George Modelski
The world system (that is, the species-wide social organization, and institutions, of humans) was not built in a day, not even in the rapidly globalizing last decades of the 20th century. Nor, for that matter, has it now attained its “final’ form – whatever that might be. It is the product of a long process whose past and future shape needs to be better understood.
If we stipulate for the purpose of this paper that the widely accepted division of world history into three eras: ancient, classical,
and modern – also represents distinct phases in the trajectory of the world system since about -3000. then the question arises about the characterization of these phases: are they in fact be phases of an evolutionary learning process of the world system [1]?
In this paper we test these questions against systematic data on major urbanization over the long period of five millennia brought
together in the recently issued World Cities:-3000 to 2000 (Modelski 2003a) [2]. The results of such testing point to an affirmative answer to our question. Yes, the world system at its most general level does indeed give evidence of passing through three major and qualitatively distinct phases, each one of which maximizes one particular set of critical social innovations. Of course, that is not the entire story of world system evolution – that also comprises, in a spectacular cascade, essential social, political, and economic processes, but it does provide an outline of the envelope within which other elements of that cascade that make up the story of the making of the social organization of mankind find their place.
In the main, then, this is an attempt to answer a qualitative question about the character of world system development on the basis of
a quantitative survey of world cities. But we shall also give attention to a related question about the role of empires as focus of world organization, and our finding suggest that their importance while notable, might have been exaggerated; they do not shape or dominate any of the three phases. .
World system
evolution
The discussion of ‘phasing’ with which we began this paper should not obscure the commonsense observation that the trajectory of humankind is a manifest case of evolution. To-day’s world is obviously much different from what it was one thousand years ago, or what we can imagine it to have been five thousand years ago. What is more, any even cursory look reveals a picture that can make sense only if we approach it via a form of evolutionary theory. For what body of knowledge if not evolution can explain humanity moving, in a space of five thousand years, quantitatively from less than ten million to a size now approaching tem billion members, and qualitatively, from a condition of small dispersed communities to one of a constellation of great metropoles? And so, what does ‘phased’ urbanization reveal about world system evolution?
World system evolution, as all of the ‘cascade”, is a macro-learning process that is Darwinian in character [1]. The term Darwinian in this context is not intended to suggest a biological (e.g. genetic) explanation. It is designed as an instance of “universal Darwinism”, the argument (advanced i.a. by Richard Dawkins and Henry Plotkin) that evolution everywhere, including in this particular case, changes in the social organization of the human species, occurs in accordance with certain generalized Darwinian principles. Plotkin (1997:84) uses the term “heuristic” – a pattern that leads to discovery and invention – for the sequence of consecutive and continuous phases in the overall evolutionary learning process [3].
At this point we stipulate that the trajectory of the world system shows evidence of major, 2000-year long, phases. The evidence for this will not be reviewed at this point, and the reader is referred to evidence on the shape of the growth of world population, and also on the long trend in major urbanization (taken as a proxy for world urbanization, Modelski 2003a,b).
At this stage of our study we intend to test the ‘qualitative’ proposition that world system evolution is a sequence of four such macro-phases : generation of variants (the nature of which remains unspecified), cooperative mobilization (or agglutination), selection of variants (by a mechanism to be specified), and regeneration and consolidation. We propose that the phases that we have recognized throughout, the three eras of urbanization: ancient, classical and modern, are in fact the first three of the four phases of the macro-learning process that we call world system evolution. Let us spell out these points in some more detail.
A test of the learning
thesis
Viewed synchronically, all parts of the world system, the social organization of the human species, constitute a structure. That structure results from the fact that at a certain point in world time, a point that coincided with the onset of urbanization, humans began to relate to each in other ways that raised the possibility, and increasingly the actuality, of species-wide organization. Hence, viewed diachronically, across world time, world system might be viewed as a process, in fact a learning process that we also call world system evolution. World system did not emerge, fully-fledged, and all at once but rather as a process extending over long periods. That process continues and projects well beyond the future that is foreseeable by to-day’s social science methodologies.
