal’s sea-faring traditions and felicitous location to develop the technologies and navigational skills needed to couple the sheltered natural environment and the prosperous consumer markets of the Mediterranean with the far broader trade opportunities of the Atlantic. Inventing the three-masted ship, adopting and then perfecting the Chinese compass, and figuring out how to mount iron cannon on shipdeck enabled the Portuguese to open and then dominate new maritime trade routes to East and South Asia.These replaced the overland trade routes that Genoa and Venice, in the eastern Mediterranean, had dominated until the Ottoman Empire interrupted them. Portugal’s innovations in maritime transport vastly expanded the material volumes of this trade—even small boats carried cargo more cheaply than horses and camels. Portuguese ships soon turned westward across the Atlantic, incorporating new space and new materials—American sugar, tobacco, turtle oil and spices as well as silver and gold—into the Mediterranean-based world trade in Asian spices, silks, and drugs. Even so, long distance trade was limited to luxury goods. Amsterdam’s location on low lying flat lands down the Rhine from some of the densest and oldest oak forests in Europe allowed cheap access to and transport of high quality timber. Huge oak rafts were floated downriver to wind-driven saw mills. The state undertook to invest in cranes and docks whose costs exceeded the capabilities of individual shipyards. Cheap raw materials, innovative technology, and new forms of labor organization combined to allow Amsterdam builders to design new, more efficient boats and to build and sell them so cheaply that Amsterdam had the largest carrying capacity in the world and also sold the most ships to competitor nations. The high throughput of materials in the busy shipyards allowed economies of scale in procurement of inputs and standardization of boat construction. Amsterdam was located near the Zaan, a sheltered large bay with river and canal connections to fertile inland hinterlands, on a coast that lined the shortest distance from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Mediterranean.This provided an enormous advantage for Amsterdam, first as a colony, then as politically independent but economically subordinate republic, and finally as an economically dominant financial and product market, in its competition for trade with Spain and Portugal, then Europe’s wealthiest nations (Bunker and Ciccantell 2003).


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The advantages of access to raw materials and consequent competitive advantages in boat building and in transport created opportunities and rewards for new forms of state power and economic intervention, of commerce, and of finance. Innovations in shipping construction, management, and finance allowed the Dutch to transport profitably relatively low value-to-volume goods—timber, fish, grain, potash—between the resourcerich Baltic and North Sea and the socially developed Mediterranean. Dutch innovations thus expanded the space and broadened the material base of world trade. For example, Dutch transport innovations lowered transport costs enough to extend plantation agriculture into South American and Caribbean interiors and so to start the transformation of sugar from a luxury to a staple commodity for mass consumption. All of these achievements originated in the confluence of topography and geography with Dutch social and political organization.Various rivers, including the Rhine, flowed through rich oak forests and fertile fields apt for wheat cultivation on their way to the Netherlands. Agents of Amsterdam firms induced large land owners to organize serfs and peasants for cultivating, harvesting, and shipping wheat and for felling, sledding to river edge, and binding together vast numbers of oak logs into huge rafts that carried small temporary villages of peasants and mountains of grain down the Rhine and then along canals to the wind-driven sawmills in the Zaan.The high quality and abundance of the oak, the savings of rafting logs down-river over the expense of loading logs in seaworthy boats for ocean crossing, and the labor economies of wind-driven saw mills gave Amsterdam enormous advantages in raw materials and labor costs in building boats and in the construction of canals, bridges, docks, and warehouses (Wallerstein 1974, 1982; Bunker and Ciccantell 2003). These savings supported major innovations in boat design that allowed for greater cargo capacity and lower manning requirements.The efficiencies and low cost of the herring buss contributed to Amsterdam’s dominance of the incipient market for fish in Europe.The subsequent development of the fluyt, arguably an adaptation of boats designed for canal transport, provided such economies of shipping that Amsterdam soon dominated both world cargo capacity and the international sale of ships. The competitive advantage of the Dutch carrying trade and sale of boats increased effective demand for Dutch-built ships and for the raw materials to make them; resulting throughput was so great that shipyards could stock enough standardized parts for multiple boats to have raw materials on hand for customized production for specific clients.This ability to stockpile parts was particularly important for those parts of a boat that demanded particular types, shapes, and sizes of wood, such as keels and hulls (Unger 1978: see also Albion 1926) As the timber trade and the shipping industry—carrying and construction— grew, the state invested directly in infrastructure such as dams and docks and in machinery such as cranes that were beyond the capital capacities of individual boatyards and which could be shared between multiple boatyards. In addition to state innovations in tax collection from and fiscal

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incentives and subsidies for long-distance trade, state regulation and support enabled a proliferation of new forms of civil finance—from letters of credit for long-distance trade and commerce to joint stock in small lots invested in boats (Barbour 1950; Unger 1978; Israel 1989, 1995).Amsterdam’s establishment of the world’s first public bank in 1609 guaranteed the credits and loans that Dutch merchants used to organize the extraction, cultivation, harvest, processing and export of timber, pitch, flax, potash, sulphur, leather, quicksilver, iron, copper and even sails, boats, guns, and copper from Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Russia (Barbour 1950). The state licensed and encouraged guilds’ development of specialized skills and collectively owned tools, thus assisting in the creation of a labor force that inspired envy and attempts at emulation in other nations (Barbour 1950; Unger 1978). Amsterdam’s materio-spatial advantages in access to raw materials and to wind power and in geographic proximity to potentially rich trade routes facilitated and catalyzed collective and state investments in productive and transport-related infrastructure, in the development of and investment in new technologies, in new financial instruments and institutions; and in new functions, powers, and capacities of the state and its relations to capital. High rates of throughput, economies of scale, and shared interests between multiple firms, the state, financial institutions, small investors, and downstream consumers converged to create synergies or feedback loops that reinforced and extended economic growth and social development. Cheaper, more efficient boats allowed Amsterdam to extend, deepen, and cheapen its access to other sources of timber and stores, especially to pine, flax, and tar in the Baltic.The highly competitive shipbuilding and shipping industry created the means for Amsterdam to dominate, first, the bulk trades of Northern Europe and then the luxury trades with the Mediterranean and the Orient. Amsterdam became, simultaneously, the entrepot of Europe, the financial center of the world economy, the first modern state, the inventor of risk sharing and the sharing of capital via insurance, and the wealthiest nation on earth. These transport innovations that initiated local economic and social expansion also transformed and expanded the world economy. Grotius’s arguments that mare liberum was prescribed by natural law, an eloquent defense of principles of security and freedom for international maritime commerce, established precedents that are still invoked in support of free trade and globalization. Struggles to overcome Dutch trade dominance expanded the world economy further. Unable to compete with Dutch access to raw materials in the Baltic and North Sea, Britain moved to annex territory and fishing grounds in the Atlantic, first in Ireland and soon in North America. Britain’s location and size deprived her of Amsterdam’s ability to import timber cheaply. Rather than achieving the technological innovations in cheap construction and design for enlarged cargo capacity and smaller crews, the British designed costly, highly maneuverable warships with large crews and little cargo space.


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Unable to match Amsterdam’s materio-spatial efficiencies of raw materials access and transport, the British state instead used military prowess backed by increasingly sophisticated metallurgy to capture and keep Dutch boats in prolonged and repeated wars through the seventeenth century (Williamson 1941; Davis 1962, 1975; Walton 1967; Williams 1972). The British also captured and administered broad areas of timber in the Americas, first for the import of lumber and then as well for the construction of boats. Innovative British colonial and military strategies for the procurement of bulky raw materials and their transport across broad spaces ultimately created the bases for the industrial revolution, but not before they had stimulated revolt and political separation by New England colonists anxious to reap for themselves the spatial and material advantages that their environment provided. The New England colonies converted abundant timber accessible by short rivers across diverse ecological zones into the most effective carrying fleet in the world. They were well positioned to exploit the demand for carriage and for supplies in the Caribbean, whose sugar was the most dynamically expanding commodity in world trade and the most dependent on external supplies of fuel and food. The North Americans soon surpassed the British in cargo capacity and carriage. British attempts to contain this competition contributed importantly to eventual rebellion (Meinig 1986, 1993, 1998). The U.S. independence directly reduced British carrying capacity. The growing volume and economic importance of cotton imports from the United States eventually forced Britain to relax the Navigation Acts. American ships could carry these cargos more cheaply than British. British industrialists could make more profits in textiles than in shipping. Owners of textile factories pressured the state to open to foreign controlled shipping in order to lower their raw material costs. The British did not regain a carrying or a raw materials advantage until new technologies allowed them to combine domestic sources of coal with steam powered machines to transform cheaper and more versatile smelting and manufacture of metals into machines that enhanced mining, transport, and production capabilities. Iron and coal steadily displaced wood as the most voluminously used raw material. Britain enjoyed social, technological, and spatial advantages in access to these materials. Steam driven steel hulls were freed of the size and weight restrictions that even the largest and best timbers imposed, while trains and rails were freed of the topographical and hydrological shackles that had bound bulk transport to rivers and canals. The trinity of iron, coal, and steam fomented and was steadily enlarged and strengthened by scientific discovery and practical innovations. These enabled improvements in the control of the chemical and physical interactions of different raw materials and energy sources in metallurgy, in the conversion of thermal to mechanical energy in engines and motors, and in the control of material composition and of thermal energy in order to strengthen iron, and later steel. These improvements permitted the higher

