Upward Sweeps of Empire and City Growth Since the Bronze Age

* Article: Upward Sweeps of Empire and City Growth Since the Bronze Age. By Chris Chase-Dunn, Alexis Alvarez, Hiroko Inoue, et al. IROWS Working Paper #22, 2006

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"presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Regular session on Globalization, Friday, August 11, 2006"

Contextual Quote

"George Modelski’s (2003) recent study of the growth of cities over the past 5000 years points to a phenomenon also noticed and theorized by Roland Fletcher (1995) – cities grow and decline in size, but occasionally a single new city will attain a size that is much larger than any earlier city, and then other cities catch up with that new scale, but do not much exceed it. It is as if cities reach a size ceiling that it is not possible to exceed until new conditions are met that allow for that ceiling to be breached."

- Christopher Chase-Dunn et al. [2]

Abstract

"This paper uses quantitative estimates of the sizes of cities and empires to tentatively identify upward sweeps in which uniquely large cities and empires emerged in the Central Political/military network since the Bronze Age, and it formulates a causal model to explain both the cyclical rise and fall of cities and empires and the upward sweeps."

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"Here we use quantitative estimates of the population sizes of cities and of the territorial sizes of states and empires to identify instances in which the scale of polities and settlements rapidly increase, a phenomenon that we call “upward sweeps.” Our project seeks to construct causal explanations of both the more usual cyclical rise and fall of large polities and cities and the less frequent instances in which much larger empires and cities emerge. The long-run evolutionary trend of the scale of human social organizations to expand needs to be studied in its particularities and comparatively so that we may explain how the processes of growth may be similar or different across large expanses of time.

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This paper has two main purposes:

1. to empirically identify upward sweeps of city and empire growth in the Central System, and

2. to formulate a revised explanation of the cyclical patterns of rise and fall and the occasional upward sweeps of city and empire growth. "

Excerpts

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: Chapter 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 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 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: Chapter 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 Afro-eurasian world-system, modern semiperipheral nations that arise to hegemony, and contemporary semiperipheral societies that engage in and support novel and potentially transformative economic and political activities."

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