By speaking about this “world system process” we imply that we adhere to a “unitary” rather than plural, or “multi-civilizational” conception of world system evolution. We do not scan the world for multiple world systems or civilizations each with their own developmental trajectory, or review the historical record in search of convincing ways of slicing it into several singular units of analysis. Such a unitary conception of the world system may be contrasted with a multi-civilizational approach originally propagated by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and that more recently came to be associated with the concept of a “clash of civilizations”.
In the present approach, we take human species as one, and ask: what has been its social evolutionary trajectory? That is, by what path have we reached to-day’s social organization, and where might such a path lead us in the future?
To answer that question, conceive of social organization on a world scale as a millennial learning project: the human species learning to live with themselves, and with increasing numbers of their own kind, by evolving new forms of organization. Such a project, like all (social evolutionary) learning processes, might be expected to proceed in long stages, that we take to be some 2,000 years in duration and about equal to historical eras, each era lending distinct emphasis to a different evolutionary problem [4].
We propose that world system evolution can be analyzed, over the past 5,000 years, and well into the future, as a sequence of four phases of a major social learning process. Its first, cultural, phase might be understood as the laying down of the learning infrastructure of the entire system, creating the conditions for what we can call the emergence of civilization, conditions in the absence of which there could be no extended (potentially world-wide) social learning, and in the absence of which variety could not emerge on a sustained basis.
The second, ‘social’, phase, that can also be described as cooperative and community-building, highlights the learning of more extensive yet also more inclusive, - and potentially universal - solidarities, on the basis of which new forms of cooperation could take root and without which social organization on a world scale could not arise.
The third, political, phase that is our own, modern, experience,
revolves around the central Darwinian principle of selection, that is on the timing and character of the (explicit or implicit) choice of evolutionarily stable conditions of world organization. In the case of world system it concerns changes in the scope and nature of collective organization at the global level, the control of the means of violence and instruments of mass destruction, and the choice of conditions of world order.
The fourth, yet to come, could be envisaged as ‘economic’, and residing
in
the stabilization and consolidation of the economic and material basis of that
process, and possible regeneration of its
products. But what about the economic
factors in social action so far? They
cannot be ignored and are hardly forgotten.
The “urban revolution” first arose against the background of, and as the
successor to, the invention and successful dissemination of agriculture in the
previous millennia, and in particular in
It is obvious that this is an attempt to lend conceptual coherence to the
large sweep of human experience, covering the ancient, the classical, the modern,(and the post-modern?) eras, and that is an important and possibly urgent task. Now comes the question that we shall ask of our data: do our data on world cities support the expectation that the three phases of the world system show qualitative differences of emphasis that support the notion of a learning process at work, that each of the eras that we have reviewed and documented stands for a distinct civilizational experience that justifies it being recognized as one of the predicted phases of world system evolution?
Major urbanization
Urbanization is how the world population comes to live in urban
places. Quite evidently, it is social change on a major scale. Our own survey of ‘world cities” suggests strongly that major urbanization, just as world population growth, is a phased process. On this occasion we take the “fact” of phasing as a given, having previously argued for it at some length (Modelski 2003a,b, Devezas and Modelski 2003).
The growth patterns of world citiesare, of course, just one portion of urbanization. The inventory of world cities that forms the data base for this test gives us information about what might be called “major urbanization”, that is about the formation and the life cycle of the world’s largest cities. This is, as it were, the tip of the iceberg of urbanization.. We call it “major” – or maybe “high-end” – urbanization because the cities we have observed are the greatest and the most prominent of their eras. It is also “major” because it highlights those urban places that are best positioned to be observed, and also to serve as links in long-range and world-wide networks of every kind.