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temperatures, greater weights, and more intense pressures that new technologies and their economies of scale demanded (Ashton 1924; Mathias 1969; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986; Harris 1988). British financiers and the British state had early adopted many of the Dutch banking innovations, and adapted them to the new political relations of the world economy and to the expanded spatial scale on which it operated. The invention of bonds, a means by which the state could effectively sell shares in a public enterprise and then buy back that share, strengthened, broadened, and tightened financial cooperation between capital and the state, while making possible state support of fixed investments in shared infrastructure beyond the means or interest of individual firms. Canals and ports were steadily expanded to accommodate the vastly increased carriage of coal and iron, but Britain’s greatest, most costly, and most consequential infrastructural increase in the spatial scale of the world economy came with the Suez Canal, which instantly and effectively shortened and cheapened the link between Britain’s Atlantic and its Indian Ocean sources of raw material (Fletcher 1958). It was only with the development of iron and steel-hulled steamboats that Britain’s advantages in access to coal and in metallurgy made her dominant in the construction of boats. The opening of the Suez Canal and the improvements in ship and motor size and fuel efficiency combined to enable Britain’s dominance of trade between Europe and the rest of the world.These technological innovations and infrastructural investments spilled over into other industrial applications that constituted the second industrial, or machine-based, revolution.The development and proliferation of machines to make machines vastly increased Britain’s imports of raw materials and thus the transport networks required to support them (Hobsbawm 1968; Mathias 1969; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986). Eventually, the Suez Canal played a major role in extending and deepening the economic significance of the technologies whose first development it had originally stimulated. The Canal provided direct commercial and military access to the newly discovered oil fields of the Middle East. Access to these oil fields, and control over the dependent monarchies that the British colonial office put in power, facilitated cheap and secure access to a raw material that powered cheaper, faster ships and trains with far less cargo space sacrificed to fuel than was possible with coal and steam. The internal combustion engine ratcheted up the technological means of expanding the reproduction of capital by enabled faster production machines, creating a machine apt for mass consumption and personal use, and by cheapening and accelerating transport of raw materials.2 Just as access to abundant, high-quality oak along relatively flat rivers to sites of steady wind power supported the technical, social, political, and financial synergies that drove Amsterdam’s ascent to economic dominance, British coal originated and supported many similar synergies, but in a spatially vaster, materially more diverse and intense, and financially and institutionally more complex economy. Myriad innovations that cheapened


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and expanded the procurement of iron and coal enabled additions to and refinements of the multiple means and forms in which they could be combined to produce steam and convert steam heat to mechanical forces or to drive chemical and physical conversions. Improved, cheaper iron and steel enabled the invention and adoption of new production machines and of new consumer goods. Together, the new machines and higher-quality, cheaper metals enabled profit-enhancing technological and social organizational innovations to follow and extend each other along more complex and diverse trajectories and with far greater and faster increases in scale and in cost of construction than had been possible in the wood-based economy which Amsterdam expanded in rising to trade dominance. The new technical initiatives and their expanded scale both depended on and fed the new and expanded instruments and institutions of finance developed to satisfy and to profit from the expanded demand for investment capital. Over time, British technology and British finances returned the advantage to the United states. Massive industrialization in nineteenth century Europe increased demand for food—cheap grains meats, and sugar—to reduce the cost of factory labor and for cheap and raw materials for manufacture—cotton, timber, iron, and copper.The diversion and concentration of agricultural labor from subsistence crops to sugar and cotton cultivation and processing and the fuel required for the mechanized processing and transport of these commodities created peripheral demand as well for foodstuffs and fuel.The opportunities offered by unsettled and fertile lands to produce or extract food, wood, and minerals for dynamic international and national markets stimulated the westward expansion of populations, transport infrastructure—canals, roads, and railways—and capital—accumulated in logging, fishing, shipbuilding, and shipping—from the narrow, rocky, coastal fringe between the Atlantic and the Appalachians to the broad, flat, fertile plains between the Appalachians and the Rockies. Railroad-building across vast, fertile continental expanses that the United States could incorporate politically and economically with little or no resistance from existing populations was supported by the cheap, strong steel enabled by the introduction of the Bessemer process and trade-andwage oriented immigrants from an already industrializing Europe or a resource-poor New England looking for better returns to their labor. The steel industry grew on mass production of steel for rails and at the same time provided a market for iron and coal that supported the integrated development of extensive rail lines and shipping systems.Two great river systems, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, combined with the Great Lakes and augmented by state-financed canals and smaller navigable rivers, supported the synergies between the accelerated consumption of iron and coal, the development of a rail network, and the growth of increasingly mechanized commercial agriculture (Fishlow 1965; Temin 1964; Meinig 1986, 1993, 1998;Agnew 1987; Parker 1992; Vance 1992; Misa 1995). The United States thus incorporated into the national economy its major sources of the most voluminously used raw materials at the same

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time that its transport systems expanded the spaces of both the national and the world economies. The territorial expansion as well as the transformations in state–capital relations gave rise to the United States’ particular mode of materio-spatial intensification and expansion. Because its raw material periphery was a vast, practically unclaimed, violently depopulated, highly agriculturable, and easily transitable plain, topographically and hydrologically amenable to railroad and steamboat—at the time the most recently developed and most efficient technologies of bulk transport—the United States could incorporate this space and its material resources economically, demographically, and politically. The newly settled populations adapted existing and developed new social and political organizational forms, culture, and ideologies compatible with and favorable to the resource base and the mode of production and exchange that had attracted them to migrate into this space. The resulting internalization of its own extractive periphery made the effects of the U.S. solution of the contradiction between scale and space less destructive of existing economies and more egalitarian, with broader articulation of expanded production with broad-based and growing popular market and a labor force specifically formed around and by the emerging mode of production rather than displaced from earlier modes of production. The benefits of expanded production were thus more broadly diffused and political resistance was less than in extractive peripheries incorporated during the ascent of other trade-dominant nations. These exceptional nineteenth century circumstances created the material and ideological bases for the extraordinary insularity, immunity from, and blithe disregard of the environmental destruction, resource depletion, political and financial chaos, and brutal and destructive wars that its continuing economies of scale and voracious appetite for mineral raw materials and for huge, unfettered speculative profits in finance and real estate in deregulated markets have engendered in its twentieth century raw material peripheries. Britain pioneered many of the nineteenth century technologies and the financial institutions required to implement them, but the far broader unclaimed and relatively unsettled territories of the United States, the varieties of ores and coals available there, and the topographies and hydrologies that defined the locations of these material resources shaped the geographical space in which technical, financial, material, social, and political dynamics intersected, vastly increasing the synergies in their economies of scale. U.S. firms adapted imported technologies of smelting to fit the booming demand for steel, used the stronger, cheaper metals they produced to improve and strengthen steam engines and steel hulled boats, and then invented and improved steam shovels and unloaders. First local, and then the federal, states invested in canals, locks, and dams to facilitate transport from huge iron and coal deposits around the Great Lakes. Firms and state negotiated new, and often tentative, forms of collaboration to combine matter and space with capital and technology and to form the world’s leading producer of steel and the worlds leading layer of steel rails.


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The adaptation of European technologies to the broader spaces and more abundant mineral and vegetable resources of North America illuminates the interdependencies between space, matter, technology, and capital. The synergies between natural resources, fertile soils, stronger machines, and a rapidly growing, trade–oriented immigrant population moving into a large, relatively unpopulated and weakly defended space around the Great Lakes, generated the U.S.-led material intensification and spatial expansion of the nineteenth century. This episode in globalization underscores the subtle interplay between the internal dialectic of capital, its external dialectic with space and matter, technological innovation, and social organization. This interplay accelerated and became more complex and more consequential as iron and steel and coal replaced wood as the most voluminously used raw material. Most of the new iron and steel technologies, particularly the use of coal in blast furnaces and the development of the Bessemer process to make uniform high-grade steel at costs that allowed mass production and consumption, emerged from British experience in developing military metallurgy. British industrialization, and its dominance of world trade and world shipping, all flourished as a consequence, but these technologies were adopted by economies with access to more appropriate materio-spatial configurations. First Germany surpassed British steel production, and then the United States surpassed both Britain and Germany, surging to production of 70 percent of the world’s steel within three decades of the introduction of Bessemer converters and the huge increases in scale of production and scale of transport that Bessemer techniques allowed (Mitchell 1980). This remarkable advance in U.S. steel production emerged from reiterated cycles of scale-enhancing technological innovations driving huge investments to rebuild the environment to fit the new scale in a materiospatial and social context that enabled and rewarded the reiterated improvements and expansions of prevailing technologies, scales of capital, and state–firm–sector organization and relations. The Bessemer process allowed mass production of steel just as the technologies of metallurgy and transport were developing sufficiently and the organization of capital and of the state had expanded enough to support huge investments—first in railroads, ships, canals, and locks, and then in newly developed machines that mechanized mining. These investments in new technologies and infrastructures made the huge iron ore reserves around the north coasts of the Great Lakes available to the rich deposits of coal around the south coasts of the Great Lakes.The expanding demand for raw materials stimulated scale increases in both transport and infrastructure. Commerce on the Lakes had already been hugely enhanced by the proximity of dense forests of high quality timber. The spread of grain agriculture and the demand for coal drove a vibrant shipbuilding industry. Highly decentralized charcoal-fueled iron plantations had supported early U.S. industrialization, but by the mid-nineteenth century both metal and

