CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN AND THOMAS D. HALL
There are many perspectives on global scale analysis in human history (Benjamin 2009; Denemark et al. 2000; Friedman 2008; Harvey 2003; Hornborg and Crumley 2007; Hornborg et al. 2007; Robinson 2004; Sanderson and Alderson 2005; Sassen 2006; Sklair 2002; Turchin 2003). Because of this wide availability and our own areas of competence and expertise, we will focus on world-systems analysis (WSA) in this discussion (Chase-Dunn and Babones 2006; Wallerstein 2004). Virtually all of these approaches address many of the same questions and issues, although from different perspectives. The largest difference among types are those that focus on description of “what” and “how,” versus those that seek to develop systematic, theoretical explanations for what happened and why. This difference is more complementary than oppositional. Of the theory-driven approaches, world-systems analysis addresses some questions that other approaches either cannot or do not ask. In this chapter we seek to highlight the contributions of a world-systems approach to global human history.
The comparative world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining social change that focuses on entire intersocietal systems rather than single societies. Its main insight is that no society can be fully understood in isolation. All societies are shaped by, and shape, other societies through important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting). These networks have woven polities and cultures together throughout human history. Explanations of social change thus need to take intersocietal systems (here, world-systems) as the units that evolve. This does not mean that individual societies are unimportant, or that local actors do not to some extent shape their own changes. Rather, it means that these actions take place within larger contexts which sometimes constrain and/or influence their actions. Intersocietal interaction networks were rather small when transportation was mainly a matter of walking. The expansion and intensification of interaction networks have been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly, often cyclically. We begin to explore this idea with a general description.
World-systems are systems of societies. “Systemness” means that these societies are interacting with one another in important ways – interactions are two-way, necessary, structured, regularized, and reproductive. Systemic interconnectedness exists when interactions importantly influence the lives of people within societies, and have consequences for social continuity and/or social change. Systemness, or coherence, is itself a variable. Some systems are more coherent than others. World-systems, however, are not necessarily global. The word “world” refers to the importantly connected interaction networks in which people live, whether these are spatially small or large. That is, they are more or less self-contained “worlds.”
Only the modern world-system has become planetary. It is a single economy composed of international trade and capital flows, transnational corporations that produce products on several continents, as well as all the economic transactions that occur within countries and locally. Culture and politics, too, are becoming increasingly global. The entire world-system is the whole system of human interactions, not only international trade and investment.
The modern world-system is structured politically as an interstate system, typically the main focus of the field of international relations, located within the academic discipline of political science. While the power of each state varies considerably, the overall world-system is multicentric. There is no world state. This is a fundamental feature of the modern system, and of many earlier smaller world-systems.
In order to compare different kinds of world-systems, the concepts used need to be sufficiently general to be applicable to all of them. For instance, a polity is any organization with a single authority that claims sovereign control over a territory or a group of people, such as bands, tribes, chiefdoms, or states. All world-systems are composed of interacting polities. This is a basis of comparison among modern world-systems, including those that have no states.
We follow current distinctions between “nations” and “states.” Nations are groups of people who share a common culture and language; they identify with each other, have or perceive a shared history, and hold similar values. States have formal organizations, typically bureaucratic, and exercise legitimate violence within their territory. Occasionally, states coincide with one nation, though even today that is relatively rare (Laczko 2000). More typically, states are multinational entities which contain more than one nation. Statistically this has been the normal condition since the first known state, Ur, some five millennia ago (Hall 1998; McNeill 1986). In contrast, ethnic groups are subnations, usually minorities within states in which there is a larger national group. While sociologically similar, ethnic groups are typically demographic minorities. Rarely, a numerical minority may be the majority nation, as occurred under apartheid in South Africa.
Core/Periphery Hierarchy
The modern world-system is structured as a core/periphery hierarchy in which some regions contain economically and militarily powerful states while other regions contain polities that are much less powerful and less developed. The institutional features and processes of a world-system reproduce the socially structured inequalities of this core/periphery hierarchy.
Countries that are called “advanced,” in the sense that they have high levels of economic development, skilled labor forces, high levels of income and powerful, well-financed states, are core powers, such as the United States, most countries in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Canada. Conventionally, “core states” also have been called the first world, developed states, or global North.