The question now is: what does our record of “major urbanization” –
viewed as an index of social transformation - tell us about world system evolution, and in particular about the make-up of the three major eras of world history (or phases of the world system)? For each of the three eras it constructs an inventory of “world cities”.[5] The primary and sole relevant qualification for the designation of a town or settlement as “world” city is the presumed (estimated) size of its population in a given year (at one century intervals). In other words, in this instance world cities are the most populous urban sites of their time. That is, deliberately a simplification. In recent years a considerable literature has arisen around the concept of “world city” as the focus of globalization at the end of the 20th century (see e.g. King and Taylor 1995). That literature That literature takes for granted population figures (the number of “millionaire”
cities is currently in the 300+range, and attention has shifted to mega-cities of 10-20 million +) and seeks to distinguish among them in particular those that host major clusters of economic activity, such as headquarters etc. of transnational corporations.
They can afford to take population figures for granted because they are now freely available, in contrast with the situation for most of the five millennia past.
As a criterion that must work across such a long time-span, the number of inhabitants seems the most useful. More refined approaches will no doubt find that not all of our listings merit the designation of “world city”, and that some smaller urbanisms that fall below our thresholds will be found will be found that also deserve that title. For ancient world cities (-3500 to -1000), our threshold criterion is an estimated population of 10,000 or more; in the classical world (-1000 to 1000) it is 100,000, and in modernity (since 1000)one million. The surprise is that these simple criteria yield, for each era, a comparable number of entries: in the first two cases, a maximum of 26, in the first, and 27 in the second. In the modern era we reach 16 cases by 1900, but then urbanization explodes, and we find some 300 cases in our inventory. There are grounds for believing that this is an instance of a hidden order in the world of cities (as in the world system). But let us now turn to our main question: what do our data reveal about the qualitative character of world system phases?
Cities, writing, and
calendars in the ancient world
Was the ancient era the first critical phase of the world system process, a distinct learning experience of an infrastructural character? What are the elements of a civilizational learning-infrastructure?
The distinguishing feature of that era resided in the launching of two
major social innovations, cities, and writing and calendars, and these might jointly be interpreted as having laid down the learning-infra-structural basis for world system evolution. Because we had cities and writing, the human species could undertake the task of building the elements of social organization on a world scale. Without cities and writing the humans could not have continued with the project of the world system. .
Why do we regard cities, and writing and calendars, as the central
elements of this stage of the civilizational process? A system of cities provided as it were the hardware making possible collective learning on a continuous basis; it was the platform for sustained and intense interaction with the expectation of repeat experience, independent of the fate of any one city. The first cities arose around cult centers; city-states were the political basis of that system, and the nodes of networks of economic cooperation. World cities, and a fortiori, a system of cities (and not just one big cosmopolis of the classical thinkers) became the basis for the sustained generation of variety from which sprang innovation. Cities, too, are the cradles of writing (the organization and storage of information) and of calendars (the organization of time) which are the software of stable social interaction and learning. They made possible collective memory (we know that lists and records are the first forms of writing), and they enabled communication across space and time, thus programming complex human enterprises.
When
and where do world cities, and writing and calendars, appear on the world
scene? Jean-Jacques Glassner, among others, has situated the “origin of
writing” in
The
earliest, and the only substantial cuneiform finds of the earliest of the Uruk IV period (-3400 to 3100), consisting of 600 inscribed tablets,
are recorded for that city (as compared to
one for
Parallel
to the invention of writing has been the consolidation of concepts used for the
management of time. The earliest tablets
(Uruk IV) contain signs for such measurement: days,
months, and years. That would seem to
confirm that the lunar-solar calendar was probably invented in
Our data on world cities therefore support the conjecture about the
(qualitative) character of the ancient era namely that its distinguishing feature at the most general level resided in the creation of a learning infrastructure, including such institutions as schools, chancelleries, and archives, and of course the cities they were located in, as essential for the continued evolution of the world system. That would lead us to expect that subsequent eras will also likely exhibit their own distinctive features.
Religions in the
classical era
Given the character of our data, and the focus of our present interest, the next concern is with the prediction derived from the framework of “world system evolution” that the characteristic features of the classical era (the second phase of the world system process, covering -1000 to 1000) center on the wider solidarities that are the products of religious evolution, in other words, on the world of religions.