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trees were becoming scarcer around the established plants.The discovery of copper and iron in huge, high-grade deposits in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1840s supplied the first expansion of iron production.The coincidence of increased demand with the opening of new transport routes and with the discovery of new and richer deposits fed back into the further investment in mining, locks, and canals. Expanded cargos generated need for larger, heavier vessels; these required further investments to expand the locks. The completion of the Sault Ste. Marie locks in 1855 opened up the vastly larger Mesabi Range iron-ore deposits. The locks were expanded at state cost several times over the subsequent decades. Boat sizes increased, stimulating innovations in boat motors to develop greater machine power. Hulls were increasingly made of metal to support the extra size and weight of cargos and the extra thrust of more powerful motors. Mining and loading were increasingly mechanized. Integration with rail systems proceeded, both physically as infrastructure but also as corporate strategy, as combines, trusts, and corporations of unprecedented size combined the capital of multiple firms with new forms of finance and equity ownership to meet the investment requirements and take advantage of the opportunities for control and profit that the new economies of scale offered in mining, transporting, processing, and selling iron and coal. Detailed examination of this particular phase in the long-term materiospatial expansion of the world economy provides a useful template for comparative analysis. Great Lakes mining and transport fed each other in very much the same way that logs and boats did in Holland, but at a vastly larger scale of material and space and capital with larger corporate and financial units, and a more active state. Like Holland before it, the United States was first incorporated into the world economy as a raw material and transport supplier to the world-trade dominant nation, Portugal in Holland’s case, Britain in the case of the United States British capital invested in North American extractive and infrastructural projects and British markets for North American fish, whale oil, logs, crops, ships, shipping, and minerals catalyzed much of the initial economic and demographic growth of New England, and then augmented the New England population, capital, and markets that incorporated the Midwest’s supply of timber, wheat, meat, copper, coal, and iron into the world markets that drove the expanding U.S. economy. The close entwining between the U.S. rise to world trade dominance and its roots in extraction and transport of bulky raw materials for the preceding hegemon parallels, at a huge increase in scale and space, Holland’s early political and economic subordination to imperial Spain and Portugal, as supplier and transporter of high-volume, low-value goods such as timber, fish, grain, flax, pitch, tar, and other ship stores. Portugal had earlier served similar functions at an even smaller material and spatial scale to thendominant Venice and Genoa. In each case, the protective aegis of the dominant nation freed the provider of raw materials and bulk shipping from the


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need to support a military force against piracy; so all available capital and labor could be devoted to economic activity. Italian, then Portuguese, and finally British commerce, technology, capital, and entrepreneurial and technical skill had flowed to the geographically and politically most convenient source of the raw materials most in demand for their own markets—both domestic and foreign.3 In each case, economic and political skills and institutions developed in the economy relegated to bulk trade and shipping of low value but industrially or commercially critical goods. Later, these skills and institutions enhanced the formerly dependent nation’s continued access to raw materials and proximity to major trade routes that led to their economic expansion and eventual trade dominance. The Great Lakes mining and transport set the competitive standards that the spectacular materio-spatial innovations of the Japanese shipping and steel industries had to surpass to achieve trade dominance in the 1960s and 1970s, but transport efficiencies had increased so dramatically by then that Japan was able to achieve trade dominance at great distance for either its raw material sources or major routes of world trade. In that sense, advancing globalization has reduced the tendency for the major raw material supplier to the existing hegemon to lead the next systemic cycle of accumulation. The U.S. case provides a useful baseline for comparison of security, both military and political, between international and domestic supply lines.The United States’ incorporation into its own sovereign territory of resourcerich and fertile, easily transitable lands created essential self-sufficiency in most raw materials during the nineteenth century.This reduced U.S. needs to protect investments in foreign extractive and transport systems at the beginning of its rise to trade dominance. A century later, Japan similarly adapted European smelting technologies— the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) and continuous casting—and U.S. shipping technologies, vastly increasing the scales of each to become the world’s leading exporter of steel and builder of ships ( Goto 1984; Miwa 1988; Yonezawa 1988; Chida and Davies 1990; O’Brien 1992). Japanese domination of international markets for steel and world transport emerged from technical and infrastructural innovations that entailed close collaboration, novel regimes of long term contracts and joint ventures in mines and transport systems with firms and states of resource-rich nations, and novel blends of collaboration, surveillance, subsidies, and sharing of market and technical information between state, and domestic firms and sectors in new forms of finance and regulation. This collaboration achieved both technological and infrastructural reorganization of world markets for iron and coal and revolutionary increases in ship size and strength, and in depth and length of ports and docks, and in size, power, speed, and capacity of loading equipment impelled by the increased throughput of materials.Various agencies of the Japanese state coordinated the design, finance, and construction of Maritime Industrial Development Areas (MIDAs), comprehensive heavy

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industrial complexes on islands built out into deep water ports near industrial cities and large enough to house integrated steel mills and raw material-receiving docks of unprecedented scale and the major downstream industrial consumers of their output. The MIDAs enhanced the economies of scale that Japanese state, firms, and sectors had collaborated to achieve by organizing the use of and location in space and the development of infrastructure to minimize the cost of material transactions between upstream and downstream links in the heavy industrial production chains that distributed the most voluminously used raw materials, transformed into the shapes, sizes, strength and malleability that suited the uses of different producers.The MIDAs, and the cheap, high-quality steel they made possible, were critical to Japanese dominance of industrial product markets. MIDAs exemplifies the ways that scalar increase of technologies requires increases in the scale of the environments socially constructed to accommodate them and to cheapen the augmented flow of materials they require. The capital costs and the financial, engineering, and political complexities of building these environments have increased through each systemic cycle of accumulation, obligating tighter and tighter cooperation between capital and the state as these projects progressed from city states building canals, dams, docks, and cranes in Holland to private capital investing in canals and railroads under public license in Britain; followed in the next cycle by consortia of local states and private capitals building canals and roads in America, the federal state making huge grants of land to private capital to subsidize construction of the transcontinental railroads there, and the formation of huge mergers and trusts to amass and coordinate the enormous capitals sunk in coal and iron mines with the steamboat and rail lines required to feed their outtake to the smelters along the Great Lakes.The MIDAs are the latest, largest, and most costly in this increasingly complex sequence of projects. The resolution of the contradiction between scale and space leads to an ever-greater volume of increasing cheap steel in the world economy and to an ever-expanding space in which coal and iron are mined and transported. In the sequence from wrought iron to Bessemer steel to open hearth to basic oxygen, the sourcing of raw materials progressed from river basin to lake drainage to global ocean.This was made possible by and required the huge increase in the size and strength of trains and rails and of ships, ports, docks, and loading equipment. This process can be seen most clearly in the two technological advances that most rapidly increased the scale of processing iron, the Bessemer process in the United States, from the 1870s through the 1890s, a period of vast railroad construction which consistently consumed the greatest share of Bessemer steel, and the Basic Oxygen Furnace which most Japanese firms installed in the 1970s, a period when Japan produced over 50 percent of new shipping capacity in the world.The Bessemer process and the BOF are both highly scale dependent. Both provided economies of scale that produced expanded quantities of the cheaper, stronger, more uniform steel


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that enabled revolutionary increases in the size and strength of vehicles and vessels for bulk transport. Fishlow (1965) has shown that Bessemer steel allowed for both the heavier trains and the heavier cargoes that the expanded trade in iron and coal made necessary, as well as other kinds of commerce. The cheapening of transport of iron and coal made the huge Bessemer smelters possible, and also superceded the highly localized “iron plantations” that had supplied small local markets previously (Temin 1964). In this sense, the economy of scale in processing depended on and made possible economies of scale in transport and thus expanded the commercial space of raw materials and product markets. Essentially, U.S. Steel moved from the highly localized iron plantations to a complex that coordinated lake transport of iron ore from the Mesabi Range with rail transport of coal from the Appalachians. Landes (1969) describes similar consequences in the competition between the smelters of the Ruhr and the far more localized smelters of Silesia. In parallel development that further expanded commercial space, in this case from lake based regional to ocean based global sourcing one hundred years later, leadership in adopting the Basic Oxygen Furnace allowed Japan to realize huge economies of scale over the open hearth technologies that still dominated U.S. and European production.The economies of scale and superior product of the BOF made possible Japanese initiatives in designing and constructing the much larger vessels that cheapened iron and coal imports to Japan.Together, these economies provided stronger, cheaper steel in Japan than could be had in either the United States or in Europe, and again, greatly expanded the commercial space across which iron and coal could be transported (Ciccantell and Bunker 1999). These increases in the space in which iron and coal are provisioned and transported, however, have also eliminated the “natural tariffs of distance” (Cf. Innis 1956; Mandel 1975; Harvey 1983).This consequence of cheaper transport has usually been addressed in terms of the increased competitiveness of imports against locally manufactured goods, but extractive industries suffer similar impacts. As the technology of transport globalizes raw materials sources, the importing countries are no longer constrained to more proximate sources. Japanese shipbuilding technology and Japanesesupported international investment in ports and rail radically changed iron and coal markets, transforming these high-volume, low-value materials into globally traded goods. Global markets reduced the bargaining power and relative status of suppliers, particularly Australia, Canada, and Brazil. As the cost of transport is diminished, all mines or sources compete in the establishment of rent, which tends to lower prices. In a situation where there are relatively few deposits of the size required to realize contemporary economies of scale, this kind of global competition reduces any element of monopoly rents. Since the 1950s, the Japanese state and firms have enhanced this technological assault on rent and thus on the prices they pay to exporting countries by using joint ventures, long-term contracts, and various kinds of

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aid to create excess capacity in both coal and iron.The Japanese have been extremely aggressive in their strategies to play off North American, South American, Asia, and African sources of raw material against each other, and their success has involved considerable learning and manipulation of information, institutional relations, and contract arrangements, but the effects of these social and political strategies would be far less without the globalization of raw materials sources that the Japanese-led revolution in maritime transport technology made possible. The revolution in transport technology would not have occurred without the massive increase of scale and fuel efficiency that the Japanese achieved with the Basic Oxygen Furnace. The consequences of the intersection of two different mechanisms of scale-dependent fuel saving and precision enhancing technologies, one in smelting, the other in transport, by setting in motion multiple mechanisms to reduce raw materials rents, directly accelerates the globalization of raw materials markets and exacerbates inequalities between the exporters and the importers of raw materials. In this sense globalization of commerce in iron and coal has occurred only in the last 40 years, but this globalization is simply the latest stage of the spatial expansion that has accompanied 600 years of capitalism.