The contemporary periphery includes relatively weak states that are not always strongly supported by their populations and have little power relative to other states. Until recently the colonial empires of the European core states constituted much of the periphery. These colonial empires broke down into formally sovereign states in waves of decolonization that began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (the United States), and occurred through the early nineteenth century (former Spanish colonies), and in the twentieth century (Asia and Africa). Peripheral regions are usually economically less developed, having many subsistence producers, and industries with relatively low productivity and relatively unskilled labor. Peripheral agriculture typically employs simple tools, including animal and human labor, whereas in the core it is capital-intensive and employs machinery and inanimate forms of energy. Oil extraction and mining are often capital-intensive, but under the direct or indirect control of core capitalists. In the past, peripheral countries have been exporters of agricultural and mineral raw materials. Recently, even when they have developed some industrial production, it has usually been less capital-intensive and used less skilled labor. Contemporary peripheral countries include most of the countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – for example, Bangladesh, Senegal, and Bolivia.
The periphery is not “catching up” with the core. Rather both core and peripheral regions are developing, but most core states are developing faster than most peripheral states. By developing we mean, in a broad sense, becoming more complex socially, inventing new technologies or elaborating on old ones. In between there are countries, called the semiperiphery, that have intermediate levels of economic development or a mix of developed and less developed regions. Semiperipheral states have political/military power based in their large size; smaller semiperipheral countries typically are more developed than peripheral states.
A few other terms also require clarification. First, “the periphery” refers to all peripheral states or areas in total. Individual states or areas may be “peripheral states” or “peripheral areas.” The boundaries between the core, semiperiphery, and periphery are generally not crucial, because there is a continuum of economic and political/military power that constitutes the core/periphery hierarchy. Indeed, we could make four or seven categories instead of three. However, we note that considerable research on the modern world-system does reveal three (sometimes four) major groups of countries. This is far less clear for earlier world-systems. These categories are mainly a convenient terminology to delineate international inequality.
There have been a few cases of upward and downward mobility in the core/periphery hierarchy, although most countries simply run hard to stay in the same relative positions. The United States is a spectacular and unusual case of upward mobility. In 300 years this territory was incorporated from outside the Europe-centered system to become a peripheral area, then a peripheral state, then a semiperipheral state, then a core state, then came to dominate the current system, although now it is declining slowly. The United Kingdom and Portugal are states that have likewise declined in the last century.
To compare different kinds of core/periphery hierarchies and relations, the concept also needs occasional subdistinctions. Analysts should not assume that all world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies. This is an empirical question. Treating the creation of hierarchy as a problematic issue facilitates comparisons and allows examination of how core/periphery hierarchies have emerged and evolved. To do so, it is helpful to distinguish between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy. Core/periphery differentiation means that societies with different degrees of population density, polity size, and internal hierarchy are interacting with one another. Village dwellers who interact with nomadic neighbors constitute an instance of core/periphery differentiation. Core/periphery hierarchy refers to the relationship between societies. Hierarchy exists when some societies exploit or dominate others, such as British colonization of India, or the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Core/periphery hierarchy is not unique to the modern Europe-centered world-system. The Roman, Chinese, and Aztec empires conquered and exploited peripheral peoples, and at times adjacent states.
This distinction allows an examination of situations in which larger and more powerful societies interact with smaller ones, but do not exploit them. It also allows the study of cases in which smaller, less dense societies may exploit larger societies, such as interactions between the nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia with agrarian states and empires in China and Western Asia, most spectacularly the Mongol Empire founded by Chinggis Khan. It also allows us to investigate how and why some instances of core/periphery differentiation became hierarchical.
The modern world-system is now a global economy with a global political system (the interstate system). It also includes all the cultural aspects and interaction networks of the human population of the Earth. Culturally the modern system is composed of several civilizational traditions (e.g., Islam, Christendom, Hinduism, etc.), nationally defined cultures, nations, and subcultures (e.g., technocrats or bureaucrats, etc.), and indigenous and minority ethnic groups within states. The modern system is multicultural in the sense that networks of interaction connect people who have different languages, religions, and other cultural characteristics. Most of the earlier world-systems also were multicultural.
