Rise And Demise

Comparing World Systems

Christopher Chase-Dunn, Thomas D Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367320157
• eBook ISBN: 9780429972782
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"The authors combine an excellent state-of-the-art review of the literature in world-systems analysis with a vigorous presentation of their own quite coherent views. This book is a major contribution to our collective dialogue on the past and the future." —Immanuel Wallerstein Binghamton University, author of The Modern World-System "An up-to-date and synthetic overview of current world-systems research. The authors draw on diverse literatures from political science to archaeology, from contemporary policy issues to Native American studies, and from history to sociology. This thoughtful volume serves as both a provocative summary of ongoing scholarship and a fertile foundation for future cross-disciplinary dialogue." —Gary M. Feinman University of Wisconsin—Madison "To understand the evolution of the world's political economy, we need empirical theories that can handle 'ancient' and 'modern' processes, a longer time frame encompassing multiple millennia, and less concern about trespassing in other people's disciplines. Chase-Dunn and Hall's new book, Rise and Demise, delivers all three with noteworthy style and effect." —William Thompson Indiana University "Rise and Demise is a wide ranging and stimulating synthesis of the world-systems approach and its main findings. Its broad coverage of parallel social processes in various regions and time periods convincingly makes the argument that world-systems theory is able to integrate many diverse historical and social science specializations." —Richard E. Blanton Purdue University

PART ONE
Concepts and Definitions

1 A Hundred Flowers Bloom: Approaches to World-Systems

In this chapter we summarize the main theoretical issues raised by scholars whose work contributed to the development of the world-systems perspective or who are extending this approach to precapitalist settings. Our discussion is organized into three interrelated topics:

• definitions of world-systems;
• spatial bounding of world-systems; and
• the problem of systemic logic.

The world-systems perspective has expanded the temporal and spatial scope of theorizing about social change. Our understanding of modernity has been radically transformed by the study of the Europe-centered world-system over the past five hundred years. But the analysis of a single system encounters methodological and theoretical limitations. If we are to fathom fundamental change, we need to comprehend the causes of those structural "constants" that are usually taken for granted in the modern world-system. These structural constants exhibit variation when we broaden the scope of comparison to include very different kinds of world-systems. Are interstate systems or core/periphery hierarchies inevitable features of all human organizational wholes? Do all world-systems share a similar underlying developmental logic, or do systemic logics undergo fundamental qualitative transformations? We can best address these questions through a comparative perspective that employs evidence produced by historians, geographers, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists on human activities over very long periods of time—much longer than the five-hundred-year span of the modern world-system.

In order to expand the scope of comparison we must modify those concepts originally developed for the analysis of the modern world-system. We must take care to avoid projecting contemporary reality onto the past. A rather large body of literature has emerged in which scholars from several different academic disciplines (sociology, political science, history, anthropology, and archaeology) have utilized world-systems concepts to analyze premodern systems.¹ These theoretical, conceptual, and empirical efforts provide the basic tools with which we begin to rethink very long-term human social change.

The involvement of scholars from many disciplines brings semantic difficulties. Most archaeologists, for example, use the term "prehistoric" to refer to societies that do not keep written records. They do not mean to imply that such societies are non-historical in the sense of mechanically determined systems in which human will plays little part in social change. Many world-system anthropologists and archaeologists demonstrate proper sensitivity to the issues of historicity and open-endedness in social change (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1977; Kohl 1987a). Only a few sociologists, those least familiar with preliterate societies, have argued that history—in the sense of historical action—only begins with the emergence of states.²

Anthropologists and archaeologists are considerably less paranoid about the "e-word," evolution, than are most historians and sociologists. They usually make a clear distinction between biological and social evolution. They construct multilinear, conjunctural, and probabilistic models—that is models that include many paths of change, where the specific path taken is a consequence of the specific conditions and the probabilities for each path at the point of change. These differ vastly from the unilinear determinist nightmares that haunt those who shun the word "evolution" (see Sanderson 1990).

Even within this broad area of agreement, there are competing concepts of what a world-system is. We begin with a review of them.

Contending Definitions of World-Systems

Several scholars restrict the concept of a world-system to those intersocietal systems that contain states and cities (e.g., Frank and Gills 1993a). Others claim that smaller stateless and classless systems also can be meaningfully studied using world-systems concepts and that including these in the scope of comparison adds useful variation for the understanding of processes of structural transformation (e.g., Collins 1992). This difference raises the issue of whether or not a world-system must have a core/ periphery hierarchy. Some build this into the definition, while others think it important to study variation in the degree to which different systems have socially structured intersocietal inequalities. Some classless and stateless systems apparently do not have core/periphery hierarchies.