Matter, Space, Technology, and Finance: A Synthetic Model of National Ascent to World Trade Dominance In this section, we derive, from the preceding comparative history, a synthetic model of how successful strategies to dominate world trade require social, financial, and technological adaptation to the opportunities and obstacles that are presented by the intersection of the material and spatial features of the ascendant economy’s location and the commercial and technological organization of the world economy at the historical moment of its ascent.We use the following linked, testable propositions that constitute this model to guide our more detailed comparisons in the following chapters of each nation’s ascent to trade dominance: (1) Globalization has been driven by a series of struggles and competitions—military and productive—to trade dominance for at least eight centuries. (2) Trade dominance depends on low production and distribution costs. (3) Low production and distribution costs depend on low costs of carriage or transport. These costs are reduced directly by efficiency in the construction of vessels and of transport, break-bulk, handling, and storage infrastructure.They are reduced indirectly by security or protection against attack while in transit or loss of property rights in capital sunk in infrastructure of transport or extraction of raw


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materials from sites outside the sovereign control of the dominant national economy.These indirect reductions of cost may be achieved by military or politico-diplomatic means. (4) Competitive efficiency in the construction of vessels and infrastructure depends directly on the cost reduction and security of access to and transport of raw materials most voluminously used for these purposes. As economies of scale increase the size of capital required to construct vessels and to build environments on a scale sufficiently large to be cost-competitive, the new forms and scales of finance required for these investments generate innovations that make financial institutions more powerful, with closer subsidization by, influence on, and collaboration with the state. Regimes to protect security of access and of capital sunk in extractive and transport infrastructure on foreign territory have progressed from fortified trading posts to colonial control to foreign direct investment (FDI) under bilateral agreements between core and peripheral nations to New Forms of International Investment (NFI) constituted by longterm contracts and joint ventures with peripheral firms and states with finance from multiple banks and often coordinated by multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank or the respective continental development banks. Each regime has devolved a greater proportion of the cost of constructing and administering extractive and transport infrastructure on the firms and states of the raw material periphery. (5) Advantage in raw material costs translates into a competitive advantage in constructing transport vessels and infrastructure. The consequent reduction in the cost of carrying trade in both raw materials and manufactured goods sets in motion the following feedback loops that provide a generalized trading advantage: (a) The specific competitive edge in the carrying trade and in the production of vessels for sale combine with the cheapened access to raw materials to accelerate throughput, particularly in the shipping and later rail industries. (b) Accelerated throughput enhances opportunities for standardization and other innovations that further cheapen the cost of transport. As the cost of transport cheapens and the spatial extent of transport infrastructure extends, trade of both raw materials and finished goods into and out of the dominant national economy’s territory becomes cheaper and thus more competitive. More intense use of transport, production, and warehousing infrastructure further reduces the unit cost of transport and handling and increases the returns to the capital sunk in this infrastructure, enhancing the dominant economy’s trade advantage. To the extent that over-accumulation of capital stimulates investment outside the national territory (cf. Harvey 1983; Arrighi 1994), the greatest opportunities for profit will occur along the transport lines established to cheapen the import of raw materials. Each resolution of the

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contradiction between scale and space requires further material intensification and spatial expansion. This repeated, cumulatively expanded reiteration of crisis–solution–crisis exacerbates the tension between (a) competitive social drives to trade dominance that work through economies of scale, agglomeration, and spatial concentration and (b) the natural limits on and spatial diffusion of material production and reproduction. (6) Historically, the technological innovations driving these feedback loops have increased the scale of vessels and vehicles, increased their speed, reduced the fuel needed per ton/mile, and extended their infrastructure in space. (7) Each of the technical and social organizational increases in economies of scale tended to sharpen the inequalities between raw materials suppliers and industrial consumers and accelerate the depletion of their natural resources.The combined savings in capital and in time thus achieved have contributed to globalization while enhancing the position of the dominant economies and increasing their advantage over, and thus the degree of inequality between them and other nations. The increasing transport efficiencies underlying globalization steadily reduce the possibilities that Holland’s and North America’s rise to trade dominance from an earlier status of major supplier of raw materials and shipping to the previous hegemon will be repeated. The capital costs of transport technology and infrastructure of sufficient scale to overcome the advantages of geographic proximity to raw material supplies and to trade routes, however, are enormous.We suspect that much of Japan’s banking crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century resulted from the hypertrophy and distortions of financial institutions needed to make the huge targeted loans and subsidies that made Japan’s steel and shipping industries larger scaled, more capital-intensive, and more competitive than any other nation’s. If we are correct, then financial crisis in the core, as well as in the periphery, may result from the same mechanisms that drive globalization.

Commonalities in and Transitions between Hegemons in an Expanding World-System In this section, we examine the ways that technological change and the economies of scale they enable affect each of the three outcomes we seek to explain—national ascent, globalization, and inequality. Each ascendant national economy transformed world markets for the most voluminously used raw material of the time—whether wood, iron, or steel—in ways that facilitated and cheapened their access to sources. Each in turn expanded the spaces—from river basin and coastal to


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lake–river–canal systems and continental to oceanic and global—across which they imported these raw materials. Each adopted and adapted new technologies and constructed new infrastructures for transporting and handling the bulkiest raw materials at greater scales and volumes than had previously existed. Each developed new financial and accounting instruments and new forms of firm or corporate organization. In each case, the state, firms, and financial institutions devised new, denser, more closely connected forms of collaboration and mutual monitoring and regulation. Each thus achieved cheaper, larger, and more stable supplies of these raw materials than any competitor had managed. Each was able to convert this advantage in raw material access, quality, and cost into competitive production for and competitive transport into international markets.Their competitiveness in product markets increased throughput, especially of the basic raw materials, and reduced the unit costs of the transport and processing infrastructure built to handle them. These savings, and the enhanced competitiveness in product markets that they enabled, supported further technological, financial and organizational innovations that led to further economies of scale. Economies of scale in the procurement, transport, and processing of the most voluminously used raw materials reduce input costs for a broad range of downstream manufacturers. Both the transport to and from and the expanded commercial relations with suppliers extend and facilitate markets for these same manufactures.These two results provide incentives for states and a broad coalition of national firms to coordinate and collaborate in the huge sunk investments that the new technologies and expanded scale of infrastructure required. Because cheap and stable raw material supplies also cheapen the construction of transport vessels and vehicles and of the rails and ports and loaders needed to maintain the expanded flow of raw materials into the increasingly competitive heavy industries, these same economies each in turn dominated the world production of ships or of trains and rail. Successful national ascent to world economic dominance thus depends on a complex coordination of materio-spatial and social processes. Technology, as mediating between society and nature (Marx 1967; Harvey 1983; Hugill 1994), plays a critical role in this ascent, but technological innovation and the investments needed to implement them must be seen as a contingent product dependent on multiple social and economic processes.Technical advance emerges from complex sets of causes—social, political, financial, and geographic—mediated by world system time, that is, the historical moment of each ascent. The cumulative sequence of these new technologies to cheapen the movement of greater volumes of matter across broader expanses of space drew on and exploited ever-broader topographic, hydrologic, and geological features of the earth. The earliest cheap transport of bulky material depended on oar, sail, and raft to move down navigable rivers and on to relatively short coastal voyages. Coal-driven steamboat and rail transport

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later allowed the integration of lakes and continentally bounded oceans with much broader terrestrial hinterlands. In the last century, petroleumpowered, high tensile steel—supported supertankers and dry-bulk carriers can traverse global oceans while keeping the unit costs of the raw materials they transport sufficiently cheap to outprice smaller cargos brought across less distance (Ciccantell and Bunker 2002). The progressive expansion of commercially integrated space moved the world economy, first, from the Mediterranean to North Sea, then to the integration of Atlantic with Indian Oceans, on to the U.S. incorporation of the Great Lakes en route to the current global markets for iron and coal and oil. The nations that achieved the most rapid economic growth of their century responded to the contradiction between economies of scale and the diseconomies of space by mobilizing and coordinating (1) technological and organizational innovation in domestic production and in transport, (2) construction and organization of their own and the world’s built environment to cheapen the procurement and transport of the most voluminously used raw materials to their domestic production sites, and (3) reorganization of the political and financial relations between extractive suppliers and themselves.The rise to trade dominance in each case (a) was technically, financially, and organizationally more demanding, and more rapid, than the one before it, (b) involved sequentially cumulative increases in space and matter, and therefore (c) required new, and each time more closely coupled, institutions of governance and collaboration between firms, banks, and the state. These comparisons provide a unitary answer to our three core questions. In each case the technological and organizational solutions to the contradiction between scale and space and the resulting problems of cheap and steady access to raw materials (a) enhanced the economic and political power of the ascending national economy while encumbering the developmental potential of its suppliers, (b) allowed the ascending nation to reshape patterns of trade in the most voluminously used raw materials to its own advantage and thus dominate world trade, and (c) expanded the flow of matter and integrated the processes of production over greater portions of the globe.

