East-West Synchronicity in the Rise and Fall of Chiefdoms and Empires

* Article: Christopher Chase-Dunn, E. Susan Manning, and Thomas D. Hall. Rise and Fall: East-West Synchronicity and Indic Exceptionalism Reexamined. Social Science History 24:4 (winter 2000)

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Findings

• "The rise and fall of chiefdoms is analytically similar to the rise and fall of empires and the rise and

fall of hegemonic core powers. All of these processes are related to the stability of institutions for extracting resources from distant regions. ... These findings suggest the possibility of systemness in the Afro-Eurasian system far earlier than most historians would imagine."

• "The synchronicity between East and West began with the rise of the Han and Roman Empires. The simultaneities of Roman and Chinese events documented by Frederick Teggart (1939) support the notion

that systemic forces had emerged that were causing East and West to march to the same drummer."

• "The long business cycles of the modern world system correspond only roughly with the rise

and fall of hegemonic core powers. George Modelski and William Thompson’s (1996) ‘‘twin peaks’’ model postulates that there are two Kondratieff waves per ‘‘power cycle.’’ Other researchers (e.g., Goldstein 1988; Arrighi 1994) contend that hegemonic cycles are only roughly related to Kondratieff waves."

Description

"All world systems with at least a chiefdom level of political organization exhibit a pattern of the rise and fall of large polities. Among chiefdoms this pattern has been referred to as ‘‘cycling.’’ In state-based systems it is known as the rise and fall of empires. And in the modern system it is called the ‘‘power cycle’’ or the ‘‘hegemonic sequence.’’ This article reexamines the question of synchronicities of rise and fall in systems linked only by verylong-distance prestige goods trade. Earlier research found that increases and decreases in the territorial sizes of empires and the population sizes of cities were highly correlated in East Asia and West Asia/Mediterranean regions from about 600 b.c.e. to 1500 c.e. (Chase-Dunn and Willard 1993). Though data were somewhat scarce for South Asia, it appeared that Indic civilization did not rise and fall in tandem with the East and the West. In this article we report an improved test of the synchronicity of empire sizes and the different pattern found in India."

Excerpt

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

"Comparative study reveals that all world systems exhibit cyclical processes of change. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) focus on two major cyclical phenomena: the rise and fall of large polities, and pulsations in the spatial extent of interaction networks. What they call ‘‘rise and fall’’ corresponds to changes in the centralization of political-military power in a set of polities. They note that all world systems in which there are hierarchical polities experience a cycle in which relatively larger polities grow in power and size and then decline. This applies to inter-chiefdom systems as well as interstate systems, to systems composed of empires, and to the modern rise and fall of hegemonic core powers (e.g., The Netherlands, Britain, and the United States). Very egalitarian and small-scale systems such as the sedentary foragers of northern California (Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998) do not display this kind of cycle, however.

The unit of analysis for the rise-and-fall process is the political-military network (PMN) or ‘‘polity system,’’ a set of polities that are directly (or not too indirectly) interacting with one another. These polities can be bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, or empires. The terms states system or interstate system are used when states are present, and interchiefdom system indicates a set of polities in which the chiefdoms are present, but not states. Chase-Dunn and Hall also note that all systems, even very small and egalitarian ones, exhibit cyclical expansions and contractions in the spatial extent of interaction networks. They develop a schema for spatially bounding regional world-systems in which smaller bulk goods networks (BGNs) are contained within larger political-military networks (PMNs), prestige goods networks (PGNs), and information networks (INs). They posit the hypothetical pulsation of BGNs, PMNs, PGNs, and INs. By this they mean that the spatial scale of interaction increases and then decreases at each of these network levels. Interaction densities increase because there is more exchange and events at any single point have consequences over a greater distance. Thus both the amount of interaction and the range of interaction increase and then contract (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Figure 10.2)

This article is not about pulsation. But pulsation may be systematically related to the phenomenon under study here—the rise and fall of political-military centralization within systems of polities. The main unit of analysis in this article is the PMN — a political-military network in which states fight and ally with one another. The principal phenomenon we are investigating is the discovery that widely separated PMNs exhibit a curious synchronicity in the rise and fall of large empires. The PMNs under study here — the West Asian/Mediterranean (Central) region, South Asia, and East Asia — were parts of a larger prestige goods network (PGN), but they did not, with a few exceptions, make war on one another directly until recent centuries. The period of time we focus on here is the last 2,500 years, but we end our dataset in 1800 c.e. ."

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Discussion

Causes of Synchronic Rise and Fall

"The question remains as to what caused the synchronous growth of cities and empires in the Central and East Asian PMNs. The hypothesis of simultaneous expansions and contractions across a wide region should specify the causal mechanisms credited with causing these synchronicities. It is possible that climate changes explain the similar timing of growth and decline in Western Asia and China. India, at a more equatorial latitude, probably experienced a very different climatic sequence. Climate change can affect urban growth and empire formation through its effects on agricultural productivity (Nix 1985). Periods of flooding may disrupt irrigation systems, and periods of drought also may negatively affect agriculture. Recently acquired evidence indicates that the collapse of Mayan states may have been caused by an extended period of drought. Harvey Weiss and his coauthors (1993) contend that both the expansion and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire were spurred by climate changes."

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