Uneven Political Development: Largest Empires in Ten world Regions since the Late Bronze Age

• In Event: 552 - Section on Political Economy of the World-Systems Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. A Longitudinal Perspective of Global Political Economy

Abstract

This is a part of a study of the growth of settlements and polities in ten world regions over the past 3500 years. We discuss changes in the relationships linking political/military power, economic power and settlement systems. And we compare East Asian urban and empire growth with the original heartland of cities and states in Southwest Asia and Africa, as well as with Europe, the subcontinent of South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Americas. This quantitative measurement of the trajectories of largest city and empire growth and the changing relative scale of social organization in the different world regions provides an overall picture of the long-term patterns of uneven development in human sociocultural evolution and has important implications for analyses of the similarities and differences between the developmental trajectories of the world regions studied. We also investigate the extent to which the growth/decline phases of cities and empires in different world regions display synchrony or a see-saw (alternating) pattern across the centuries.

Authors

• Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside

• Hiroko Inoue, University of California, Riverside

• Alexis Antonio Alvarez, Univ of California-Riverside

• Rebecca Alvarez

• Teresa Neal, University of California Riverside

• Eugene N. Anderson, University of California-Riverside