Theories of the Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps of Urban Centers and Empires Throughout History
Discussion
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rihard Niemeyer, et al. :
"There are many theories about why systems of interacting polities experience cycles of rise and fall. A thorough overview of the anthropological literature on "cycling" – the rise and fall of large chiefdoms – is presented in David G. Anderson's (1994) The Savannah River Chiefdoms. Chase-Dunn (2005) presents an overview of earlier theories and a new theoretical synthesis based on Peter Turchin's (2003) model of the dynamics of agrarian state growth and decline, network theory, a population pressure iteration model and explanations of the rise and fall of modern hegemons. This approach is further modified below to reincorporate the operation of trade networks. Explaining the upsweeps requires adding a discussion of emergent properties and the increasing geographical scale of interaction networks to the theories of rise and fall. Explaining collapses requires taking account of environmental fragility and resilience, cultural and technological flexibility and other factors examined by Jared Diamond (2005).
Explaining upsweeps
Earlier work on socio-cultural evolution has produced a synthesized "iteration model" of the processes by which hierarchies and new technologies have emerged in regional world-systems since the Paleolithic (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: ch. 6). The iteration model assumes a system of societies that are interacting with one another in ways that are important for the reproduction and transformation of social structures and institutions. This comparative world-systems theory uses interaction networks rather than spatially homogenous characteristics to bound regional systems. Bulk goods exchanges are an important network in all systems, and so are alliances and conflicts among polities (the so-called political-military network – PMN). Some systems are also importantly linked by the long-distance exchanges of prestige goods.
While Chase-Dunn and Hall used trade networks to spatially bound world-systems, they left trade out of the iteration model that explains why world-systems evolve. More recent works by McNeill and McNeill (2003) and Christian (2004) have stressed the importance of trade and communications networks in the processes of human socio-cultural evolution. Both of these recent works employ a network node theory of innovation and collective learning that is similar to the human ecology approach developed earlier by Amos Hawley (1971). Innovations are said to be unusually likely to occur at transportation and communications nodes where information from many different sources can be easily combined and recombined.
One advantage of using world-systems as the explicit unit of analysis and of examining the possibility that world-systems may be organized by core/periphery structures is that it allows us to see that there are important and repeated exceptions to the network node theory of innovation. It is often societies out on the edge of a system rather than at the center that either innovate or that successfully implement new strategies and technologies of power, production and trade. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: ch. 5) synthesize earlier formulations into a theory of semiperipheral development in which a few of the societies that are in between the core and the periphery of a system are the ones that are most likely to come forth with strategies and behaviors that produce evolutionary transformations and upward mobility. This phenomenon takes various forms in different kinds of systems: semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, semiperipheral marcher states, semiperipheral capitalist city states, the semiperipheral position of Europe in the larger Afroeurasian world-system, modern semiperipheral nations that rise to hegemony, and contemporary semiperipheral societies that engage in and support novel and potentially transformative economic and political activities.
The network node theory does not well account for the spatially uneven nature of evolutionary change. The cutting edge of evolution moves. Old centers are often transcended by societies out on the edge that are able to rewire network nodes in a way that expands the spatial scale of networks.
There are several possible processes that might account for the phenomenon of semiperipheral development. Randall Collins (1999) has argued that the phenomenon of marcher states conquering other states to make larger empires is due to the marcher state advantage. Being out on the edge of a core region of competing states allows more maneuverability because it is not necessary to defend the rear. This geopolitical advantage allows military resources to be concentrated on vulnerable neighbors. Peter Turchin (2005) argues that the relevant process is one in which group solidarity is enhanced by being on a "metaethnic frontier" in which the clash of contending cultures produces strong cohesion and cooperation within a frontier society, allowing it to perform great feats. Carroll Quigley (1961) distilled a somewhat similar theory from the works of Arnold Toynbee.
But Toynbee also suggested another way in which semiperipheral regions might be motivated to take risks with new ideas, technologies and strategies. Semiperipheral societies are often located in ecologically marginal regions that have poor soil and little water or other disadvantages. Patrick Kirch relies on this idea of ecological marginality in his depiction of the process by which semiperipheral marcher chiefs are most often the conquerors that create island-wide paramount chiefdoms in the Pacific (Kirch 1984). It is quite possible that all these features combine to produce what Alexander Gershenkron (1962) called "the advantages of backwardness" that allow some semiperipheral societies to transform and to dominate regional world-systems.
Iteration revised
For the purposes of explaining upward sweeps we have reformulated the iteration model to focus on state-based systems by adding trade, marcher states, capitalist city states, cities and empires (see Figure 5). The top and right side of the revised iteration model is only slightly modified. Here we have the basic ideas from Marvin Harris and Robert Carneiro as reformulated by Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle (1987) regarding population growth, intensification, environmental degradation, population pressure, emigration, circumscription and conflict, which then lowers or reverses population growth. This is a general model of population ecology and the Malthusian demographic regulator that works for humans as well as for other animal populations. Human world-systems that are unable to invent institutions that protect natural resources, to regulate population growth or to evolve larger polities, hierarchies and/or new technologies of production get stuck in the "nasty right side" of the iteration model (e.g., see Patrick Kirch's [1991] study of the Marquesas). Systems that increase population and that fail to sustain their natural resources, especially those that occupy marginal or fragile environments, may collapse back to a lower level of complexity and hierarchy (Diamond 2005). All human world-systems tend eventually to return to the nasty right side, at least so far, because the scale of resource use, ecological degradation and population growth tends eventually to exceed existing institutional capabilities."