How Hegemonic Competition Transforms World Trade Patterns In this section, we discuss concepts and methods for analysis of the ways that raw materials access strategies simultaneously increase the domestic productivity of the ascendant economy, transform international trade and investment, and drive globalization. Patterns of world trade in raw materials change dramatically during the rapid rise of a new competitor. Holland and England each transformed at the beginning of their ascent, and then struggled over, trade in timber to


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build ships; Britain, Germany, and France struggled similarly over iron and coal as those materials became the most voluminously used. Each competitor nation strove to reform these trades to their own locational advantage. Japanese firms and state agencies created the conditions for rapid industrialization and ascent to preeminence in the global economy, for example, by fomenting global shifts in raw material extraction, processing, and trade. Less than 20 percent of all iron ore mined in 1960 entered transmaritime trade; two decades later, over 35 percent was shipped overseas for processing. Ton-miles of iron transported increased over 600 percent during the same period. Coal was also transformed from a locally and regionally to a globally traded commodity; ton-miles transported increased 1275 percent between 1960 and 1990. The central propositions that emerge from our comparison of the five cases are that (a) securing reliable access to a variety of cheap raw materials is the most complex challenge that any rising national economy confronts (Bunker and O’Hearn 1992; Bunker 1994; Bunker and Ciccantell 1994; Ciccantell and Bunker 1999, 2002); and (b) this challenge becomes more complex over time as the scale, scope, and throughput required for effective competition expand reveal key mechanisms underlying the long historical trajectory to globalization. Solutions to this challenge require technological, financial, organizational, and institutional innovations capable of restructuring relations at unprecedented degrees of close-coupled complexity, scale, and scope within and across firms, sectors, and the state.These newly structured relations must be compatible and dynamic both domestically and internationally, as well as flexible enough to respond adequately to the increase in complexity, scale, and scope that other core nations’ and extractive peripheries’ responses to changes the rising economy’s access strategies and developmental trajectory stimulate in the world economic system. Taken together, these propositions illuminate how the material intensification and spatial expansion that result from each successful national ascent to trade dominance accumulate sequentially through successive systemic cycles of accumulation, simultaneously advancing globalization and exacerbating the differentials in state, corporate, and financial power, skill, and organizational complexity that underlie the growing inequalities between national economies. Any rising economy must adapt its solutions to a larger, politically, and technologically more complex world economy than had confronted earlier ascendant nations, but the parameters of effective raw materials access strategies persist across all cases. In any rising economy, these strategies must respond to and take advantage of contemporary technological, geopolitical, environmental, and market conditions in the rest of the world and of the nation’s position and location within that particular global economy.They must also coordinate the physical characteristics and location in space and in topography of the various raw material resources actually or potentially available with the physical characteristics and location in space and topography of the national territory.

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Because solutions to the raw materials problem requires the coordination of multiple physical and social processes across geopolitical and physical space with domestic relations between firms, sectors, the state, labor, and new technologies, and because the solutions to these problems must accompany or even precede industrial competitiveness, we believe that these solutions require and stimulate complex processes of learning and of institutional change that fundamentally mold the organization of the national economy at the same time that they change international markets and the rules binding participants in them. In this, we follow, and then extend to a global stage, Alfred Chandler’s (1962, 1977, 1990) demonstrations of how the railroad and the steel industries created templates and dynamic forces that transformed the shape of U.S. corporations. Chandler, though, used an essentially historical methodology, which limited the nomothetic potential of his insights. We propose, in contrast, to interpret the economic, social, and geopolitical history of raw materials access strategies and of the transport innovations and investments needed to implement them through first principles of chemistry and physics. Chandler’s insight that heavy materials and the systems devised to transport them rapidly over long distances formed the crucible of the U.S. economy can be abstracted upward to reflect not merely a national particularity but rather a set of physical determinancies that surround the ways that procurement and transformation of matter expand in volume and in distance transported as the industrial economy itself expands. Our approach, which we call the new historical materialism, allows us to use first principles of physics and chemistry and rules of biology and geology to explain why solution of the problems posed by procuring access to, extracting, processing, and transporting the heaviest and most voluminous of raw materials has generated social attributes essential to each economy’s rise to global dominance. By first framing our historical analysis within the regularities governing material, temporal, and spatial characteristics and processes and, second, showing how these physico-spatio-temporal processes intersect with and shape economic regularities and mechanisms, we can extend the lessons of particular cases to more abstract principles. This parallels North’s approach in the New Economic History, but there is far more consensual validation of the table of elements, or of the laws of physics, than there is for the first principles of classical economics, or for sociological definitions of the state or the firm. Indeed, historical materialism is fundamental to explanations of combined and uneven development, and thus more appropriate to the relative and relational analysis implied by world-systems approaches. In devising this approach, we have considered and updated Marx’s recourse over a hundred and fifty years ago to contemporary understandings of biology and organic chemistry in his analysis of how socially devised technologies invalidated the formulas that Malthus used to project lower rates of increase for agricultural production than for human populations,


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and to current understandings of the mechanical rules and physical laws that governed the amount of pressure per square inch that could be safely contained in a steam-engine boiler. Marx’s theory of differential rent is based on notions of natural soil fertility and of how it can be technically enhanced.4 We now have access to far more precise formulations of physical laws and of chemical and biological rules than existed when Marx first advocated material history as an means of demystifying political economy and invoked vaguely specified notions of organic metabolism, but Marx was clearly searching for ways to integrate material and social process in his analysis. Framing the question of how economies ascend in the world-system within a rigorously materialist logic validates a focus on raw materials as the primary locus of development.The physical and chemical characteristics of matter, energy, space, and time impinge far more directly, and far less flexibly, on raw materials economies than they do on sectors further downstream (Bunker 1992).The total volume of raw materials is, necessarily, greater than that of the sum of products made from them.The distances to, and the topographic and social organizational differences between, the sources of raw materials are far greater, and the diversity of their molecular structure and the heterogeneity of their chemical composition are necessarily greater than those of the industrial inputs derived from them. Greater volume, greater distance, greater complexity, and more heterogeneity combine to create the broadest scale and scope for the most fundamental of economic processes—the increase of profit and market share through technical and organizational innovations that reduce unit costs of production. The solutions to problems of bulk, throughput, physical complexity, and cost in raw materials procurement and processing require coordination of domestic and of multiple extranational processes. These must be compatible both within and across particular raw materials. Raw materials industries thus tend to generate the domestic reorganization of corporations, sectors, and the state as well as the extraterritorial understandings, rules, and practices that underlie the operations of a world-system. The most voluminously used raw materials (excepting earth and stone, which are never moved very far) are those that bear weight, resist force or heat, and provide energy, and so are most extensively incorporated into infrastructure, machinery, and transport. Infrastructure, machinery, and transport facilities must all increase rapidly during the initial stages of industrial development.The bulk and weight of wood, and later, of iron, coal, and oil are vastly greater than those of other materials procured and transformed. The synergies between their procurement, transport, and transformation at the accelerating levels of throughput, scale, and scope that must be achieved in any rising economy create the challenges and the conditions for the social, economic, technological, political, legal, and educational innovations required for national economic ascent within a global economy. This was true of wood and ships in Amsterdam, iron, coal, rail, and steamships in Great Britain, and iron, coal, oil, rail, ships, automobiles, and

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trucks in the United States and later in Japan. Particular technological, geographical, and relational solutions varied because of the huge changes in scale, scope, technology, and geopolitics during the very different periods of these different national ascents. Technological solutions in both transport and in transformation of matter and energy conform to specifiable and unchanging chemical and physical laws and regularities. Space and topography comprise geographic obstacles to transport whose effects can be precisely measured for each transport technology. Technology and geography thus provide baselines within which regularities and mechanisms with fairly high explanatory status can provide context and frame for examination of the different relational solutions that are viable at different moments of competition for national ascent within the world economy. In the next section, we lay out some of the regularities of technology, space, topography, and matter as these intersect with social processes, organizations, and the mechanisms that drive them.

How Weight, Bulk, and Distance Structure Social Organization Humans use different raw materials because their molecular structure, chemical composition, and other characteristics allow them to perform certain functions in production. All material has weight and occupies space, and few raw materials occur in nature in either the forms or the locations that make them useful to humans.Thus, the procurement of raw materials requires work and imposes costs, both of which increase with the bulk of the raw material and the distance from which it must be brought. Minerals particularly tend to occur in natural forms that require molecular and chemical transformations and in locations that require complex extraction and lengthy transport. Molecular and chemical transformation requires large amounts of concentrated energy in forms specific to each raw material, and the materials used for strength, weight-bearing, and force require heavy transport. Both of these tasks are beyond the range of human labor, and so require major technological solutions. The contribution of raw materials to productivity depends on their cost relative to the other means of production, and particularly of labor. The more costly the raw material, the lower the organic composition of capital, and thus the lower the productivity of labor (Marx 1967: vol. III). Increased industrial productivity can only occur by reducing the work, and thereby the cost, required to extract, process, transport, and transform raw materials. The most fundamental of technologies, and of technological innovations, therefore, are those which contrive to derive the same functions with less weight moved across less distance, and thus to allow greater production with equal or less work. Different minerals exist in fixed amounts and in specific places, however, so both the historical process and the expansion of production tends to


