Book Review
Rise and Demise: Comparing World Systems
Rise and Demise: Comparing World Systems.By CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN and THOMAS D. HALL. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. Pp. xi + 322. $25.00 (paper).
This volume is a contribution to the conversation that has developed among historians and social scientists since the publication of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System (3 volumes, 1974-89). Wallerstein showed how the process of capitalist development in Europe created imbalances between central "core" and external "peripheral" areas as the latter were hooked into the expanding capitalist market "system."
Over the last decade, Wallerstein's "world-systems theory" has been criticized for ignoring the importance of economic activity outside and "before Europe." Janet Abu-Lughod proposed a pre-1500 world system from 1250-1350 and André Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills argued for a single Eurasian world system continuing over five thousand years. Debates have raged over the continuity of early and modern systems, the number, unity, plurality, or polarity of systems, the meaning (and, thus, the spelling) of "world[-]system[s]," and the relationship of a world system to capitalism.
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall summarize these debates and develop their own positions in the course of a dozen chapters, both theoretical and historical, organized into four parts. Part I develops "definitions and concepts." Part II asks how world systems change, incorporate new areas, evolve, and are transformed. Part III directs these theoretical insights to three historical cases: the tiny world system of precontact northern California, the ancient world system of Afroeurasia between 500 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E., and the modern Europe-centered world system. Part IV draws conclusions and speculates about the future of the modern world system.
The authors begin Part I with a survey of world-system literature, [End Page 347] sorting and labeling the various debates and developing their own positions. They choose to define world systems broadly as "intersocietal networks that are systemic" or "interactional entities that [are] self-contained." Autonomy rather than size is the key. While they recognize only one modern capitalist world system, they believe there have been thousands of world systems as society evolved from foragers to villages to chiefdoms to states to empires.
To determine the boundaries of a world system, the authors distinguish various types of networks--bulk-goods, prestige-goods, political/ military interactions, and information networks. Sometimes they add marriage networks (perhaps especially for kinship societies). They seem to suggest that most world systems will contain most or all of these networks. In most systems, the prestige-goods and information networks are the largest (for example, the ancient silk road system was larger than Roman military alliances), though in some cases all four networks may be coterminous (as in the instance of the precontact Hawaiian Islands and the modern world system). There must be two-way and regularized interaction to be systemic. As an example, they judge the arrival of the Peruvian sweet potato in Hawaii insufficient to render Peru and Hawaii part of the same bulk-goods network of a world system.
Part II asks how world systems are transformed. Here the authors make good use of the notion of semi-peripheral areas, regions which lie between core and periphery or share some of the characteristics of each. Drawing on classical theories of economic "backwardness," they include as semi-peripheral the Akkadian conquest of Sumer, the role of capitalist city states on the borders of medieval landed empires, frontier chiefdoms, and borderland "marcher states." The "rise of the West" is offered as an example of this larger process of semi-peripheral power replacing an older core. Within that Western history, future core states (Holland, England, and the United States in succession) have originated in the semi-periphery, as have challengers to the "logic of capitalism" (the Soviet Union and China). Such challenges fail or succeed within the context of other factors, among them: "population growth, environmental degradation, conflict, hierarchy formation, and the intensification of production" (p. 98). Chapter 6, "Iterations and Transformations: A Theory of World-Systems Evolution," charts the interactions of these elements in breathtaking complexity.
For historians and empiricists, Part III, "Investigations: Cases and Comparisons," is the meat of the book, providing chapters on the "very small world-system" of precontact northern California (7), the ancient Afroeurasian world system, 500 B.C.E.-1400 C.E. (8), and the modern Europe-centered system (9). The treatment of all Afroeurasia [End Page 348] over a millennium as an example equivalent to Wintu California is a daring stroke, intended to drive home the authors' conceptual schema: both are world systems. But, ironically, the case is better made for the Wintu--who were at least self-contained. The millennial tributary world system of Afroeurasia is an amorphous category, sometimes one and sometimes three world systems, derived primarily from five or six others. The authors offer persuasive arguments for considering Eurasian trade and disease contacts earlier, more pervasive, and more consequential than often thought, but this reader is left unconvinced that the rich terminology of "world-systems" theory has made a contribution to that effort. Oddly, chapter 8 is organized in traditional textbook style surveying one civilization after another (east to west) in three time frames, leaving little room to explain the meaning or workings of an Afroeurasian "system."
One of the most contested issues among world-systems theorists concerns the relevance of capitalism. For Wallerstein it was capitalism that created the world system. His magnum opus gave flesh to Marx's vision of the bourgeoisie creating a single integrated world and to twentieth-century notions of the global inequalities caused by imperialism. With the recent demise of both Soviet and Eurocentric models of the world, capitalism has been downsized or universalized into obscurity. In response to those who find capitalism ancient or irrelevant, Chase-Dunn and Hall agree that capitalist institutions can be found throughout world history. They find capitalism governing the ancient Phoenician cities and Medieval city states in the semi-peripheral interstices between tribute-based core states or empires. But, they argue, the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century was the first "national state with core status to be controlled by capitalists" (p. 190). The combination of capitalist economic power and the "protective capacity of territorial states" proved unbeatable for Europe, enabling it to wrest control of the older central system and create a truly global world system. It is interesting, the authors point out, that none of the successive Western core states (Holland, England, or the U.S.) turned their economic difference between capitalist and tributary world systems and raise interesting questions about the future role of political core states vis-à-vis the market.
Rise and Demise is too rich, ambitious, and useful a study to ignore, even if it is a shaky instrument for diagnosing the modern world system. The meaning of the "world-system" has been too diluted to have analytical bite and the range of cases is too numerous and varied to tell us much about modern capitalism. It may be useful to think of the process of world history as the coming together of thousands of world systems as creeks into streams, streams into rivers, rushing together [End Page 349] into the single modern capitalist world system. The authors are too subtle to argue that all water (or swimming) is the same. Even the logic of development, they suggest, may be different in clan, tribute, state, and market systems. Yet their method overwhelms their intent. Far more attention is given to lining up the "comparable" cases than to understanding how the world has changed. Their admirable quest for scientific method (comparable instances, precise language, testable theory) gets the best of them. Linguistically they allow analytical abstractions to become animate realities: PGNs (precious-goods networks) "touch" or "merge"; networks "pulsate" and "nest." Their scrupulous quest for scientific precision too often requires decoding in lieu of reading. And since each fact is required to support appreciably more theory than Wallerstein's or other more historical accounts, errors like "the ninth century, under the Umayyad Caliphate" (p. 172) and "Sassanid Iran ...in the seventeenth century" (p. 191) weaken the foundations.
Yet the authors are clearly in possession of a good deal of knowledge and insight, they have performed a valuable service in assessing and refining the vast emerging body of world-systems literature, and they are often persuasive. I applaud their evolutionary sociology, macro world history, innovative comparative analysis, and their desire to delineate the logic of the capitalist world system. I agree with their judgment that the modern capitalist world system is unique, but for that reason I think we might learn more by studying it directly than by contemplating the otherwise interesting comparisons of thousands of other systems, networks, and empires.
KEVIN REILLY
Raritan Valley College
