Urbanization and Empire Formation in World-Systems
* Article/Chapter: Power and Size: Urbanization and Empire Formation in World-Systems. By Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis Alvarez, and Daniel Pasciuti.
URL = https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/10/reader/powsize/powsize.htm
Excerpts
Christopher Chase-Dunn et al. :
"This chapter presents an overview of research on city and empire growth/decline phases and new evidence on the relationship between urban growth and the rise and fall of empires in six world regions. We find that empires and cities grow and decline together in some regions, but not others, and we examine the temporal correlations between growth/decline phases of largest and second largest cities and empires within regions. Do large empires grow at the expense of other large states within a region or are there periods of regional growth in which states (and cities) are growing together? World-systems are intersocietal interaction networks in which culturally different peoples are strongly linked together by trade, political-military engagement and information flows.
Earlier research has demonstrated the utility of studying settlement systems and networks of interacting polities as windows on the historical development of social complexity and hierarchy (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). By knowing the population sizes of settlements and the approximate territorial sizes of states and empires we can compare rather different time periods and regions in order to discover both regularities and uniquenesses.
This chapter summarizes the results of earlier studies using city and empire sizes and presents new results on the relationships between changes in urban populations, city-size distributions and the territorial sizes of states and empires. Archaeologists often assume that the concentration of political power can be inferred from the rise of a size hierarchy of settlements increases in the steepness of the settlement size distribution (e.g. Kowalewski 1982). Existing data can be used to test this hypothesis, though more certain results await the improved accuracy and greater temporal resolution of estimates of city and empire sizes.
Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) examined urban growth and city-size distributions in nine different regional political/military networks (PMNs) using data on city sizes from Tertius Chandler's (1987) compendium. Political/military networks (PMNs) are interstate systems systems of adjacent conflicting and allying states. David Wilkinson (1987) bounds these expanding and contracting systems of states as they merge or become incorporated into what Wilkinson calls the Central Civilization. Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) plotted changes in the Standardized Primacy Indices (a measure of the steepness of the city-size distribution) over time, and read descriptions of what was happening in nine different PMNs to examine the hypothesis that changes in the city-size distribution was related to changes in the degree of political integration and the centralization of state power. They also accidentally discovered a synchrony of changes in city size distributions and phases of urban growth/decline in the East Asian and the West Asian-Mediterranean PMNs over a long period from about 650 BCE to about 1500 CE.
This latter discovery led to further research using data on the territorial sizes of empires gathered by Rein Taagepera (1978a, 1978b, 1979,1997). That analysis (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000) found additional evidence for synchrony between the East Asian and the West Asian-Mediterranean PMNs over this same 2150-year period, and confirmed what had also been indicated by scant city size data from India, that the Indic PMN was marching to a different drummer.
These synchrony results were further confirmed by additional analysis of the city data by Chase-Dunn and Manning (1998). That study examined synchronicities by comparing constant regions rather than PMNs. PMN boundaries change over time because of the expansion of the Central PMN, whereas specified regions that are held constant over time constitute a different, but related, unit of analysis. Chase-Dunn and Manning found support for the synchrony phenomenon using constant regions, and so this phenomenon is not likely to be an artifact of the way in which units of analysis have been constructed.
This chapter returns to the question asked in the Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) study about the relationship between urban growth, city-size distributions and the rise and fall of empires. What is the relationship between the size of settlements and power in intergroup relations? Under what circumstances does a society with greater population density have power over adjacent societies with lower population density, and when might this relationship not hold? Population density is often assumed to be a sensible proxy for relative societal power. Indeed, Chase-Dunn and Hall employ high relative population density as a major indicator of core status within a world-system (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). But Chase-Dunn and Hall are careful to distinguish between core/periphery differentiation and core/periphery hierarchy. Only the latter constitutes actively employed intersocietal domination or exploitation, and Chase-Dunn and Hall warn against inferring power directly from differences in population density.
In many world-systems military superiority is the key dimension of intersocietal relations. Military superiority is generally a function of population density and the proximity of a large and coordinated group of warriors to contested regions. The winner of a confrontation is that group that can bring the larger number of warriors together quickly. This general demographic basis of military power is modified to some extent by military technology, including transportation technologies. Factors such as better weapons, better training in the arts of war, faster horses, better boats, greater solidarity among soldiers and their leaders, as well as advantageous terrain, can alter the simple correlation between population size and power.