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increase the distance between the sites of extraction and of transformation. The most accessible and the highest quality ores, that is, those that require the least amount of work to become useful, are usually used first, so the technological innovations designed to reduce the costs of procuring, transporting, and using raw materials are partially, and sometimes completely, vitiated by cost-increasing processes of depletion.This paradox enhances the central importance of technological innovations in the raw materials sectors to the economy as a whole. Most mineral ores occur in highly diverse combinations with other elements. In any particular deposit, these combinations are governed by chemical and physical properties that allow for various types and degrees of bonding and by the geological history of the particular site. Ores in different sites, or in different strata at the same site, therefore are both complex and diverse. The transformations that make minerals useful to humans require simplifying and standardizing the complex physical and chemical forms in which they occur in nature. Most of the technical processes for these simplifications, as well as transport, reduce work, and cost, most effectively at or above a certain scale of operation. Economies of scale, however, are only possible with standardization of process and therefore of inputs. From Darby’s invention of smelting iron with coke through Bessemer’s furnace and to the present, the diffusion of technologies for reducing the cost of smelting and improving the quality of metal has been retarded by chemical and structural differences in the iron ore and in the coal available in different regions. Standardizing these highly diverse raw materials in order to cheapen the processes of large-scale chemical and molecular simplification can be achieved in two ways. One is to assure constancy of supply from the same source. As distances to sources become greater, this may involve special problems of establishing and maintaining property and contractual rights as well as transport rights and costs across national boundaries and on the seas. Another is to develop techniques of preparing and blending ores from different locations to particular specifications.The costs of these procedures increase with the variability of the ores received, so this second option also requires some constancy of supply from different sources. Another means of reducing raw materials costs is by contriving to lower the rents or prices paid for their extraction and to lower the cost of their transport. Close holding of technical information, knowledge about the internal politics and economies of resource-rich nations, and stimulating competition between multiple suppliers are commonly used strategies for negotiating rent and price bargains.The most direct means of lowering the cost of transport is to make larger, more efficient vehicles, vessels, terminals, and ports.This requires other fields of technical and organizational innovation, creates a major demand for the raw materials themselves, and requires complex negotiations and agreements with foreign states and firms.As scale and technical and financial complexity of mineral extraction and markets increase, the relative advantage of dominant nation firms and states, with

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accumulated experience in and understanding of the global minerals markets that supply them, over peripheral firms and states with only local— and in many cases, no—experience and knowledge of the minerals markets they are being induced to supply, increases. In this way, the learning, skills, and institution formation generated by resolving the contradictions between scale and space intensify the inequalities between raw material suppliers and raw material consumers. Ports and terminals are required at both ends of a voyage, so cheapening transport of raw materials requires cross-national coordination and guarantees of construction, ownership, and management of these costly facilities. The large costs sunk in enabling infrastructure and vessels to handle very large volumes create pressure to reduce loading and unloading time, and thus drive technologies and management to accelerate turnaround. In this instance as well, solutions involve the coordination of the technical and the political, of the domestic and the external. Finally, security of supply is critical to lowering the cost of raw materials. Smelting and refining, the generic terms for simplifying the physical and chemical complexity of mineral ores into useful forms, and bulk transport, are scale-sensitive and capital-intensive. They require large investments of capital sunk in technologies specific to the particular mineral, and often to the particular ores.The greater the capital intensity, the greater are the costs of operating at less than full capacity.The more specific the technology to the process, the less flexible it is in shifting to other inputs or other products. Mineral processors are therefore extremely vulnerable to heavy losses due to interruptions of supply. Resulting increase in raw materials costs reverberate through the entire economy. Security of supply is therefore a pressing concern for individual firms, for entire sectors, and for the national state. As in the other instances just discussed, solutions require coordinated actions, domestically and internationally, and between firms, sectors, and the state. As the throughput of metals in national production systems expand and accelerate, solutions to these problems have ever-greater urgency for and impacts on downstream economic activities. Opportunities for solutions, however, also increase. Large volume and rapid throughput create the conditions in which potential savings are most likely to return the costs of developing and implementing technical and organizational innovation.The bulk and potential scale of raw materials processing surpasses that of all other sectors of the economy, and the chemical and physical complexity confronted in raw materials processing is greater than in other sectors. These two physically derived constants determine that investment in costreducing innovation has its greatest effects in the raw materials sectors, especially at the beginning of economic ascent. Because the savings generated by these innovations will cascade into a wide range of downstream economic activities, the motivation and the potential for collaboration across sectors and vested interests increases, even for firms that may compete for product markets.


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Because the huge scale and complexity of most significant innovations in the most voluminously used raw materials require enormous investments, including in infrastructure and diplomatic relations which may benefit multiple firms, but also on a spatial scale that may require new patterns of location within built environments, collaboration is required not only across sectors but also with the state. As the scale and complexity of such innovations has accumulated through the history of the world system, these collaborations have tended toward closer coupling between firms, sectors, and states, at least during the greenfield and early stages of expanded production. These same mechanisms contribute eventually to hegemonic decline. The huge scale and lumpiness of sunk capital required in these sectors, and the relatively long economic life of the infrastructures developed, mean that once established, these solutions tend to endure over the medium term. Their immediate costs diminish, but they no longer generate the technical and organizational innovation they did at the beginning. Once established, the motivation for close-coupled collaboration tends to diminish. Firms are far less likely to accede to collective decisions and to direct state intervention or restriction when they no longer depend on state support, subsidies, or regulation to achieve solutions to problems beyond the individual firm’s capacity. Nonetheless, even if close-coupled collaboration is reduced, the spillover of the original technical and organizational solutions, both into other sectors and into the institutional relations between firms, sectors, and the state, ensures that their social and economic impacts endure. British, and then American, financial and commercial dominance outlasted each nation’s control of world steel and shipping industries; Dutch ships still carried the greatest share of the world’s cargos for almost a century after Britain achieved economic dominance. If we are correct that bulk, scale, and throughput create the conditions most conducive to technical and organizational innovation, then the most voluminously used of the raw materials should have the greatest generative effects. In 1991, the world economy produced 45 times more steel by weight than aluminum, and 76 times more copper.With the most advanced smelting techniques and highest quality inputs, each ton of steel required at least 800 pounds of coal and 1.4 tons of iron ore. Iron, once it has absorbed the carbon contained in coal, combines the ability to bear weight and to resist force without losing its shape. These two attributes satisfy the most extensive material requirements of an industrial society. Space, weight, and matter relate in complex but specifiable ways that intersect significantly with social processes. Space manifests itself as the measurable barrier or obstacle to transport of distance and topography, but in compressed form, the increasing density of social and economic activity is also manifest in spatial metric. Agglomeration of multiple economic activities in a relatively restricted space greatly lowers the cost of moving inputs, commodities, information, and labor, but requires that far more matter and energy than is available in that space are transformed there, and that the physical environment is rebuilt in order to allow the close proximity of

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multiple social and economic activities. The matter transformed and the matter storing energy both have weight, and their transformation requires force or heat.Weight bearing and force and heat-resisting strength increase with the mass of steel; available heat increases with the mass of coal and iron. Expanded production in this restricted space can only occur by bringing in greater volumes and weight of raw material, and so require greater amounts of weight-bearing and force-resisting matter into the industrial environment and into the transport infrastructure that supplies it. Some technological innovations have reduced the amounts of matter required to perform a certain amount of work (Isard 1948; Bunker 1996), but the savings thus achieved are only realized in new production, not in the environment, the plants, or the machinery that has already been built. These innovations tend to be adopted during expansive phases of production; they result in more material being transformed more profitably rather than in absolute reduction of matter consumed (Bunker 1996). As consumption of these raw materials continues and expands, they must be transported from ever more distant sites, requiring the extension of increased weight-bearing capacities over greater space.Whether with ships and wood or with trains, trucks, ships, coal, steel and oil, the raw materials incorporated in greatest bulk into transport have been the same as those most voluminously used in the rest of the economy. Harbors, canals, rails, roads, and the warehouses, docks, cranes, hoists, conveyors, and terminals needed to store and load voluminous raw materials involve huge, inflexibly sunk capital and serve multiple firms and sectors.They also require continuous right of way or easements. Increased scale of raw material transport and processing transforms the logic of industrial location and size; as technical economies of scale increase progressively, reorganization and reintegration of industrial location around the downstream flow of matter and energy from raw material to finished goods become more cumbersome and more costly. National states and local government intervention and supervision, both in investment and in modified property law, expand and become more elaborate across hegemonic cycles. The state may serve to overcome fears of free riders that would impede autonomous firm solution, to transfer moneys from other sectors, either as subsidies or as tax-breaks, and also as the only authority competent to ensure rights of way.Also, as the distances across the multiple spaces needed to procure raw materials in appropriate quantities and qualities increases, the locus of extraction and one end of the transport journey involves a widening diversity of sovereignties. Only the state is competent to deal with the multiple relations of property and long-term contracts across a plethora of sovereignties. As volume, scale, scope, and speed of raw material technology and organization accumulate and accelerate, the ever closer coupling and coordination they require to reduce the costs of excess capacity or down time for the huge capitals invested in them generates a sustained increase in state participation and regulation. Because efficiencies in transport and


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in location of the most voluminously used raw materials create savings for the greatest possible number of other sectors, synergies between innovations and developments in coal and iron on the one hand and in transport on the other generate increasingly complex collaboration, surveillance, and regulation within and between state, firms, and sectors.

Raw Materials, Generative Sectors, and National Development The challenges and the opportunities presented by the basic raw materials industries and by the transport systems on which they depend foster what we call “generative sectors”: sectors that, beyond creating the backward and forward linkages that underlie the concept of a leading sector, also stimulate a broad range of technical skills and learning along with formal institutions designed and funded to promote them, vast and diversified instrumental knowledge held by interdependent specialists about the rest of the world, financial institutions adapted to the requirements of large sunk costs in a variety of social and political contexts, specific formal and informal relations between firms, sectors, and states; the form of legal distinctions between public and private and between different levels of public jurisdiction. These generative sectors have been as specific to each hegemonic cycle as was the raw materials challenge that fostered them, but they can be conceptualized in terms of technology, learning, institutional change, the organization of firms and sectors, and state formation that allow comparison across cases and over time, and that allow examination of how the changes in the world system have progressively expanded and complicated the requirements for national ascent relative to other economies. Generative sectors will be more numerous, more easily observed, and more efficacious in those national economies that are growing so rapidly that they must achieve massive increases in throughput and transformation of raw materials.The concept is relational, however, within a world-systems perspective, and thus implies that generative sectors in a rising economy will have significant consequences for economies that export raw materials or trade in other kinds of goods. The concept generative sector can also be used for synchronically framed comparisons, that is, comparison between national economies in the same hegemonic cycle. Presence, absence, material base, density of connections, and extent of connections can be specified and then compared for different economies.The idea of such comparisons between competitors for core status seems relatively straightforward. A more relational question would involve looking at raw material exporting countries in terms of generative sectors.Terry Karl’s (1997) analysis of the impact of oil on Venezuela’s formation of both state and economy, or Michael Shafer’s (1994) examination of how sectors form the state, for example, could both benefit from a more mechanismic explanation based on the idea of generative sectors.

