5000 YEAR WORLD SYSTEM - 2003 UPDATE AND PREFACE
for the Chinese Edition
by
Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills
It is much pleasure and a great honor to have our book translated into Chinese and thus to
be permitted to address the Chinese reader in this Preface prepared especially for that
occasion. We are thankful to our colleague and friend Gao Xian for taking the initiative
and responsibility to bring this Chinese edition to life, to the Foreign Translation and
... for publishing the same, and especially grateful to Mr. [insert name] for the
laborious and good work of making this translation of our difficult text.
We take this opportunity to address the Chinese reader in this Preface to do three things:
1] Make a brief review of the argument which situates it in the context of Western,
including Russian, Chinese and other archaeological and other pre-historic work, 2] report
on related work by ourselves and especially on advances by others during the now more than
a decade since most of the present text was written, and 3] consider how the latter has
permitted and obliged us to change our own views about the reality and scientific
methodology set out in our original text that is presented here, as well as to relate this
text about the last 5,000 years more directly to contemporary concerns at the present end
and the foreseeable future of this period.
i. THE WORLD SYSTEM CONTEXTUALIZED
Our work and theses are deliberately global and humano-centric and where possible also
eco-centric. Therein they differ sharply from most received research, teaching, and theory
in the West, China, and elsewhere., which is very local and localized as well as covering
a brief period, often deliberately so. School teachers of history the world over are
mostly paid by the STATE to inculcate the children and later adults with state
nationalism, or rather statism dressed up as nationalism in states that with very few
exceptions are not uni-national at all. Similarly, pre-history in the hands of
archaeologist are paid to dig up ruins, artefacts and skeletons on the basis of which to
claim that THIS LAND IS MINE and has been so since time immemorial when God gave it to our
glorious ancestors, blessed be their name; and others keep out on pain of being subject to
ethnic cleansing. Western and Chinese archaeology resemble each other in digging
>=elsewhere,@ in that much of the former has followed or even preceded Western
colonialism especially in Southwest Asia and North Africa as well as in the Americas,
while Chinese archaeology has tended to follow in the footsteps of Hanification first of
the Chinese mainland and then of Taiwan and Southeast Asia, as Russian and then Soviet
archaeology has followed the Russification of Siberia and Central Asia. Contemporary
politics has played an immense role in the selection of research sites if only because
state sovereingty and or colonialism has determined site access or the lack of it. For
instance, the two generations of Soviet archaeology surveyed by Chernykh on whom we rely
in this book is almost entirely limited to areas that were under Soviet control,
irrespective of what close relations they may have had to other sites that bear analysis,
but happened to be under outside Cold War control.
Another similarity among pre-historic work here and there, is the limitations imposed on
the researcher by the archaeological record itself - that which has survived to our day.
Stone better than wood buildings and furnishings, ceramic vessels more than natural fibre
ones, metal much more so than other materials, dry better than wet climate, sunken ships
more than other shipwrecked, not to mention dismantled, ones. Moreover, what was once left
or buried needs still to be there and not to have been burglarized by generations of local
or neighboring peoples seeking precious metals or stones or even only building materials,
nor especially having been plundered by Western Museums for >=safe-keeping as the
heritage of human kind,= such as many treasures from the Dunhuang Grottoes at the eastern
edge of the Taklamakan Desert, which were then bombed to bits by intra-Western wars. Our
work relies on all of these as secondary sources, but it also amplifies them through
available written records and especially documented or where necessary inferred RELATIONS
between here and there and everywhere.
We make some efforts to take account of climatic conditions and changes, but we have to do
much better. We make faint efforts to pay attention to gender relations, while many others
make none. For instance, contrary to the Gimbutas/Eisler theory that patriarchy was
brought westward on horseback by barbarian warrior nomads, we cite evidence that gender
relations have generally been less unequal and womens property and other rights greater
among Central Asian nomads than in the Acivilized@ societies around them. Important
Chinese studies by Gao Shiyu and by Liu Ruzhen support us and demonstrate the higher
status of women among their northwestern neighbors than in the Han Dynasty and of the
nomads= influence on raising the status of women during the Tang and Liao and Yan
dynasties [both in Min Jiayin, ed. 1995]. We hope our Chinese colleagues will extend this
work..
We have serious doubts about, to the point of negation of, Acivilizations@ (Frank 2001,
2002]., which have played so large a role in received historiography and pre-history,
Western, Chinese and otherwise. We challenge anyone to find a past or present civilization
with an identifiable - let alone pristine - beginning and end, temporal, territorial,
cultural, or social. Until someone can do so, we prefer to work with and on a
socio-cultural-political-economic WHOLE composed of many different and ever changing
PARTS. One of our main tasks is to identify this [or several?] whole/s and to analyze
it/them holistically. The principal instrument in this inquiry is to identify CONNECTIONS
and LINKS in a NETWORK or SYSTEM. These links may be of any kind, including being subject
to and having to react to the same forces. The heuristic research question is whether A
here would be as it has been and is or not and HOW in the absence or presence of links to
B there, which in turn is different because of its links to A C or to C, so that A and C
may in turn influence each other through their mutual interaction with B.
Tracing these links and influences outward from any point to another most distant other
point/s then begins to map the WHOLE and its identifiable boundaries at a particular time.
Indeed, doing horizontally integrative pre/history across as much of the globe as possible
at any ONE TIME and eventually at EACH point or period in time offers a methodological
definition of the WHOLE/SYSTEM in that it shows THAT and perhaps even HOW A here and B at
a long distance there dance to the same rhythm, expanding and contracting at the same
times. The reasons for such simultaneity may be common reactions to shared climactic
change, which however is always socially mediated; or it may be social relations, such as
trade, war, cultural diffusion, etc, themselves.