Networks are defined by regular and repeated interactions among individuals and groups that may involve trade, communication (formal or informal), threats, alliances, migration, marriage, gift giving, and so on. A network is important if the interactions affect these individuals’ and groups’ everyday lives, access to food and necessary raw materials, their identities, and their security from or vulnerability to threats and violence. World-systems are fundamentally composed of interaction networks.
One of the important systemic features of the modern system is the rise and fall of a dominant core power, called the “hegemonic sequence.” A hegemon is a core state that has a significantly greater amount of economic, political, and military power than any other core state, and that takes on the role of system leader. In the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic was the hegemon, in the nineteenth century Great Britain became the hegemon, and in the twentieth century the United States was the hegemon. The normal operation of the modern system – uneven economic development and competition among states – makes it difficult for a hegemon to sustain its dominant position, and so they tend to decline, as is currently happing to the United States. The decline is relative. Thus, the structure of the core oscillates back and forth between hegemony and hegemonic rivalry, a situation in which several roughly similar core states are contending for hegemony. Hegemonic rivalry is a dangerous condition, and system-wide wars are more common during this stage than in other times.
Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems
The modern world-system is distinctive in the spatial scale of its interaction networks, most of which are now global. In earlier, and especially smaller, systems there was a significant difference in spatial scale between networks in which food and basic raw materials (bulk goods) were exchanged and much larger networks of the exchange of luxuries such as spices, or jewels, silk, or bullion (prestige goods). (See Levi, this volume.) It is not economical to carry bulk goods far under premodern conditions of transportation. For foot transportation, the carrier will consume an amount of food equivalent to what he or she can carry over short distances, 50 miles or less. Occasionally food will be transported farther for some noneconomic reason. With domesticated animals or water transportation, this network can be much larger.
Prestige goods can be carried much further because of their high value-to-weight ratio, so this exchange usually constitutes a much larger network. Most early prestige goods trade was “down-the-line trade” in which goods are passed from group to group. For any particular group the effective extent of a trade network is that point beyond which nothing that happens will affect the group of origin. We note here that prestige goods and bulk goods are really poles of a continuum. Placement of any specific good on that continuum is a function of transportation technology, the relative value of the good, and supply and demand considerations. In short, whether a something is a prestige good or a bulk good is as much, if not more, a property of its context within an exchange system as a property of the good itself.
In order to bound interaction networks, we need to pick a place from which to start – a so-called “place-centric approach.” Searches for actual breaks in interaction networks are often fruitless, because almost all groups of people interact with their neighbors. But by focusing on a single settlement, for instance the pre-European contact village of Onancock on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay (near the current boundary between the US states of Virginia and Maryland), it is much easier to determine the spatial scale of the network by tracing how far food moved to and from it. Food came from some maximum distance, a bit beyond the groups that sent food directly. Two indirect jumps are probably sufficiently far that there would be little effect on Onancock. This sphere probably included villages at the southern and northern ends of the Chesapeake Bay.
Onancock’s prestige goods network was much larger. Copper, for instance, may have come from as far away as Lake Superior. In between the size of bulk goods networks and prestige goods networks are the interaction networks in which polities make war and ally with one another. These are called political-military networks. For the sixteenth-century Chesapeake world-system, Onancock was one member of a regional, multivillage chiefdom. The Powhatan and the Conoy paramount chiefdoms across the bay were core chiefdoms that collected tribute from several smaller chiefdoms. Onancock was part of an interchiefdom system of allying and warmaking polities whose network included some indirect links. Thus the political-military network for Onancock extended to the Delaware Bay in the north and to what is now North Carolina to the south.
Information, like a prestige good, is light relative to its value. Information may travel far along trade routes and beyond the range of goods exchange, but it is subject to deterioration from decay of clarity. Thus information networks are usually as large as or larger than prestige goods networks. The actual spatial scale of important interaction needs to be determined for each world-system. Generally, the bulk goods nets are the smallest, the political-military nets are intermediate spatially, and the prestige goods nets and the information nets, while not coterminous, are the largest. There are exceptions to this general pattern. Thus the relative sizes of networks need to be determined empirically for each world-system.