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The semantic form of the notion “generative sector” connotes that other sectors, or changes in those sectors, are generated. Chandler demonstrated that the railroads adapted to the problems and opportunities of moving multiple cargos over great distances at high speeds by devising organizational forms that could coordinate, dispatch, and monitor entire trains, and eventually individual cars, from and to multiple locations. He claimed that the telegraph companies, faced with the need to coordinate and regulate the flows of multiple messages from and to multiple locations, adopted the “template” that the railroads had developed.We note, though, that Chandler does not consider how the telegraph, thus formed, increased the efficiency, safety, complexity, and profits of railroads. Our model of generative sectors, therefore, includes consideration of feedback, or autocatalytic loops, between generative sectors and the sectors that they foment or stimulate to change. If raw materials access strategies require new scales of transport, and thus new technologies, new design, and new infrastructure, we expect that, for example, successful access to cheaper iron ore and coal will both require and generate technical solutions to transport costs, such that the design and construction of larger ships, better railways, larger ports, more capacious warehouses, and so on will create demand for more steel, and potentially for higher quality steel, in volumes, or at levels of throughput, that both make possible technological innovation and allow and full use of capacity required to reduce unit costs of steel. Reduced unit costs of steel make shipbuilding cheaper and more competitive and further reduce unit costs of iron and coal transport. Feedback loops of this type cheapened, deepened, and accelerated the synergies between iron ore, coal, railroads, ships, and smelters after the adoption of Bessemer smelting in the Great Lakes steel belt as directly as they cheapened, deepened, and accelerated the synergies between iron ore, coal, computerized continuous casting and hot rolling, vastly larger harbors, the construction and deployment of superlarge dry bulk carriers, and the relocation of heavy industries and their downstream dependent consumer industries around deep-water ports in Japan a century later. In this sense, iron and coal may be treated as generative sectors, but transport is not simply a generated sector. Rather it participates in feedback or autocatalytic loops that intensify the growth and innovation in the generative sector, that is, in the steel, or in the iron and coal sector.Whether or not the state becomes involved in financing, promoting, relocating, and regulating these sectors, and whether or not it develop skills, creates capable agencies, and inspires trust, are empirically accessible questions about the generative sector’s contribution to historically particular processes of national development. The progression toward increasingly tight coupling at greater technical economies of scale across greater spaces and multiple sovereignties with greater levels of production that appears to characterize the unfolding of the world-system suggests as well, though, that only economies where effective generative sectors emerge can rise to economic dominance or competitiveness. We suspect that the characteristics of the


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world-system at any particular moment are more or less amenable to dominance by countries with different physical or social conditions or qualities. Within this approach, the world-system must be the object of analysis, and global processes are data, but we strongly affirm, against the wisdom of Immanuel Wallerstein and many of the proponents of globalization, that the nation and the nation-state must remain a key unit of analysis.The complex interactions and dynamic processes which underlie the creation and the impact of generative sectors occur within bounded spaces, or places, and however much these generative sectors draw on, act within, and affect global systems, we cannot understand how they develop and change unless we locate our analysis in the places they occur.We hope that our insistence that process and location are intimately related may enrich world-systemic analysis of globalization by providing insights on how the internal processes of national development are intertwined with the ways that this development affects the global economy. Matter, Space, and the Future of Global Economies Successive ascendant economies’ strategies to cheapen transport technology and infrastructure, together with their strategies to stabilize their access to international raw materials sources, have been a major factor in progress toward globalization for at least 800 years. Systematic analysis of abstractly similar patterns of successful national strategies over this period help us build a model of the ways that transport and production technologies have mediated between society and nature—both material and spatial—as social manipulations of nature have expanded and intensified. Such a model can facilitate a consideration of how and whether a global system that has sustained its competition for markets and materials by successive waves of expansion can continue as it reaches the material and spatial limits of the globe. Each successive expansion of the world economy has been driven by scale-dependent innovations of the technologies of production and transport. The economies of scale incorporated in competition and struggle for trade dominance in each successive hegemonic cycle have required greater volumes of more different types of raw material. Because these raw materials are produced, many naturally, in local sites where their extraction depletes or reduces them, most expansions of production require incorporation of more distant sources of raw materials, spread over greater portions of the globe. Thus, economies of scale in production create diseconomies of distance in the procurement and transport of the vastly increased amount of raw material required by the new scale of production. Resolving the contradictions between economies of scale and diseconomies of space has generated innovations and investments in technologies, organization, and infrastructure to cheapen the movement of ever-greater volumes of matter across ever-greater distances. At each cycle of world-economic expansion,

208


the technical complexity, the political coordination, and the capital investment required for these innovations have increased. Thus far, each episode of these material and financial dilemmas has been resolved by a spatial fix that has incorporated new types and deposits of raw materials into new technologies and infrastructures of transport. The investments in transport systems required to incorporate these new sources of material into the world market also provide avenues for the extension of commerce and investment into expanding global markets. From this perspective, globalization must eventually collide with inexorable natural limits of both space and matter. At the local level, the inequality between extractive and productive economies (Bunker 1985; Bunker and Ciccantell 2003), and the unbalanced flow of matter and of energy from the extraction to production (Bunker 1992) can only become greater as economies of scale approach these natural limits. At the global level, the internal dialectic of capital and the materio-spatial logic of capitalist production have combined to drive each systemic cycle of accumulation first to site-specific or local depletion of the technically most accessible raw materials and then to the overaccumulation and devaluation of capital in the dominant economy. As the most voluminously used, lowest value-to-volume raw materials are introduced into global trade, the potential for future crises of resource depletion and capital devaluation increases, while the potential for spatial fixes through discovering large new deposits in more distant places decreases. The next great crisis of capital may result from spatio-material constraints rather than from financial responses to overaccumulation and devaluation. The question then will be whether the states, firms and sectors—whose strategic collaborations to achieve national dominance of world trade by investing in new scale economies have led to this crisis— will be able to invent new forms of collaboration that do not require material intensification or spatial expansion. Notes 1. The assumptions of dematerialization and deterritorialization can be questioned by observations of what the information communicated is about or what the capital is ultimately invested in. Even if material processes of production are now the object of a smaller portion communication or capital, the technically driven flood of communication and capital is so much greater than it once was as to suggest that information and investment—no matter how global—are still about material things in specific places. 2. See Hugill (1994) for an extended and delightfully detailed discussion of these effects. 3. Religious persecution—the inquisition in Portugal and the civil wars in England, augmented the flow of capital and skill. Sephardic Jews and British Puritans and Quakers played important productive, commercial, and financial roles in Holland and America respectively. 4. Much of the first third of volume III of Capital is devoted to Marx’s accounts of the practical experiments of and dialogue between factory engineers and public safety inspectors struggling between the opposed imperatives of increasing engine power by increasing steam pressure and protecting the safety of workers and plant. The middle third of volume III addresses the ways that the soil fertility, natural and socially manipulated, differentially affects rates of profit. Though only roughly edited and integrated, both sections of volume III deal with issues of how naturally produced features of material affect political economy.


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INDEX

Abbasids, 4, 5, 12 Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 122, 144, 155 administrative technology, 75–7, 81 Aegean Sea, 69 Africa, 82, 98, 101, 106, 122, 142–5 Akkadian Empire, 99 Alexander (the Great), 21, 22, 26, 34, 36–39, 42 Amsterdam, 180–182, 185 Anatolia, 10, 29, 39–41, 61–3, 70, 76, 86 Arabia, 27, 40, 82, 88, 117 Arabs, 6, 9, 12–13, 83, 88, 90 Arrighi, Giovanni, 15–16, 168, 175–7 assabiyah (social solidarity), 2–3 Assyrian Empire, 13, 47, 65, 75–80, 82–9, 104, 110 Babylon, 41, 65, 99, 103–4 Baghdad, 105 Bactria (Afghanistan), 37, 42, 65, 110 biology, 198 Britain, 16, 25, 174, 177, 182–4, 186–7, 190 Bronze Age, 20–4, 40, 47–8, 54, 58, 61–2, 64–5, 67, 69–70 capital cities, 109, 129 capitalism, 139, 142, 156, 166–9, 178, 192 capitalist city-states, 94 Carpathians, 20, 29 Celtic (peoples), 21–2, 29, 32, 37–8, 43, 46, 50 Central Asia, 45, 48–50, 59, 63, 113, 119–20, 125, 127, 132, 133, 138, 146, 159–62 Chandler,Tertius, 93, 97, 98, 110, 111

chemistry, 198 Chernykh, E.N., xii, 21–45 chiefdoms, 3, 9, 13, 17, 23, 79, 88, 94, 111 China, 5–12, 17, 19, 21–2, 25–6, 33–9, 42–51, 64, 105, 110, 113–20, 124, 130–1, 133, 145, 155–72 Chou (Zhou) Dynasty, 21, 35 cities, 47, 92–111, 142 city size distributions, 92–3, 95–6, 107, 111 city-states, 8, 79, 88, 94, 125, 138–9, 148, 153 classes, 58, 146, 158–68 class struggle, 141–5 climate change, 7, 24, 31, 38, 45, 52–74 coal, 183–92, 196–7, 201, 203–6 commodities, 29–31, 45–6, 129–35 conquest, 13–14, 35–6, 41, 82–4, 113–14 core, xi, 13–15, 39, 56–65, 75–88, 93–8, 116–17, 139–42, 193–4, 196–7 core/periphery hierarchy, xi, 15 core-wide empire, 13, see also world-empire, universal state Crete, 28, 45, 50, 63–70, 73–4, 82 cuisine, 113–21 cultural evolution, 10 C-wave, 26, 40, 47, see also Chernyk Cyprus, 28, 40–1, 64, 89 Dark Ages, 39, 52, 54, 56 desert peoples, 2, 5–6 Dutch, 6, 14–16, 124, 147, 152–3, 181–4, 203