The observation that the classical
era was associated with the development of major cultural and religious
traditions is hardly news to historians who routinely comment on the rise of i.a. Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, in this time
frame. Less frequent are the attempts
to put these developments in a wider framework. One prominent exploration on the canvas of
world history is Karl Jasper’s concept, in The Origins and Goal of History (1953) of
the “axial period” . That is the period, from 800 to 200 BC, that
on his view, constituted a major turning point in human affairs, and laid down
the foundations from which all contemporary civilization derives. Because that is when, he argues, simultaneously
and across
We might wonder how simultaneous a process can be that extends over a period of 600 years; we might also point out that Christianity and Islam appear on the world scene, on Jaspers’ account, as latecomers, well past the “axial period”. But our own analysis does concur with his in recognizing the importance of religions for the classical era; it differs from it, though, in some important respects: in its analysis that puts the emphasis less on ideas and more on social organization, one that is sequential rather than stressing simultaneity, and one that sees it in terms of the general processes of world system evolution, as previously described, and not as the unique product of a specific historical situation. Our urban series could therefore help us to answer the two following questions: do religions in the classical era show sequential development as part of world system evolution, and when and how did they take root at the center of the world system?
We
propose that the classical process might have followed in
Table 1: “Classical World Cities: Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Others”
helps to test such propositions. It classifies all those we designate as “world cities” according to whether they might be regarded as influenced (or just colored) by one of these three religions communities. In other words, whether, in their general orientation, they might be described, at specific points in time, as likely to be noticeably (though not exclusively, or completely) Buddhist, Christian, or Moslem. Table 1 displays developments from 200 BC onward (that is, past Jaspers’ axial period) because prior to that date such communities have demonstrably not yet registered an impact on cities in general.
Confucianism
comes first in this sequence, and it does not really make an appearance in
Table 1 because it emerges as an official ideology first in the Han Empire, after
-2000, with Changan or
The
first to show up well in Table 1 is Buddhism, with the city of
The third phase is that of Christianity, appearing initially in the form of
small communities in Antioch,
Alexandria, and Rome but after 330
becoming the official cult of the Roman empire
centered on Constantinople, and
taking hold of up to one half of the then world cities. From about 330 to 632 the
The fourth phase is Islamic and Table 1 shows how rapidly
the Christian cities of eastern
Table 1 therefore suggests that the rise and diffusion of certain religions in
the classical era was more nearly a sequential process, rather than a simultaneous experience. The process was one characteristic of the world system, and not just of its component parts. The table shows most of the classical era as significantly molded by that preeminent tendency.
Table 1: Classical World Cities: Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Others,
-200 to 1000
|
-200 |
1 |
200 |
400 |
600 |
800 |
1000 |
|
|
Buddhist |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PATALIPUTRA |
VAISHALI |
VAISHALI |
TAXILA |
|
KANAUJI |
KANAUJI |
|
|
|
PATALIPUTRA |
PATALIPUTRA |
|
KANAUJI |
ANURADHP. |
THANJAVUR |
|
|
TAXILA |
TAXILA |
TAXILA |
CHANGAN |
ANURADHP. |
SRI KSETRA |
|
|
|
VAISHALI |
PURUSAPURA. |
PURASAPURA |
|
SRI KSETRA |
|
|
|
|
|
PRATHISTARA |
PRATHISTARA |
YE |
ISANAPURA |
CHANGAN |
|
|
|
|
ANURADHP. |
ANURADHP. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CHANGAN |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
WUCHANG |
|
DALI |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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|
KYONGJU |
|
|
|
|
Christian |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CONSTANT. |
CONSTANT. |
|
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THESSAL. |
|
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|
ANI |
|
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|
|
CAESAR.MAR.. |
CONSTANT. |
CAESAR.MAR. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
CAES.MAZ. |
EMERITA |
CONSTANT. |
|
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|
CAESAR.MAR. |
|
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Moslem |
|
|
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|
FUST/CAIRO |
|
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|
|
CORDOVA |
TINNIS |
|
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|
NISHAPUR |
|
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|
FUSTAT |