Defined in this way, world-systems have grown from small to large over the past 12 millennia as societies and intersocietal systems have gotten larger, more complex and more hierarchical (see Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: parts 2 and 3 for theoretical and empirical examples of this approach; Denemark et al. 2000 review most other grand scale approaches, and include statements by key thinkers). This spatial growth of systems has involved the expansion of some, and the incorporation of some into others. The processes of incorporation have occurred in several ways as systems distant from one another have linked their interaction networks. Because interaction nets are of different sizes, it is the largest ones that come into contact first. Thus information and prestige goods link distant groups long before they participate in the same political-military or bulk goods networks. The processes of expansion and incorporation brought different groups of people together and made the organization of larger and more hierarchical societies possible. In this sense globalization has been going on for thousands of years.
World-System Cycles: Rise and Fall, and Pulsations
Comparative research (e.g., Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997) reveals that all world-systems exhibit cyclical processes of change. Two major cyclical phenomena are the rise and fall of large polities, and pulsations in the spatial extent and intensity of trade networks. Rise and fall corresponds to changes in the centralization of political/military power in a set of polities – an “international” system. Nearly all world-systems with hierarchical polities experience a cycle in which relatively larger polities grow in power and size and then decline.
Pulsation is a cyclical expansion and contraction in the spatial extent and intensity of exchange networks. Different kinds of trade usually have different spatial extents. They may also have different temporal sequences of expansion and contraction. It is an empirical question whether or not changes in the volume of exchange correspond to changes in spatial extent.
Egalitarian and small systems do not have cycles of rise and fall, but do experience pulsations as seen among sedentary foragers of Northern California (Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998). In the modern global system, trade networks cannot get larger because they are already global. But they might become denser, more intense, or faster. A good part of what has been called globalization is the intensification of larger interaction networks relative to the intensity of smaller ones. This is often seen to have occurred only in recent decades. However, research on trade and investment shows that there have been two recent waves of integration, one in the last half of the nineteenth century and the most recent since World War II (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000).
The simplest hypothesis regarding the temporal relationships between rise-and-fall and pulsation is that they occur in tandem. Whether or not this is so, and how it might differ in distinct types of world-systems, are problems amenable to empirical research. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) contend that the causal processes of rise and fall differ depending on the way in which wealth is accumulated. One major difference between the rise and fall of empires and the rise and fall of modern hegemons is in the degree of centralization within the core. We continue this discussion later.
The multiscalar method for regional bounding of world-systems as nested interaction networks is complementary with a multiscalar temporal analysis of the kind suggested by Fernand Braudel (see Braudel 1980 for an overview). Temporal depth, the longue durée (approximately, long duration), needs to be combined with analyses of short-run and middle-run processes to fully understand social change. Jared Diamond (1997) makes a strong case for the very longue durée in his study of the role of original zoological and botanical wealth in subsequent development. (See chapters by Yoffee, by Spier, and by Simmons, this volume.) The geographical distribution of species that could be easily domesticated explains a large portion of the variance regarding which world-systems expanded and incorporated other world-systems over millennia. Diamond also contends that the diffusion of domesticated plant and animal species occurs much more quickly along latitudinal dimensions (East/West) than along longitudinal dimensions (North/South). He uses this difference to explain why domesticated species spread so quickly to Europe and East Asia from West Asia, while the spread south into Africa was much slower, and why the North/South orientation of the American continents made diffusion much slower than in the Old World. Subsequent research supports Diamond’s hypothesis (Turchin et al. 2006).
Much of contemporary social science and culture is not multiscalar and tends to have a shallow presentism that focuses on recent history of years or decades. Concentration on only one historical scale can lead to distorted understanding of multiscalar temporal processes (see Yang 2008 or Hall 1989 for extended examples).
Modes of Accumulation
All societies produce and distribute the goods that are necessary for everyday life. But the institutional means by which human labor is mobilized are very different in different kinds of societies. In order to comprehend the qualitative changes that have occurred in social evolution we need to conceptualize different logics of development and the institutional modes by which socially created resources are produced and accumulated.
Small and egalitarian societies rely primarily on normative regulation organized as shared understandings about the obligations of kin (in these societies kinship is reckoned far beyond what happens in contemporary core states). When a hunter returns with game there are definite rules about who should receive shares and how large those shares should be. Hunters want to be thought of as generous, but they must also take care of some people first. These rules, the “normative order,” define the roles, obligations, norms, and values of kin relations. These are continually socially constructed and reconstructed in any kin-based mode of accumulation.
