AOC: Global State Formation: Modeling the Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps of Large Polities in World History and the Global Future

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

SBE -0527720 Christopher Chase-Dunn Eugene N. Anderson Peter Turchin University of California-Riverside In the last 200 years international governmental and transnational non-governmental organizations have emerged that constitute the first beginnings of world state formation, and the national states have been partially reconfigured as instruments of an increasingly integrated global elite. World state formation may be desirable because the problems created by human technological and social change are increasingly global in scope. But a world state will need to be legitimated in the eyes of a majority of the human population of the Earth and this means that democracy must be constructed on a global scale. This project allows the PIs to examine several probable future trajectories of global political integration based on models of growth, decline and systemic transformation that are developed by studying patterns of political integration in several regions over the past 3000 years. The main purpose of the proposed project is to study and model the growth of states in selected regions of the world over the past 3000 years. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries expansion and intensification of intercontinental interactions has been called globalization. But earlier regional systems also exhibited similar waves of "globalization," albeit on a smaller spatial scale, and these waves of network expansion and contraction, punctuated by occasional huge jumps in the scale of networks, eventually led to the formation of the modern global social system. This project will study the spatial nature of interaction networks over time and the relationship between these networks and the growth decline/phases of cities and states. The three-year project will develop, parameterize and test models of social change using newly upgraded estimates of the sizes of cities and states, climate change, trade routes, and warfare. The project will develop a new theoretical synthesis) model of the dynamics of agrarian state growth and decline, network theory, a population pressure and ecological model, and explanations of the rise and fall of modern hegemons. The PIs will test the hypothesis of "semiperipheral development" - the idea that that it has mainly been semiperipheral societies that have expanded networks, made larger states, and innovated and implemented new techniques of power and new productive technologies that have transformed the very logic of social change. Broader Impacts: The products of the project will provide a better understanding of long-run patterns of historical social evolution and their implications for the human future, especially world state formation. The World Historical Systems Time Map will be a spatio-temporal web-enabled data set that will be made available to scholars and students for studying probable trajectories of international political integration.