212

Index

Egypt, 1, 19, 21–2, 27–9, 34, 39–43, 47, 52–5, 57, 59, 61–5, 67–9, 70–5, 82, 84–6, 88, 100–2, 108–9, 122 elites, 46, 58, 82–4, 86, 88, 121, 138, 156, 158–61, 165–8 England, 5–6, 95, 106, 109, 129, 140, 172, 196, 208 environmental degradation, 54, 86 Eurasia, 21, 24–6, 32–3, 35, 38, 44–5, 47, 64, 94, 111, 124 Europeans, 29, 43, 120, 126–8, 135, 141 evolution, 18, 25, 27, 94, 110 Fertile Crescent, 10, 40, 77, 82, 90 Frank,Andre Gunder, x, 18, 32, 45, 49, 52, 72, 140, 144–5, 150, 152, 155, 157, 169 Genghis Khan, 113, 121 geology, 198 globalization, 174–9, 182, 187–90, 192, 194, 196, 207–8 grain, 33, 41, 46, 66, 76, 117, 148, 160, 165, 181, 187 Great Powers, 15 Greece, 20, 28–9, 34, 39, 41, 43, 47, 63–7, 70, 72 Guptas, 124 Hall,Thomas D., 9, 12–13, 45, 92, 94 Han Empire, 34–5, 37 Harappa, 52–3, 55, 57–9, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71–3 Harvey, David, 175–6 hegemony, 14–16, 28–9, 42–3, 75, 87–8, 94, 122, 141, 148, 155, 160–1, 176 Hittites, 67, 77, 82, 99, 103–4 Huns, 22, 34, 105, 108–9 Iberia, 41–2 Ibn Khaldun, 1–6, 9–13, 18, 110 imperialism, 106 incursion, 35 India (South Asia), 9, 11, 26, 32, 37, 40, 42–5, 70, 73, 82, 93, 117–18, 122, 129, 133-6, 139–40, 144–5, 150–1 Indus River Valley, 61, 71–4, see also Harappa Indus Civilization, 73–4, see also Harappa

Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS), 97, 110 interaction networks, 8–9, 92, 98, 110 iron, 22, 65, 86, 178, 180, 182, 184–92, 196–7, 199, 201, 204–6 Iron Age, 48–50, 87, 90 Islam, 6, 105, 150–1 Italy, 28–9, 32, 41, 151 Japan, 5, 45, 110, 119, 166, 172–3, 177, 189–92, 197, 200, 206, 209–10 Khaldun Cycles, 5, 6, 12 kinship, 2, 76, 114 Kondratieff cycles (K-waves), 16, 25 Korea, 6, 45, 110 lamb, 113, 116, 120–1 Lattimore, Owen, 47 Lebanon, 89 Levant, 27, 64, 82–3, 87, 110, 126 marcher states, xii, 13, 94 Maya, 6, 7, 18, 19 Marx, Karl, 176, 195–200, 208 Mediterranean, 8, 17, 18, 22, 26–9, 31–2, 38–9, 40–50, 51, 53–4, 64–5, 69–70, 73, 80, 82, 84, 87, 93, 110, 120, 140, 180–1, 196 merchants, 80, 149, 151–3 Mesopotamia, 8, 13, 21, 27, 40, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 67, 69–71, 76, 79, 98, 100–3, 105, 109, 114, 116 metalworking, 23, 24 migration, 22, 23, 25, 32, 37, 54, 61, 63–4, 133, see also incursions military technology, 94–5 Ming Dynasty, 5, 113, 118–19, 169 Modelski, George, 15–18, 21, 45, 48–50, 54, 70, 73, 94, 97–100, 111 Mongol Empire, 6, 7, 48, 108, 112, 135 Mongols, 7, 12, 25, 109, 113–21, 132–4, 150, 153, 164 Neo-Assyrian Empire, 75, 77, 82, 90–1, 99, 103 Neolithic, 74, 91 Netherlands, 181 networks, 9, 11, 26–7, 41, 57, 65, 68, 87, 92 New England, 183, 185, 188

Index Nineveh, 81, 99, 103 nomads, 114, 127, 132, 133 Ottoman Empire, 106, 129, 180 Palestine, 20, 22, 28, 63, 65, 69, 72, 84, 86, 91 periphery, 15, 57, 66, 78–9, 86, 93–4, 121, 128, 135, 141–2, 158, 166, 178, 186, 193 Persia, 9, 12, 34, 36, 42, 88, 104, 110, 128, 133 Persian Empire, 42, 104 Phoenicians, 40, 43, 48, 67, 82, 86–90 physics, 198 plague, 7, 121 population density, 93, 94, 97 population growth, 31, 58, 70, 161 population pressure, 157 Portugal, 16, 106, 120, 174, 180, 189, 208 Qing Dynasty, 5, 170, 171, 172 religion, 19, 91, 172 rice, 12, 113, 119, 121–2, 124, 145, 147, 161–2 rise and fall, 1, 2, 9, 10, 12–15, 17, 56, 92–3, 96, 161 Rise of the West, ii, xi, 9, 122–54 Roman Empire, 7, 10, 124, 143 Rome, 11, 27, 29, 47, 104 Russia, 5, 73, 104, 106, 112, 182 Scythians, 26, 32, 34–5, 38, 46, 50 semiperiphery, xi, 75–87, 97 modern, xi–xii semiperipheral capitalist city state, xii, 94 development (theory of), xii, 12–14, 95 marcher state, xii, 94 Shang Dynasty, 23, 34–6, 39, 43, 45 Silk Road, 7, 47, 48, 119 social evolution, 111 solidarity, 2, 3, 94, 138, see also assabiya Song (Sung) Dynasty, 115 South Asia, 12, 50, 102, 107, 109–11, 122–54, 180 Southeast Asia, 6, 12, 45, 111, 120, 128, 137, 149

213

Spain, 12, 42, 82, 86, 88, 106, 117, 181, 189 state formation, 137, 205 steel, 183–7, 189, 190–1, 194, 196, 198, 203, 206 steppe nomads, 5, 114 steppes, 23, 33, 35–6, 39, 46, 109, 112, 114, 117 stratification, 86, 159 Sumer, 18, 99, 103, 104 synchrony, 19, 93, 110 Syria, 13, 22, 28, 40, 47, 61, 64, 66, 69, 71, 76, 84, 98, 110 Taagepera, Rein, 93, 95, 97, 98, 103 taxation, 75, 83, 85, 88, 139, 146, 147 technological development, 25, 78, 174–207 textiles, 59, 76, 82, 123, 139, 145, 157, 183 timber, 61, 123, 142, 145, 157, 180–3, 185, 187, 196 tribute, 33, 37, 47, 76, 79–80, 83, 85–9, 103, 131, 134, 137 Tunis, 2 Turchin, Peter, 17, 94 Turks, 22, 25, 105, 109 universal state, 14, see also core-wide empire, world-empire urbanization, 56–7, 66, 70, 96, 98, 102, 123, 157 Uruk, 17, 71, 77, 89, 90, 98, 113 Wallerstein, I., x, 15, 156, 207 warfare, 4, 8, 67, 115, 132, 134, 141, 147, see also conquest wheat, 11, 12, 47, 67, 119, 181, 188 Wilkinson, David, 8, 14, 44, 93 wine, 11, 30–1, 46–7, 82, 124 world-economy, 76, 80, 83, 88, 126, 127, 142 world-empire, 76, 88, 133, see also core-wide empire, universal state world-systems perspective, xi, 7–17, 75–94, 126, 140, 175, 198 Xia Dynasty, 46 Yuan Dynasty, 133 Zhou, 34, 35, 36, 43, 46

The Historical Evolution of World-Systems (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

The Historical Evolution of World-Systems (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

Puzzles of the Democratic Peace: Theory, Geopolitics and the Transformation of World Politics (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

The Making of a Digital World: The Evolution of Technological Change and How It Shaped Our World (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory

The statistical processes of evolutionary theory

Major Powers and the Quest for Status in International Politics: Global and Regional Perspectives (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

Systemic Transitions: Past, Present, and Future (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)

Evolutionary Processes in Binary and Multiple Stars

Politics in the Ancient World

The South in World Politics

The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics

Evolutionary Essays: A Thermodynamic Interpretation of Evolution

Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology

Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation, and Progress in Evolutionary Biology

Women and Politics in the Third World (Women in Politics)

The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life

Magnetohydrodynamics: historical evolution and trends

Historical Atlas of the Celtic World

Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia

Historical Materialism and Social Evolution

Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire

Historical Atlas of the Viking World

Historical Atlas of the Celtic World

Historical Atlas of the Islamic World

Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation

Deviant Conduct in World Politics

Contested States in World Politics

The Creation-Evolution Debate: Historical Perspectives

Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective

The Evolution of Morphology (Studies in the Evolution of Language)

The Historical Evolution of World-Systems (Evolutionary Processes in World Politics)