Accumulation involves the preservation and storage of food for scarce seasons. Status is based on one’s reputation as a hunter, a gatherer, a family member, or a talented speaker. Group decisions are made by consensus, achieved through much discussion. The authority of leaders is based on their ability to convince others that they are right. These features are common (but not universal) in kin-based modes of accumulation.
As societies become larger and more hierarchical, kinship itself becomes hierarchically defined. Clans and lineages become ranked so that members of some families are defined as senior or superior to members of other families. Classical cases of ranked societies were those of the Pacific Northwest, in which the totem pole represents a hierarchy of clans. This tendency toward hierarchical kinship resulted in the eventual emergence of class societies (complex chiefdoms) in which a noble class owned and controlled key resources, and a class of commoners was separated from the control of important resources and had to rely on the nobles for access to them. Such a society existed in Hawai’i before the arrival of the Europeans.
However, normative power does not work well by itself as a basis for the appropriation of labor or goods by one group from another. Those who are exploited have a great motive to redefine the situation. On the one hand, nobles often elaborate a vision of the universe in which they are understood to control natural forces or to mediate interactions with the deities, thus obligating commoners to support these sacred duties by turning over their produce to the nobles or contributing labor to sacred projects. On the other hand, commoners will have an incentive to disbelieve unless they have only worse alternatives. Thus institutions of coercive power are invented to sustain the extraction of surplus labor and goods from direct producers. The hierarchical religions and kinship systems of complex chiefdoms became supplemented in early states by specialized organizations of regional control – groups of armed men under the command of the king, and bureaucratic systems of taxation and tribute backed up by the law and by institutionalized force. When institutional coercion became a central form of regulation for inducing people to work for the accumulation of social resources, the tributary mode of accumulation emerged. Various tributary modes of accumulation invented techniques of power that allowed resources to be extracted over great distances and from large populations. These are the institutional bases of states and empires.
The third mode of accumulation is based on markets. Markets can be defined as any situation in which goods are bought and sold. When competitive trading by large numbers of buyers and sellers is a major determinant of price, these are labeled price-setting markets. This is a situation in which supply and demand operate on price because buyers and sellers are bidding against one another. In practice there are very few instances in history or in modern reality where only markets set prices, because political and normative considerations quite often influence prices. But the price mechanism and resulting market pressures have become more important. These institutions were completely absent before the invention of commodities and money.
A commodity is a good that is produced for sale in a price-setting market in order to make a profit. A pencil is an example of a commodity. The capitalist mode of accumulation is based on commodity exchanges. Capitalism is the concentrated accumulation of profits by the owners of major means of the production of commodities in a context in which labor and the other main elements of production are commodified, that is things are treated as if they are commodities, even though they may not have been in the past. Land can be commodified even though it is a limited good that was not originally produced for profitable sale. There is only so much land on Earth, so it can never be a perfect commodity. This is also the case for human labor time.
The capitalist mode of production also required the redefinition of wealth as money. The first storable and tradable valuables were probably prestige goods (see Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). These were used by local elites in trade with adjacent peoples, and eventually as symbols of superior status. Originally prestige goods were used only in specific circumstances by certain elites. This “proto-money” was eventually redefined and institutionalized as the so-called “universal equivalent” that serves as a general measure of value for all sorts of goods and that can be used by almost anyone to buy almost anything. The institution of money has a long and complicated history. Suffice it to say here that it has been a prerequisite for the emergence of price-setting markets and capitalism as increasingly important forms of social regulation. Once markets and capital become the predominant form of accumulation, we can speak of capitalist systems. Thus the Europe-centered world-system became fully capitalist during the Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century, though to be sure there were pockets of capitalism in older world-systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Other world-system scholars see capitalism developing in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries (Wallerstein 1974), or in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Abu-Lughod 1989) or as having existed since the first states (Frank and Gills 1993; for discussion of these and other approaches see Denemark et al. 2000). When the intensity of trade based on market prices is the major mode of exchange, the system has become a capitalist system. This does not mean, however, that all other forms of exchange, such as barter or tribute, have disappeared completely, only that they no longer are the major mode of exchange.
The various cyclical processes interact with the broader changes among modes of accumulation. In terms of rise and fall, tributary systems alternate between a structure of multiple, competing core states and core-wide (or nearly core-wide) empires. The modern interstate system experiences the rise and fall of hegemons, but a hegemon never conquers the other core states to form a core-wide empire. This is the case because modern hegemons are pursuing a capitalist, rather than a tributary form of accumulation.