ISPHAHAN |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
RAYY |
CORDOVA |
|
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|
MERV |
|
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RAYY |
|
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|
KUFA |
|
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|
AL AHSA |
|
|
Other Cities |
|
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|
|
|
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|
LINZI |
|
|
|
|
|
|
LINZI, LU |
LINZI |
|
MERV |
|
XINJANG |
LINHUANG |
|
|
XIANYANG |
CHANGAN |
|
|
. |
YOUSHOU |
ANHILWARA |
|
|
CHANGAN |
MAOLING |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ZHANGLING |
CAESAR.IOL |
TEOTIHUA. |
TEOTIHUA |
|
TOLLAN |
|
|
|
YANGLING |
|
CARACOL |
CARACOL |
CARACOL |
|
|
|
|
|
APAMEA |
TICAL |
|
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|
|
|
|
WAN |
|
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|
TIHUANACO |
|
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SELEUCIA/T |
|
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APAMEA |
|
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CYBIRA |
|
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SELEUCIA/T |
|
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|
|
|
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
16 |
25 |
20 |
19 |
18 |
27 |
26 |
|
Note, too, that the spread, or diffusion, (as distinct from the origin and
inception)
of these religions is principally the product of regional developments of the
second part of the classical era, after about -200. The first part saw the rapid growth of
populations, growth of cities, and expansion of cultivated areas, especially in
East and
Note,
in addition, that of the religious communities we have followed, each started in
the competitive context of systems of independent city states: the Spring and Autumn, and the Warring
states in
How important were empires in world system evolution?
Historians, political scientists, and sociologists pay much attention to the role of empires” as the most interesting, and as though ever-present, social structures of the pre-modern world system. Immanuel Wallerstein regards empires as a “constant feature of the world scene for 5000 years”. What does the inventory of world cities reveal about those quite obviously prominent structures, and why do we need to under-emphasize , in an evolutionary account, the role of empires?
The importance of empires - those multi-level political organizations, seeking power monopoly mostly imposed by force upon diverse populations, yet also claiming universal authority at regional or world scales - is sometimes assessed by the extent of the territory they controlled. That measure is of questionable validity unless qualified by some index of value. The world city data makes it possible, for the ancient and classical eras, to gauge the importance, or lack of it, of those grand political constructions in another way, by determining whether they mattered in global proportions, by showing what share of world urban resources (hence also skilled populations, trade and industry, and communication networks) they commanded. We analyze those empires that offer lessons or experience in regional or world organization – not just large land powers.
The
urban record reveals empires to have been not as important as historical memory
would have it, if we measure that importance by the proportion of world cities
controlled by them, at points of time captured in our record. In the ancient
world, the two prominent multi-level political organization with a claim to
regional standing were those of
Both the wars of
peripheral pressures paved the way toward the disappearance, at the hands of Babylon, of the civilization of Sumer
in the following 2-3 centuries, But
Hammurabi’s short-lived Amorite empire does not even show up on our
screen; it was substantially gone by -1700. Nor does
In the classical world, imperial regional organizations make a somewhat
stronger impression, but not a truly positive contribution. An overview of the relevant data appears in Table 2, below; it gives a rough measure of the weight of classical empires at five data points and demonstrates that the classical world showed minimal imperial structures in the early part of the era (at -1000 and -500), and maximum control at about mid-point, in year 1, with some three-quarters (18 out of 25) of world cities forming part of an imperial structure, that share declining sharply over the remaining period, such that by 1000, only about 1/5th of our world cities can be shown to have had imperial color..
Table 2: How important were the classical empires?
(as share of all world cities, by major region)
|
Imperial / NON-IMPERIAL world citiies IN |
at -1000 |
-500 |
1 |
500 |
1000 |
|
|
0 1 |
0 8 |
9 0 |
0 5 |
3 4 |
|
|
0 |
0 1 |
0 6 |
0 1 |
0 4 |
|
|
0 2 |
1 0 |
7 1 |
6 1 |
2 2 |
|
West Asia & Moslem world |
0 1 |
2 0 |
2 0 |
2 0 |
0 10 |
|
The |
|
|
|
0 3 |
0 1 |
|
Totals |
0 4 |
3 13 |
18 7 |
8 10 |
5 21 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
% distribution (rounded) |
100 |
20 80 |
75 25 |
30 70 |
20 80 |
.
