Class Readings and Plans for Tuesday, November 17
World Systems

Class Plan - World Systems Theory was coined by Emanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s as a model to explain European colonialist expansion and global exploitation from the 1400s to 1900s. Wallerstein saw colonialism as a product of European capitalism, in which a crowded European core had lots of people to buy goods and specialized technical know-how for creating products for economic growth, but had exhausted natural resources (agricultural land, timber, precious metals, etc.). This set up a mechanism for expansionist policies in which explorers and settlers spread around the world looking for untapped natural resources. In the process of commercializing these resources (bringing them to market in an economically feasible way), land and resources had to be appropriated and privatized (claimed for the [crown of your choice]) and labor had to be cheaply available (stimulating exploitative treatment of indigenous populations and growth of the African Slave market). Subsequently, anthropologists and others have generalized the concept of World Systems Theory to relate to relations of "core and periphery" (of densely populated and strong political systems) in any case in which different populations were brought into contact in the context of asymmetries of political, economic, and technological influence. Accordingly, the world of the past can be thought of as having been composed of multiple political power centers (cores) and the interstitial peripheries that shifted through time but that had some recognizable social, economic, and political dynamics. Critiques of Wallerstein's WST in the 1980s and 1990s challenged the Eurocentrism (Wallerstein more or less saw the core/s as being all-powerful and steam rolling the peripheral populations) and urged a consideration of the complex ways that recipients of colonialism resisted or co-opted the interests of the colonialists for their own purposes. Relationships between cores and between cores and peripheries then can be seen as the result of the exercise of patterns of exploitation and resistance.

By 9:00 p.m. on Monday, November 9, please post a comment about how world systems theory (ultimately a theory of global political/economic history) relates to historical ecology in the ways we have been discussing it for the past several weeks. Abel explicitly draws a connection between WST and Resilience Theory. Are you convinced? How might WST help us understand the "ecological imperialism" Crosby documents? In what ways might culture contacts be conceived of as "disturbances" to socio-ecological system dynamics? Ben will take part of class time to present a lecture on the larger connections between Kuril Island archaeological history and events in Japan and mainland NE Asia and discussions will expand to discuss the Kuril case in the context of the readings and questions/comments posed on go-post.

• Abel, Thomas (2007) World-Systems as Complex Human Ecosystems. In The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic. A. Hornborg and C. Crumley, eds. Pp. 56-73. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
• Crosby, Alfred W. (1988) Ecological imperialism: the overseas migration of Western Europeans as a biological phenomenon. Reproduced in: The Ends of the Earth, ed. by D. Worster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103-117.
• Fitzhugh, Ben, Erik Gjesfjeld, Will Brown, and Mark Hudson. (submitted) Resilience and the population history of the Kuril Islands, Northwest Pacific: A study in complex human ecodynamics. Quaternary International. [this last reading explains a model that will be expored in the lecture. Its relevance to the topic of World Systems will be made apparent in the lecture]