Rise and fall works differently in interchiefdom systems because the institutions that facilitate the extraction of resources from distant groups are less developed. David G. Anderson’s (1994) study of the rise and fall of Mississippian chiefdoms in the Savannah River valley provides an excellent and comprehensive review of the literature on what Anderson calls “cycling”: the processes by which a chiefly polity extended control over adjacent chiefdoms and erected a two-tiered hierarchy of administration over the tops of local communities. At a later point these regionally centralized chiefly polities disintegrated back toward a system of smaller and less hierarchical polities.
Interchiefdom systems are highly dependent on normative integration and ideological consensus based on kinship. States developed specialized organizations for extracting resources: standing armies and bureaucracies. Tributary world-systems were more dependent on the projection of armed force over great distances than modern hegemonic core states have been. Capitalist systems are able to extract resources from faraway places with much less overhead cost because commodity production, mechanisms of financial control, and elaborations of bureaucratic power make such extraction more efficient.
Occasionally, during one of these cycles, people solve systemic problems in a new way that allows substantial expansion. This is how expansions, changes in systemic logic, and collapses occur. This can only be seen by comparing world-systems.
Patterns and Causes of Social Evolution
Here we explore how all these processes help explain the emergence of larger hierarchies and the development of productive technologies. These innovations often, but not always, come from semiperipheral societies. Semiperipheral societies are not constrained by sunk costs in specific resources or techniques to the same degree as older core societies. Thus, they are freer to implement new institutions. Occasionally by transforming a system a semiperiphery could become a new core society.
Marcher states are states that are spatially located out on the edge of a number of interacting states – in the “marchlands.” Semiperipheral marcher states are better known than semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms. The largest empires have been assembled by conquerors who came from semiperipheral societies: the Achaemenid Persians, the Macedonians led by Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Ottomans, the Manchus, and the Aztecs. In other cases a semiperiphery may transform institutions, but does not take over. Semiperipheral capitalist city-states operated on the edges of the tributary empires, where they bought and sold goods in widely separated locations and encouraged people to produce a surplus for trade. Phoenician cities (e.g., Tyre, Carthage, etc.), as well as Malacca, Venice, and Genoa, spread commodification by producing manufactured goods and trading them across great regions. They helped transform the world of the tributary empires without themselves becoming core powers.
All of hegemonic core states in the modern world-system – the Dutch, the British and the US – formerly had been in semiperipheral positions. Indeed, Europe had been a peripheral and then a semiperipheral region within the larger Afroeurasian world-system before it rose to become the new core of the multicore modern world-system.
Not all semiperipheries create transformations, nor do all transformations come from semiperipheral areas. Rather, semiperipheries have been unusually prolific sites for the invention of institutions that have expanded and transformed many small systems into today’s global system. This could only be discovered within a conceptual apparatus of the comparative world-systems.
But why is this so? Some of the problems that needed to be solved were unintended consequences of earlier inventions, but others were very old problems that kept emerging again and again as systems expanded – such as population pressure and ecological degradation. These basic problems make it possible to specify a single underlying causal model of world-systems evolution. Figure 12.1 shows the links among demographic, ecological, and interactional processes that lead to the emergence of new production technologies, larger polities, and increased hierarchy.
This is an iteration model because it contains an important positive feedback mechanism in which the original causes are themselves consequences of the things that they cause. Thus the process goes around and around, which is what has caused the world-systems to expand to the global level. While the cycle can begin anywhere, we begin our account with population growth. All human societies contain a biological impetus to grow based on sexuality. This impetus is mediated by social institutions: infanticide, abortion, taboos on sexual relations, pronatalist ideologies, or support for large families. These means of regulation are costly. When food is relatively abundant, these controls tend to be eased. Thus, most societies experience periodic “baby booms.” Over the long run, the population tends to grow despite institutional mechanisms that try to control it.
Population growth prompts greater efforts to produce food and other necessities, here labeled intensification. This usually leads to ecological degradation because all human production uses the natural environment through resource extraction and pollution, and eventually leads to environmental degradation. This has been a regular property of all states (Chew 2001). Only its global scale and intensity is new.