Table 3: presents the data in greater detail, naming names, quite a few of which the reader might recollect as forming part of our
historical
memory. It also offers visual support
to the trends depicted in Table 2. The
basic distinction is that between world cities (of 100,000 inhabitants+) that
are part of empires: “imperial cities”, and other such cities that we call:
“non-imperial”. The distinction is not
always as neat as we should like it to be, and it also raises important
definitional questions about what was (or is) an empire (a political structure
with a monopoly of regional reach). The
important cases are clear: the
Three out of the four major regions that we have reviewed show one
strong pattern: vigorous urban growth in the first half of the era, followed by imperial rule of uncertain duration and stability and combined with cessation of growth in the second half [such cross-regional synchrony in respect of changes in the size of empires and the largest cities was earlier demonstrated by Christopher Chase-Dunn). In other words, empires seemed to have had little to do with the creative parts of the process; at best they may have had some effect of consolidation (with a much overrated Pax Romana), but also vulnerability to hinterland intrusions. They never offered a sustainable model of regional cooperation, let alone of world organization.
The path to empire
was somewhat different in
original seat of the urban
revolution. Three prominent conquest
states made an early appearance there in succession: the Neo-Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian, and the
Persian empires, with
The
seem to have had an imperial structure, but rather one of autonomous city-states.
Table 3:
Classical world cities: imperial
and non-imperial
(est.100,000 inhabitants and over)
|
Year / totals |
Imperial world
cities |
Non-imperial
world cities |
|
-1000 4 |
|
HAOQING capital of Western Zhou |
|
-500 16 |
|
LINZI capital of Qi XIATU lesser capital of Yan XINTIAN capital of Jin LU capital of Lu ANYI capital of Wei SHANGQIU capital of Song RAJAGRIHA capital of Maghada AGRAGAS, |
|
1 25 |
CHANGAN capital of Han LINZI , LU
Han MAOLING. ZHANGLING Han YANLING Han CTESIPHON/SELEUCIA/T MERV Parthian empire EHESUS CIBYRA APAMEA |
TAXILA VAISHALI city of the Licchavis PATALIPUTRA PRATHISTARA Satavakhanas ANURADHPURA Sinhalese
capital |
|
500 18 |
CAES.MARITIMA MERV Sasanid empire |
CHANGAN Northern Wei YE Northern Wei TEOTIHUACAN CARACOL Mayan |
|
1000 26 |
|
RAYY, ISPHAHAN NISHAPUR AL AHSA capital of Qarmatians CORDOVA capital of Umayyads FUSTAT/CAIRO capital of Fatimids TINNIS LINHUANG capital of Liao ANI capital of KANAUJI capital of Pratiharas ANHILWARA main city of THANJAVUR capital of DALI capital of Nanzhao TOLLAN capital of the Toltecs |
.
The modern world was initially characterized by the strength of
urbanization in West and
The impetus for
change came from
a shift of focus from the
By 1900, the network of world cities (1m +) holds especial interest. Of
the sixteen “millionaire” cities of
that year, a majority could have been described as “imperial”:
Table 4: Modern world cities: imperial and
non-imperial, 1000 to 1500
(est. one million inhabitants and over)
|
Year |
Imperial
cities |
Non-imperial
cities |
|
1000 |
|
|
|
1100 |
|
SONGDO Koryo |
|
1200 |
|
|
|
1300* |
|
|
|
1400 |
|
|
|
1500 |
|
|
* In 1300,
Mongol rule.
In other words, as evidenced by the record of world cities, empires
can hardly be said to have been
“ever present”, and even less, creative, in the past five millennia. They can take little credit for urban growth
or economic development though they did attempt to harvest the fruits of that
growth when they ripened, for empires
are a primitive means of domination all round, and not just instruments
of economic domination. Their much
touted products, peace and order, failed to hold The Roman, and the Chinese empires may have
served lessons for state builders in the modern era but it is the example of
democracy in the city states of classical
Selection in the modern world
Selection refers, of course, to the third phase of evolutionary learning.
