Abstract
This paper describes the role played by anthropogenic ecological degradation in the evolution of world-systems over the past twelve thousand years. We have developed a conceptual apparatus for comparing workd-systems in order to better understand how fundamental transformations in systemic logic occur. When properlyconceptualized and bounded, we can compare earlier, smaller regional systems with the modem global system. This enables us to comprehend how the size and nature of world-systems have changed. Ourr model of world-systems evolution incorporates the important world of anthropologists on population pressure and ecological degradation. The expanding scale of world- systems corrceponds to the expanding scale of ecological degradation, so that, though institutional developments have temporarily overcome the constraints of demography and ecology, in the long run more complex systems face the same problems that smaller and simpler systems faced. Thus procsses of ecological depletion have long been central in the evolution of social structures and are likely to continue to be so in the future.
Highlights
AUST.RACr: This paperdescribesthe role played by anthropogenicecological degradationinthe evolutionofworld-systemsoverthe past twch'CthotL~anydcm
A few social scientists have begun doing formal research on the possible causal connections between world-systemic developmental processes and changes in the biosphere (e.g. Grimes and Roberts 1995; Kick et al 1996). These important ta-;ks can be facilitated by a theoretical focus that comprehends the rol e that ecological factors and anthropogenic ecological degradation have played in the evolution of world-systems over the pa-;t twelve thousand years
Because we wish to study transformations, we maximize the range of possible ca-;cs by including all sedentary human groups that have existed on Earth since the beginning of scdcntism about twelve thousand years ago. ill To facilitate broad comparisons we define world-systems a-;intersocietal networks in which the interactions are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and importantly affect changes that occur in these local structures
Summary
Because we wish to study transformations, we maximize the range of possible ca-;cs by including all sedentary human groups that have existed on Earth since the beginning of scdcntism about twelve thousand years ago. ill To facilitate broad comparisons we define world-systems a-;intersocietal networks in which the interactions (e.g., trade, warfare, intermarriage, information) are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and importantly affect changes that occur in these local structures. Ill To facilitate broad comparisons we define world-systems a-;intersocietal networks in which the interactions (e.g., trade, warfare, intermarriage, information) are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and importantly affect changes that occur in these local structures. World-systems are fundamentally social structures that include different cultural groups and politics within them. Worldsystcms began when people first developed scdcntism and so sedentary villages of diversified foragers interacted with their still-nomadic neighbors This led to the institutional invention of territoriality-- the claim that one group held rights to control and use specific natural resources. Bounding world-syst ems necessarily must proceed from a locale-centric beginning rather than from a whole-system focus This is because all human societies, even nomadic hunter-gatherers, interact importantly with neighboring societies. Good worldsystems analysis--in modern or precapitalist settings--always attends to the compl ex dialectic between social change within any of its composite units and the entire system
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