Historical Oscillation Between Marcher States and Empires
* Article / Chapter: Oscillatory dynamics of city-size distributions in world historical systems. By DOUGLAS R. WHITE, LAURENT TAMBAYONG: In the Book: Globalization as Evolutionary Process. Routledge. 2007
focuses on innovation at the peripheries of states and empires, that is, on the marcher or boundary polities that resist the encroachment of expanding empires
ABSTRACT
"Globalization, world-system, and historical dynamic theory offer complementary perspectives for the study of city systems as the politico-economic engine of interstate networks. Here we combine these perspectives to examine a dynamical perspective on systems of cities. Globalization theory applied to Eurasia in the last millennium (e.g. Modelski and Thompson, 1996) focuses on centers of economic innovation and political power and their successive periods of rise and fall in dominance. Units of larger scale, as for example polities, are shown to operate at successively longer time-scales in their rise and fall than the economic innovation centers within those polities. World-system theory for similar regions and processes (e.g. Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997) differs in the way in which it also focuses on innovation at the peripheries of states and empires, that is, on the marcher or boundary polities that resist the encroachment of expanding empires. Marcher states that amalgamate to defeat the spread of an empire often defeat polities formally organized on a much larger scale, thanks to cohesive or decentralized organization that is able to marshal superior combative skills or technology. World-system theory often limits itself to the more prominent types of relations, such as trade in bulk goods and interstate conflict, that form distinct macroregional networks. The structural demographic approach to the political economics of agrarian empires (e.g. Turchin, 2003, 2006) is capable of yielding a more dynamical historical account of how central polities rise and fall as their internal cohesion disintegrates with population growth into factional conflict, and of how oncedominant polities and economies contend with marcher states that coalesce into formidable opponents on their frontiers."