In evolutionary biology, this is natural selection, that is selection by the forces of nature, such as climate. environmental change, or other species. In social arrangements, there is social selection, either by collective agencies or individual choice. Decision is selection among alternatives. At the most general level, the modern world system might be undergoing a phase characterized by “selection” in two respects: as human species in a changing environment, and as a species internally selecting viable forms of world-wide species organization. Our concern is primarily with the latter.
World system evolution is about the arrangements that humans devise for living together on this planet in conditions of rising inter-connectedness. Theoretical analysis (Devezas and Modelski 2003) shows it to be a project that is about 80 percent complete. That situation did not obtain 5000 years ago but world system organization is now inescapable, and probably irreversible. We also know that over the experience of the modern world system, world empire has already been selected against, twice in a major way. In the 14th century the spectacular failure of the Mongol project was one strong signal. In the centuries since 1500, a European imperial solution was four times selected against, albeit at heavy expense, the preferred system being global leadership, a transitional solution mid-way between empire and modern world organization. The time has now come to move the world system toward a more stable solution. That which is being selected is a form of governance that will make possible human survival into the “long” future. These will be multi-level forms of social organization sturdy enough to cope with such priority issues on the world agenda as the role of war and nuclear weapons, center-hinterland interactions, wealth disparities, and environmental stress.
The study of major urbanization over the past several millennia cannot tell us precisely what forms of world organization will be, or need to be, selected. That topic needs a more comprehensive treatment. What it does make clear though is this: for long stretches of the modern era the need for change hardly appeared urgent or convincing. Currents of change were already underway but they remained mostly subterranean, hidden from view. For a short time, and until the 20th century, it seemed as though only ‘the West’ was changing.
What the study of urbanization does bring into full view is the abruptness of recent social change. We now know that over what seems only a moment, the last century between 1900 and 2000, the world’s social make-up has undergone sudden, and unprecedented change: the number of people on earth has risen dramatically, and qualitatively the world’s makeup has moved, from chiefly rural to majority urban. As noted, the number of “millionaire” cities shot up from 16 to some 300 in just the last one hundred years. (Table 5) What also follows is not just that urbanization cannot possibly continue at the speed of the past century because soon we would all be living in cities (or maybe even in one world city but that the social organization of the species is on the verge of a qualitatively new form.
Table 5: Number of modern world
cities: 1000 to 2000
(est. one million inhabitants and over)
|
1000 |
1100 |
1200 |
1300 |
1400 |
1500 |
1600 |
1700 |
1800 |
1900 |
2000 |
|
1 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
4 |
16 |
299 |
What we have learnt from the phasing of urbanization tells us that at
mid-points of both the ancient and the classical eras, a change of pace occurred that signaled new dangers and new opportunities. Has the world system reached a comparable mid-point in the modern era? Our analysis implies that much but should not be taken too literally because it is anchored in a “rounded” conception of the duration of the modern (and earlier) eras, as extending for 2000 years, from 1000 to 3000. A finer analysis, of global political and economic processes, might suggest an earlier mid-point, as early as 1850. (Modelski 2003b). The onset of an “Age of Redistribution” (Modelski 2003b) makes a decision process even more likely. Current population projections indeed indicate a growth slowdown for this century and next and that, too, implies that the world is near, or at, the mid-point it had reached in two previous eras.
Developments other than urbanization also signal a time for decision. By 2000, a majority of the world’s inhabitants have come to live in democracies, an advance that clearly owes much to urbanization. Politically, nuclear weapons are now in the hands of governments of about one half of the world’s population; the weapons revolution makes the destruction of urban life, and even mass extinction of humans a theoretical possibility, hence poses another sort of limit. The information revolution now supplies the knowledge requirements of a world system available to much of a highly inter-connected population. That is, decision might now be seriously in order but it is also worth remembering that this still leaves several centuries for that phase to be completed.