The most important general exception (in comparative evolutionary perspective) to the size/power relationship is the phenomenon of semiperipheral development (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997:Chapter 4). The pattern of uneven development by which formerly more complex societies lose their place to less developed societies takes several forms depending on the institutional terrain on which intersocietal competition is occurring. Less relatively dense semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms conquer older core chiefdoms to create larger chiefly polities (Kirch 1984). Likewise, semiperipheral marcher states, usually recently settled peripheral peoples on the edge of an old region of core states, frequently are the agents of a new core-wide empire based on conquest (Mann 1986). And less dense semiperipheral Europe was the locus of a virile form of capitalism that condensed in a region that was home to a large number of unusually proximate semiperipheral capitalist city-states. This development, and the military technology that emerged in the competitive and capitalist European interstate system, made it possible for less dense Europe to erect a global hegemony over the more densely populated older core regions of Eurasia (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The more recent hegemonic ascent of formerly semiperipheral national states such as England and the United States are further examples of the phenomenon of semiperipheral development.
The phenomenon of semiperipheral development does not totally cut away the general observation of a correlation between power and demographic size. What it shows is that this correlation can be overcome by other factors, and that these processes are not entirely random. Denser core societies are regularly overcome or out-competed by less dense semiperipheral societies, but it does not follow that all semiperipheral or peripheral regions have such an advantage. On the contrary, in most world-systems most low-density societies are subjected to the power of more dense societies. Semiperipheral development is a rather important exception to this general rule.
Why should a city system have a steeper city size distribution when there is a greater concentration of power? The simple answer is that large settlements, and especially large cities, require greater concentrations of resources to support their large populations. This is why population size has itself been suggested as an indicator of power (Taagepera, 1978a: 111). But these resources may be obtainable locally and the settlement size hierarchy may simply correspond to the distribution of ecologically determined resources. People cluster near oases in a desert environment. In such a case it is not the political or economic power of the central settlement over surrounding areas that produces a centralized settlement system, but rather the geographical distribution of necessary or desirable resources. In many systems, however, we have reason to believe that relations of power, domination and exploitation do affect the distribution of human populations in space. Many large cities are as large as they are because they are able to draw upon far-flung regions for food and raw materials. If a city is able to use political/military power or economic power to acquire resources from surrounding cities it will be able to support a larger population than the dominated cities can, and this will produce a hierarchical city size distribution.
Of course the effect can also go the other way. Some cities can dominate others because they have larger populations, as discussed above. Great population size makes possible the assembly of large armies or navies, and this may be an important factor creating or reinforcing steep city size distributions.
The relationship between power and settlement systems is contingent on technology as well as political and economic institutions. Thus we expect to find that the relationship between urban growth and decline sequences and the growth decline sequences of empires varies across different systems or in the same regional system over time as new institutional developments emerge. We know that the development of new techniques of power, as well the integration of larger and larger regions into systems of interacting production and trade, facilitate the emergence of larger and larger polities as well as larger and larger cities. Thus there is a secular trend at the global level and within regions between city sizes and polity sizes over the past six millennia. But the question we are asking here is about finer temporal and spatial relationships. Do cities and empires rise and fall together? Are there important exceptions to this pattern? What are the causalities involved?
We may also ask whether or not the causal relations are stable over time within regions? We expect that there may be periodic changes in the relationship between power and size as new institutions develop. The rise of capitalism as an alternative source of power to military might and changes in the relationship between military power and demographic factors most likely change the nature of the connections between size and power. We know that empires ceased to increase in territorial size with the demise of the modern colonial empires. And the contemporary world city system may be unique in the extent to which some of the largest cities are located in the semiperiphery rather than in the core. These observations suggest that we should try to overcome the difficulties encountered in studying the last two centuries in order to shed more light on the power-size relationship.
We will further examine the relationship between power, urban growth and settlement size hierarchies by comparing trends in the growth/decline sequences of city populations and the territorial sizes of empires."
(https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/10/reader/powsize/powsize.htm)