Virtually all contending definitions of world-systems claim or imply that the particular kinds of interaction upon which they focus are necessary or systemic, but there are vociferous disputes about the relative importance of specific kinds of inter-connectedness.

Fernand Braudel (1975, 1984), a major forerunner of world-systems analysis, developed his terminology in order to make sense of the modern Europe-centered world-system. Thus he considers commodity trade to be the most important type of interconnection. He also thought that hegemony is best defined in terms of economic domination, which is arguably the case for the modern world-system but is debatable for earlier world-systems. In world-systems in which the dominant means of accumulation of wealth was payment of taxes, fees, or other tribute, socially structured inequalities, including those between an imperial core and dominated peripheral regions, rested more on political/military power than on economic power.

Immanuel Wallerstein conceives of world-systems as multicultural economies in which there is a division of labor in the production of foods and raw materials necessary for everyday life. This "bulk goods" definition of world-systems is certainly an important aspect of systemic cross-cultural interaction in many systems. Wallerstein contends that networks of the production, distribution, and consumption of basic goods create the systemic unity of a world-system. In today's world-system a map of the material links that connect each of us with the global economy could begin with breakfast. Unlike ancient foragers or subsistence farmers, we do not produce much of what we eat. Rather, "commodity chains" link the food we eat for breakfast to the labor and resources of distant others. They might go most directly to nearby truck, dairy, and poultry farms. More often some of our breakfast was grown on other continents. The fuel used to produce food on local farms typically came from far away. It would not take very many links to trace our material connections with people all over the globe.³

Wallerstein (1984a) also distinguishes between world-systems and "minisystems." Whereas world-systems are defined as regional divisions of labor composed of several different cultural groups, minisystems are defined as "small-scale systems covering a limited geographical area, within which all that is essential for the survival of the collectivity is done. We might think of such systems as bearing the motto: one economy, one policy, one culture. That is to say, the boundaries of the division of labor, the structures of governance, and the values, norms, and language which are current are more or less the same" (Wallerstein 1984b, 148). Wallerstein contends that small-scale stateless and classless systems were minisystems because there was little exchange of food and raw materials across cultural and/or political boundaries.

Other types of interconnection that have been proposed as constituting systemic relations are exchanges of prestige goods, political protection, regularized military conflict, and information exchange networks. Each of these has its advocates. The earliest debate is about bulk goods versus prestige goods (which Wallerstein calls "preciosities"). Prestige goods are symbolically important goods, typically exotic imports, often of high value to weight ratio, that confer prestige on the owner. A prestige-goods economy is an exchange network in which a local leader monopolizes the supply of prestige goods that he uses to reward subordinates.

Wallerstein (1974a, 41-42) contends that the exchange of "preciosities" (by which he means luxury goods utilized primarily by elites) does not produce important systemic effects. Jane Schneider (1977) and many others (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1977; Blanton, Kowalewski, and Feinman 1992; Peregrine 1992, 1996) argue that such prestige-goods economies constitute systemic networks because the ability of local leaders to monopolize the supply of these goods is an important mainstay of their power, and changes in the availability of such goods can have important effects on the society's authority structures. Monopolized exotic imports are used to reward subordinates and in many systems are necessary for important social rituals such as marriage.

Other theorists have emphasized political interconnections in defining systems. Charles Tilly (1984, 62) has suggested the following "rule of thumb for connectedness":

the actions of powerholders in one region of a network rapidly (say within a year) and visibly (say in changes actually reported by nearby observers) affect the welfare of at least a significant minority (say a tenth) of the population in another region of the network. Such a criterion indubitably makes our own world a single system. . . . The same criterion, however, implies that human history has seen many world systems, often simultaneously dominating different parts of the globe. Only in the last few hundred years, by the criterion of rapid, visible, and significant influences, could someone plausibly argue for all the world as a single system.

This definition focuses on intentional political authority that is popularly perceived. The requirement that interconnections be visible to the connected actors excludes consideration of opaque objective relations. Marx (1967, 71ff.) argued that market societies normally operate in terms of a "fetishism of commodities" in which objective relationships between human producers are hidden behind what appear to be relations among things—commodities and their prices. In the contemporary world-system most actors are only vaguely aware of the extent of the global network of production that materially links them with the labor of distant others, though recently there has been a significant increase in this awareness.