Following Diamond (1997), all locations did not start with the same animal and plant resources. Such exogenous factors affect the timing and speed of hierarchy formation and technological development, as do climate change and geographical obstacles that affect transportation and communications. The emergence of an early large state on the Nile was greatly facilitated by the ease of controlling transportation and communications in that linear environment, while the more complicated geography of Mesopotamia slowed stabilization of the system of city-states and slowed the emergence of a core-wide empire.
All of this changes the economics of production for the worse. According to Joseph Tainter (1988), after a certain point increased investment in complexity does not result in proportionately increasing returns. This phenomenon can be identified in the areas of agricultural production, information processing, and communication, including education and maintenance of information channels. Sociopolitical control and specialization, such as the military and the police, also develop diminishing returns. Tainter argues that such decreasing marginal returns can occur in at least four instances: benefits constant, costs rising; benefits rising, costs rising faster; benefits falling, costs constant; benefits falling, costs rising. When herds are depleted the hunters must go farther to find game. The combined sequence from population growth to intensification to environmental degradation leads to population pressure. The growing effort needed to produce enough food is a major incentive for people to migrate. Migration eventually runs into barriers, called circumscription, limiting further migration: herds in all the adjacent valleys are depleted, or all alternative locations are deserts or high mountains, or all desirable locations are already occupied by people who can resist migration.
Figure 12.1 Basic iteration model of world-system evolution.
Circumscription combined with population pressure often leads to a rise in the level of intergroup and intragroup conflict. This is because more people are competing for fewer resources. All systems experience some warfare, but warfare becomes a focus of social endeavor that often has a life of its own. Boys are trained to be warriors and societies make decisions based on the presumption that they will be attacked or will be attacking other groups. Even in situations of seemingly endemic warfare, the amount of conflict varies cyclically. Because high levels of conflict reduce the size of the population as warriors are killed and noncombatants die because their food supplies have been destroyed or diminished, Figure 12.1 shows an arrow with a negative sign going from conflict back to population pressure. Some systems get stuck in a vicious cycle of population pressure and warfare.
Situations such as this are also propitious for the emergence of new institutional structures, especially through semiperipheral development as people tire of continual conflict. As shown in Figure 12.2, these institutional developments can produce streamlining, or shortcuts, in the iteration model. One solution is the emergence of a new hierarchy or a larger polity that can regulate access to resources in a way that reduces conflict. A larger polity usually is a result of conquest of several smaller polities by a semiperipheral marcher. The larger polity creates peace by means of an organized force that is greater than any force likely to be brought against it. The new polity reconstructs the institutions of control over territory and resources, often concentrating control and wealth in a new elite. Also, larger and more hierarchical polities often invest in new technologies of production that change the way in which resources are utilized. They produce more food and other necessities through new technologies or intensification of old technologies. Either will increase the carrying capacity, the number of people that can be supported on a specific territory. This makes population growth more likely, so the iteration model is primed to go around again. It is important to note that circumscription does not cause new social inventions. Rather, it makes them more likely. Often they do not occur and the system collapses and cycles through growth again. Anderson (1994) notes that a chiefdom system can go through this cycle for a millennium or more before it invents a solution to it.
Figure 12.2 Temporary institutional shortcuts in the iteration model.
Thus, the iteration process is the basis of continual, if sporadic and cyclical expansion of world-systems, the development of new technologies, and new forms of regulation. Population growth resumes, which leads to new problems of ecological degradation and population pressure. The emergence of new institutions that change the economics of production creates new political organization and new technologies that allow the system to avoid the messy bottom end of the model.
This is not a teleological explanation. Rather, it suggests where and when change is most likely. Incidentally, this is also a time when human agency can be most effective in producing change. Often the first solution is not optimal; it merely works. As more systems find other solutions, a process of optimization begins. Eventually, however, even an optimal solution encounters the environmental degradation and population problem. Occasionally, however, the cycle is shortened. New technologies and/or new forms of hierarchy may allow some adjustments without increasing the level of systemic conflict. Still, the level of conflict may remain high because the rate of expansion and technological change has increased.
It is difficult to understand why and where innovative social change emerges without a concept of a world-system. As we have seen, new organizational forms most often emerge in semiperipheral societies. Interestingly, all the hegemonic core states in the modern system had been semiperipheral (the Dutch, the British, the US). Such “semiperipheral development” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997) arguably includes organizational innovations in contemporary semiperipheral countries (e.g., China, Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that may transform the current global system.