Explaining Upward Sweeps in City Size and Empires
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rihard Niemeyer, et al. :
"In state-based systems periods of intensified conflict within and between societies lower the resistance to empire formation. A semiperipheral marcher state can "roll up the system" under such circumstances. Thus did the Neo-Assyrians, the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander, the Romans, the Islamic Caliphates and the Aztecs produce the core-wide empires that constitute the great upward sweeps of state size in the age of state-based systems.
During the Bronze and Iron Age expansions of the tributary empires a new niche emerged for states that specialized in the carrying trade among the empires and adjacent regions. These semiperipheral capitalist city states were usually "thalassocratic" entities that used naval power to protect sea-going trade (e.g., the Phoenician city-states, Venice, Genoa, Malacca), but Assur on the Tigris, the "Old Assyrian city-state and its colonies", was a land-based example of this phenomenon that relied mainly upon donkey caravans for transportation (Larsen 1976). The semiperipheral capitalist city-states did not typically conquer other states to construct large empires, but their trading and production activities promoted regional commerce and the emergence of markets within and between the tributary states.
The expansion of trading and communication networks facilitated the growth of empires and vice versa. The emergence of agriculture, mining and manufacturing production of surpluses for trade gave conquerors an incentive to expand state control into distant areas. And the apparatus of the empire was itself often a boon to trade. The specialized trading states promoted the production of trade surpluses, bringing peoples into commerce over wide regions, and thus they helped to create the conditions for the emergence of larger empires.
Capitalist city-states and ports of trade
Sabloff and Rathje (1975) contend that the same settlement can oscillate back and forth between being a "port of trade" (neutral territory that is used for administered trade between different competing states and empires – see Polanyi et al. 1957) and a "trading port" (an autonomous and sovereign polity that actively pursues policies that facilitate profitable trade). This latter corresponds to what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) mean by a semiperipheral capitalist city-state. Sabloff and Rathje also contend that a trading port is more likely to emerge during a period in which other states within the same region are weak, whereas a port of trade is more likely during a period in which there are large strong states.
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Several analysts have contended that world-systems oscillate between periods in which they are more integrated by horizontal networks of exchange versus periods in which corporate and hierarchical organization is more predominant (Ekholm and Friedman 1982; Blanton et al. 1996; White, Tambayong, and Kejzar, 2008). Arrighi (1994, 2006) contends that modern "systemic cycles of accumulation" display a somewhat similar alternation, with the Genoese-Portuguese network-based cycle followed by a more corporate Dutch organized cycle and that by a more network-based British cycle and then a more corporate US cycle. These oscillations may be composed by the alternative successes and failures of tributary marcher states and capitalist city-states, but in the long run it was the capitalist city-states that transformed the state-based systems into the global capitalist system of today. The long-term trend toward commercialization and the integration of large regions into networks of market exchange may have made greater gains during periods in which tributary states were relatively weak. But Arrighi contends that the deepening of commodity production made gains under both network and corporate forms of hegemony.
So what does this have to do with upward sweeps of empires and upward sweeps of city sizes? Regarding upward sweeps of empires, if semiperipheral capitalist city states were major agents of the spread of commodified exchange and the expansion and intensification of trade, then upward sweeps in which larger states emerged to encompass regions that had already been unified by trade should have occurred after a period in which semiperipheral capitalist city-states had been flourishing.
Regarding upward sweeps of city sizes, these should have followed upward sweeps of empire sizes because it was empires that created the largest cities as their capitals. The settlements of semiperipheral capitalist city-states were typically smaller than the capital cities of empires. It was not until the rise of London that a capitalist city became the largest city in a world-system.
The question of the timing of upward sweeps to new levels is entirely germane to the problem of modeling global state formation. So also is the issue of how unusually large states have been formed in the past. Upward sweeps have mainly been instances of a semiperipheral marcher state conquering and unifying adjacent older core states and nearby peripheral areas. Conquest of adjacent territories has been the main mechanism of large-scale political integration in the past. But the pattern of hegemonic rise and fall in the modern world-system has been different. The most powerful states, the hegemons (the Dutch, the British and the United States), have fought semiperipheral challengers (e.g., Napoleonic France and Germany) to prevent the emergence of core-wide empires. We contend that this is because the hegemons are the most capitalist states in the system, the ones for whom economic success is most closely tied to the ability to make superprofits on the technological rents that return from new lead technologies.
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Only during hegemonic decline have the modern capitalist hegemons shown a tendency toward "imperial overreach" in which their military power is employed in a last ditch effort to prop up a declining economic hegemony.[8] These efforts have not been successful, and a new hegemon only emerges after a period of hegemonic rivalry and world war. This is a primitive method of choosing "global leadership" that we can no longer afford to employ because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. This is analogous to the succession problem within states. The further construction and strengthening of institutions that can peacefully resolve the struggle for hegemony is of the first importance for our very survival as a species."