Social Change, Social History - General & Miscellaneous, Capitalism, Economic History - General & Miscellaneous

Rise And Demise

Name: Rise And Demise
Author: Christopher Chase-Dunn
ISBN: 9780813310060

by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Thomas D. Hall

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Overview

Spanning ten thousand years of social change, this book examines the ways in which world-systems evolve. A comparative study of stateless societies, state-based regional empires, and the modern global capitalist political economy, it reveals the underlying processes at work in the reproduction and transformation of social, economic, and political structures.Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall show that stateless societies developed in the context of regional intersocietal networks that differed significantly from larger and more hierarchical world-systems. The processes by which chiefdoms rose and fell are similar to the ways in which states, empires, and modern hegemonic core states have experienced uneven development. Most world-systems exhibit a pattern of political centralization and decentralization, but the mechanisms and processes of change can vary greatly.Looking at the systematic similarities and differences among small scale, middle-sized, and global world-systems, the authors address such questions as: Do all world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies in which the development of one area necessitates the underdevelopment of another? How were kin-based logics of social integration transformed into state-based tributary logics, and how did capitalism emerge within the interstices of tributary states and empires to eventually become the predominant logic of accumulation? How did the rise of commodity production and the eventual dominance of capitalist accumulation modify the processes by which political centers rise and fall?Rise and Demise offers far-reaching explanations of social change, showing how the comparative study of world-systems increases our understanding of early history, the contemporary global system, and future possibilities for world society.

Synopsis

This book compares the modern global world-system with earlier regional intersocietal systems. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall propose an evolutionary theory that explains how myriad small-scale systems became unified into a single global system over the last ten thousand years. Their theory focuses on semiperipheral societies as agents of expansion and transformation of political structures and economic networks and suggests how basic transformation might occur in the future.

About the Author, Christopher Chase-Dunn

Christopher Chase-Dunn is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Thomas D. Hall is Lester M. Jones Professor of Sociology at DePauw University. Christopher Chase-Dunn is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Thomas D. Hall is Lester M. Jones Professor of Sociology at DePauw University.