This approach requires that we think structurally. We must be able to abstract from the particularities of the game of musical chairs that constitutes uneven development in the system to see the structural continuities. The core/periphery hierarchy remains, though some countries have moved up or down. The interstate system remains, though the internationalization of capital has further constrained the abilities of states to structure their own economies. During such changes some states have been more successful at exploiting opportunities and protecting themselves from liabilities than others.
Thus, much that has been labeled “globalization” corresponds to recently expanded international trade, financial flows, and foreign investment by transnational corporations and banks. (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) Too much of the globalization discourse assumes that until recently there were separate national societies and economies, and that these have now been superseded by an expansion of international integration driven by information and transportation technologies. Rather than a wholly unique and new phenomenon, it is an old world-systemic process. Recent research comparing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that trade globalization both is cyclical and also follows a trend. For instance, Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance capital has been a central component of the commanding heights of the world-system since the fourteenth century. The current floods and ebbs of world money are typical of the late phase of very long “systemic cycles of accumulation.”
Most world-systems scholars contend that leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the periphery as inert are grave mistakes because the ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources and labor has been a major factor in deciding the winners of the competition among core contenders. Also, the resistance to exploitation and domination mounted by peripheral peoples has played a powerful role in shaping the historical development of world orders. Thus world history cannot be properly understood without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy. For instance, Yang (2008) shows that the two millennia long process of incorporation of what we now know as Yunnan into China can only be explained by examining the consequences of its participation in the Southern Silk Road – from Yunnan to Annam, Burma, and South Asia. Hall (1989) examines the interplay of local, regional, national, and global forces in a 500-year history of what we know today as the American Southwest. A key point for both authors is that it is the interactions of all of these levels that are crucial. Few other accounts of these regions examine the interplay of the extremes – the local and global – in their histories.
Philip McMichael (2003) has studied the “globalization project” – the abandoning of Keynesian models of national development, and a new (or renewed) emphasis on deregulation and opening national commodity and financial markets to foreign trade and investment. This approach focuses on the political and ideological aspects of the recent wave of international integration. This process has been called “neoliberalism,” or “Reaganism/Thatcherism,” or “the Washington Consensus.” While the worldwide decline of leftist parties and movements began before the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union, it was accelerated by these events. The structural basis of the rise of the globalization project is the new level of integration reached by the global capitalist class. The internationalization of capital has long been an important part of the trend toward economic globalization. Every modern hegemon has claimed to represent the general interests of business. Still, the integration of the interests of capitalists all over the world has very likely reached a historical peak.
This part of the theory of a global stage of capitalism must be taken most seriously, though this can be overdone. In the current world-system both the old interstate system, based on separate national capitalist classes, and new global institutions coexist, and are powerful simultaneously. Each country has a ruling class fraction that is allied with the transnational capitalist class. The major question is whether or not this new level of transnational integration will be strong enough to prevent competition among states for world hegemony from turning into warfare, as has always happened in past periods of hegemonic decline.
The discovery that capitalist globalization has occurred in waves, and that these waves are followed by periods of backlash has important implications for the future. Capitalist globalization increased both intranational and international inequalities in the nineteenth century and it has done the same thing in the late twentieth century (O’Rourke and Williamson 2000). Those countries and groups that have been left out of these changes either mobilize to challenge the hegemony of the powerful or try to retreat into self-reliance, or both.
Globalization protests emerged in the noncore with the riots of the 1980s against the International Monetary Fund. Several transnational social movements participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle brought globalization protest to the attention of observers in the core. This resistance to capitalist globalization has continued to grow despite the temporary setback that occurred in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 (Podobnik 2005).
There is an apparent tension between those who advocate deglobalization and delinking from the global capitalist economy and the building of stronger, more cooperative and self-reliant social relations in the periphery and semiperiphery, on the one hand, and those who seek to mobilize support for new or reformed institutions of democratic global governance. Self-reliance by itself, though an understandable reaction to exploitation, is not likely to solve the problems of humanity in the long run. The great challenge of the twenty-first century will be the building of a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. World-systems theory can be an important contributor to this effort.
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