Book Review: Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present by Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Lerro

Abstract

Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Lerro Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present, Paradigm Publishers, London, 2013; 504 pp: 9781612053288, 53.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Lerro's Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present offers a highly impressive narrative covering many millennia. Using a comprehensive thematic guideline, the study illuminates a complete history of the evolution of human societies. The book's intention is to inform its readers about how 'the people of the earth have gone from living in nomadic bands to the urbanised global political system of the present over 12,000 years' (p. xxi). Ambitious from its outset, it is designed for undergraduate and graduate social science classes on social change and globalisation topics in sociology, world history, cultural geography, anthropology, and international studies. In order to tackle such a daunting task, its authors employ a framework spanning the social geography of human settlements to the highly evolved social systems that exist today. The methodology driving such a study centres on tracing the growth of settlement systems and interaction networks. The authors argue that this methodology explains the processes of institutional transformation that has made it possible for current civilisations to live in large and complex societies. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, historical documents, statistics and survey research, the authors trace the growth of human societies and their complexity, and probe the conflicts in hierarchies both within and among societies. Part 1, 'The Framework', provides a much-appreciated foundation for its succeeding parts. Consisting of four chapters, it details the history of social evolution in general, and its relationship with human history. It introduces the concepts examined throughout the book, from the idea of institutions to the problems of free will and determinism. This first part contends that as social structures evolve, so does the social self. Part 2 'Stateless Systems', discusses the lives of people in small egalitarian societies in which consensus and moral order are the foundations of the main social institutions. It examines how ecological degradation, warfare, aggressive musicality and cannibalism, often resulting from growing population pressure, affected the development of sedentism and new technologies of production. Part 3, 'State-Based Systems', smoothly transitions from the less organised social structured past to the emergence of ordered cities and states. Focusing on the story of empire, particularly its markets and commerce, these four chapters illuminate one's understanding of how the interconnected social systems maintained steady growth only to fall years later. The rise and fall of powerful states and empires is an important topic, as is the development of core and periphery relations. By considering the recurrent phenomenon in which the semi-peripheral and peripheral peoples conquer old core states and establish new empires, the authors discuss the nature of political and economic institutions with a focus on the long rise of markets and commerce. Encompassing nine chapters in total, the most extensive section of the book is the concluding part, entitled 'The Long Rise of Capitalism'. Chase-Dunn and Lerro argue that in order to understand the development of capitalism in world history, one needs to approach the subject of a slow and uneven emergence of financial institutions. …