What might be the mechanisms of selection? The first lesson of our analysis might be that this will not be empire, or imperial rule. The record of such solutions is worse than uneven and does not justify their reputation. The most damaging thing to be said about them is that they are incompatible with democracy. Imperial dominance is monopoly of power and absence of accountability, and these are inimical to democratic arrangements, as well as to evolutionary stability.
The best general mechanism of selection in fact appears to be that implied
in democratization. Recall that at its base, world system is about the social organization of human species, and that means that the selecting mechanism will be actuated by the world’s population. This might take the form of each individual acting on their own as for instance in the decision to form, and have or not have, families, to move to a city or to leave it, or to participate in, or withdraw from, markets, by buying or selling. Or else it might find expression in the decisions of collective agencies and organizations such as governments, at several levels, that are accountable, and responsive to, their respective constituencies. Being self-correcting, and self-legitimating, democracy is the system most compatible with the requirements of evolutionary stability and change.
In summary
This has been a test of propositions maintaining that the human experience of the past 5000 years can be understood in a unitary perspective as one period of a continuous process of (prospectively) four major phases but one that can be portrayed and narrated in one uninterrupted sequence (except for the Americas in the classical age where such continuity may be in question). This continuity assumption (also confirmed by David Wilkinson for Central Civilization) is supported by the evidence of major urbanization, combined with data on the world population.
But the test goes beyond the continuity thesis. It showed that viewed though the prism of urbanization world system evolution is neither linear nor random, but phased because at fairly regular intervals and at increasing levels of complexity it exhibits distinct phases. That makes it possible to argue that those phases are successive installments of a Darwinian learning process: the process of world system formation.
Grounds for this conclusion lie in the recognition that the course of world system evolution has been marked by a qualitative succession of major innovations theoretically predicted for these phases, and it is these innovations that best characterize the entire process. The first of these phases (or eras) laid down the groundwork for further advance, the very infrastructure of the learning process. It launched cities, invented, and broadcast writing, and organized time, assuring conditions without which further learning would have been inconceivable. In the second phase, the narrow basis of human solidarity was expanded, and the formation of larger regional communities enabled, by the dissemination of religions.
As indicated i.a. by city data for the third, selection, phase of this macro-
learning process, conditions are now changing at an extremely fast rate and will be seen as helping to justify calls for action toward viable forms of world organization. The quality of that selection and the innovations linked to that process will have much to do with the survival capacity of the human species. We do not know what forms of world organization will, or will not be, actually selected and innovated. That set of decisions will be up to all the members of the human family. What it does graphically show is that the time for decision is nigh.
Notes
* Paper presented to the “Globalization and World System Dynamics” panel, annual conference of the International Studies Association,
1. For a fuller discussion see in particular Modelski (2000) and Devezas and Modelski (2003b).
2. This paper draws substantially from Part III of World Cities:-3000 to 2000, and most of its data from that volume.
3. Henry Plotkin enumerates three phases of the “g-t-r” (Campbell-Lewontin) heuristic.
We add a fourth,
cooperation, that too can be traced to
4. In this way we go beyond postulating a ‘heuristic’, to proposing that each element of that heuristic is optimized in a definite and significantly long period, and that each such phase of that process has roughly the same length, namely 2000 years. Why should phases be of equal length? They facilitate coordination with other evolutionary processes.
5. The network of world cities maps the center of the world system, and its mapping yields information, in the first place, about the center. But the condition of the center also reflects the state of center-hinterland relations, hence also the state of the whole system
(see also Modelski 2003b).
References
Devezas, Tessaleno and George Modelski (2003) “Power Law Behavior and
World System Evolution” Tech. Forecasting and Soc Change November, 819-860.
King, Paul L. and Peter Taylor eds. (1995) World Cities in a World-System,
Modelski, George
(2003a) World Cities: -3000 to 2000,
----- (2003b) “Ages of Redistribution” Conference on “World System History
and Global
Environmental Change”,
-----
(2000) “World System
Evolution” in R. Denemark
et al eds. World
System History,
Plotkin, Henry
(1997)