David Wilkinson (1987b) takes a different political, approach. He focuses on the importance of interaction through conflict, especially military competition. Thus two empires that regularly engage each other in military confrontations are part of the same system. Citing Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser, Wilkinson writes:

Conflict always integrates in a mildly significant way, in that the transaction of conflicting always creates a new social entity, the conflict itself. But durable conflict also integrates more significantly, by creating a new social entity that contains the conflict but is not reducible to it, within which the conflict must be seen as occurring, which is often of a larger scale and longer-lived than the conflict that constituted it. It is therefore legitimate, and it is indeed necessary, to posit the existence of a social system, a single social whole, even where we can find no evidence of that whole existence other than the protracted, recurrent or habitual fighting of a pair of belligerents. Such continuing relations, however hostile, between groups however different, necessarily indicates that both are (were or have become) parts of some larger group or system

(Wilkinson 1987b, 34; emphasis in original.)

Because Wilkinson focuses only on state-based urbanized "civilizations," he excludes from consideration those intersocietal networks in which there are no states, but his criterion could also be applied to them. For example, Raymond Kelly (1985) has studied the ways in which habitual raiding between Nuer and Dinka pastoralists reproduced their kin-based social structures in a fascinating instance of "tribal imperialism."

Another approach to defining intersocietal linkages has been formulated by Schortman and Urban (1987, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c). Their review of the development of theoretical perspectives in archaeology provides valuable insights into the contributions of diffusionism, studies of acculturation, ecological/evolutionism, and world-system approaches to intersocietal interactions. They also review and evaluate the literature of the last two decades on the archaeological study of trade. Their own theoretical formulation of the problem of intersocietal linkages focuses on the concept of information, which is defined broadly as "energy, materials, social institutions, and ideas" (Schortman and Urban 1987, 68). They point out that the economic aspects of trade are only part of intersocietal interaction, and they emphasize ideological diffusion and especially cross-cultural intermarriages among elites involved in prestige-goods economies. Though Schortman and Urban emphasize the importance of the symbolic and cultural aspects of trade for some intersocietal systems, they completely ignore the systemic aspects of military competition emphasized by Wilkinson.

One problem with trying to be specific about the most important and systemic types of interaction is that these probably vary greatly across different kinds of world-systems. Nevertheless, it is important for comparative research to specify the most significant types of connectedness.

What Are the Parts of a World-System?

Another issue might be called the subunit problem—what are the parts that constitute world-systems? When we use the term "intersocietal networks" we seem to imply that the important subunits are "societies," but this is not necessarily so. Much recent analysis has emphasized the difficulties of bounding societies even within the modern world-system (e.g., Tilly 1984). In the modern world-system there are many national states, a few multinational states, several states that govern only portions of nations,⁴ many transnational actors, and societal elements operating at the global level. There is no single kind of subunit, and many subunits are not easily bounded. The study of the modern world-system is much more than the study of "international relations" among states. By "whole system" we mean individuals, households, neighborhoods, firms, communities, cities, and so on, as well as states and the interstate system.⁵

The subunit problem is even more complicated when we try to compare the modern world-system with precapitalist world-systems of very different sizes and kinds, Eric Wolf (1982) cautions that group boundaries are inherently fuzzy and permeable. Wolf claims that "by endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls" (1982, 6). Schortman and Urban's solution is to define the subunit as a "spatially delimited body of individuals living within and adapting to a specific physical environment" (1987, 63). This may work well for some systems, but it ignores important larger and smaller subunits.

The way out of this problem is to recognize that the sizes and types of organizations that interact within regional world-systems vary, and larger systems have increasingly nested and overlapping levels of organization. In the simplest intergroup systems, households are politically organized at the village or intervillage level, and there are no larger overarching political organizations. Households and villages are important subunits in all world-systems, large and small. One important difference between smaller, regional world-systems and larger, more complex world-systems is the size of polities and the range of direct economic, military, and cultural interactions. The task, then, is not to define a single type of subunit that is common to all world-systems but rather to pay attention to the types and scales of organization within each world-system.

Spatial Boundaries of World-Systems

Disputes over which kinds of connectedness to emphasize are related to disagreements over the best way to spatially bound world-systems. The shift of the unit of analysis from societies to world-systems suggests to us that interconnections rather than uniformities are the important features of boundedness, because world-systems are usually composed of differentiated but interacting parts. There are, however, scholars who bound systems by their shared characteristics. Those who have debated the best ways to spatially bound "civilizations" (e.g., Melko and Scott 1987; Melko 1995) have divided themselves into the "culturalists," who stress the homogeneity of central values as defining civilizational boundaries, and the "structuralists," who use criteria of interconnection rather than homogeneity.

The tradition of "culture area studies" (e.g., Wissler 1927; Kroeber 1918, 1936, 1945) also focuses on typological homogeneities to define cultural regions. Stephen Kowalewski (1992a, 1992b, 1996) suggests that world-systems in precontact North America were contiguous with the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Concepts and Definitions
• Part Two Explaining World-System Evolution
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• About the Book and Authors
• Index