Schematically these relations could be mapped by a series of chain of ellipses that are
interlinked, and which each have major and minor urban or oasis centers that are in turn
interlinked inside and among the ellipses as in a network with bigger more widely
interlinked and smaller less linked urban knots. Experience seems to suggest that the
extension of the whole system differs according to what criterion the researcher
prioritizes. Thus our co-author David Wilkinson is a political scientist and
civilizationist prioritizes political relations within and -often military - among
socio-political >=units.@ Therefore he dates the emergence of what he called Central
Civilization from 1500 BC, all the while recognizing that economic relations emerge
earlier and spread out wider than political ones; so that he can accept Frank and Gills=
recognition of a single systemic whole already 1500 years earlier in 3,000 BC; and he
encourages us to probe still ever farther back and outward. Military relations are also
wider than political control, though they do not extend as far out as do economic
relations. That is so even though the military ones more often than not are undertaken to
promote economic ones or at least to shape economic relations to one=s interest, such as
establishing colonies or access to raw materials or markets, and most often to exercise
control over trade routes.
A major example is the relations between Han China and Imperial Rome. In his important
study of their >=correlations,@ Francis Teggart [1939][ demonstrated that and why
changes in political policy and events in Han China repeatedly had immediate political
economic repercussions in Rome. And of course the famous study of TE DECLINE AND FALL OF
THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Gibbon [19xx] falls short in attributing the same only to the arrival
of the >=barbarian=> Huns led by Attila without analyzing how and why as in a set of
dominoes stretching from the northwest frontier of Han China to Rome each falling nomad
domino also pushed the next one westward across Asia until the last one also pushed over
Rome, which had already been weakened by the same continental economic forces that had
simultaneously also weakened the Han Dynasty as well as Kushan India and then Parthian
Persia, as well as all of the trans- Central Asian Silk Road that connected them all.
Our main analytic tools and related propositions are set out in our introductory chapter
and may be briefly summarized:
1] There is a Eurasian wide World System, which has received no recognition and if
anything only neglect or outright denial by Western, Chinese and other scholars alike.
2] The motor force of change and transformation in this System is and has long since been
competitive capital accumulation, which according to most scholarship, Marxist and other,
does not begin until 1800 AD or 1500 AD at the earliest. We demonstrate that essentially
the same process is thousands of years old and the driving force of history and even some
pre-history. 3] We can identify center-periphery relations within the system, though not
necessarily with a single systemic center and its peripheries
4] There may be alternating periods of hegemony during expansion and rivalry during
contraction within the system, but the longer we study it the more persuaded do we become
that hegemony has been much more partial and rare than previously thought. 5]Although
capital accumulation is very old and still ongoing, it is not steady. On the contrary, the
process of capital accumulation and its derivative social and political changes is
cyclical. In this book in chapter 5, we identified expansive A and contractive B phases as
far back as 1750 BC. Then Frank [1993] pursued this cyclical pattern more than a
millennium longer to 3,000 BC. Now Frank and Thompson have taken it still further through
the 3rd and 4th millennia BC, and other scholars are trying to do the same.
However, the book brings together chapters by authors with differing views on these
matters. Arguing in favor of these propositions are the contributing editors Frank and
Gills, and contributors Friedman and Eckholm, and Wilkinson. Arguing against us in defense
of more traditional also Marxist analysis are Amin and Wallerstein, and attempting to have
a foot in both camps is Abu-Lughod.
Beyond these still on-going disputes even among ourselves, a number of important questions
remain outstanding:
Part of the Indian sub-continent plays an important role in the system as a whole until
about 1750 BC, but seems to disappear from the archaeological record for an entire
millennium untill it reappears in the mid-first millennium BC. How can that be? Hard
evidence for the connection of China with an Afro- Eurasian system that extends through
the Mediterranean to the Atlantic appears only in the mid-first millennium BC.
These relations between events in China and elsewhere in Asia occurred in the lifetime of
Confuscius and Tao, which was called the >=Axial Age@ by Karl Jaspers and others, who
observed that other major religious and philosophical movements were also born
simultaneity during the mid-first millennium alll accross Eurasia, including Buddhism,
Zoroasterism, Janism, Pythagorianism, Ionian philosophy and the major Hebrew prophets
Ezekiel and the second Isaiah. Others have already suggested that this simultaneity in
timing was probably not accidental, and we argue that they were the similar responses to
common conditions of a Eurasian-wide mid-millennial economic contraction. Yet evidence of
connections from Russia and Siberia extends all the way to the Pacific. China, of course,
is not China. Many peoples, settled and nomadic, Han and countless other nationalities
came together over the long course of history, and most were sometimes slowly sometimes
rapidly Han/Sinofied. What we now know as China and Chinese is the result of this long and
still ongoing process that included an important element of expansion through a previous
jungle in a south-easterly direction. Nor was that a constant process, for also it had
periods of acceleration and deceleration and even retreat, also from what is now labeled
as Southeast Asia. Our familiarity with this process is still all too limited, and it is
almost nil regarding how its phases fit in with those across most of Asia toward the West
[but see the section below about more recent work]. We are missing something in China and
East Asia. Hopefully the publication of this book there will encourage our Chinese
colleagues to pursue these questions and find evidence for much earlier systemic
relations. Take to heart the archaeological, indeed scientific, saying that absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence.
Even so as a result, we believe in this book and elsewhere [see section on new work below]
to have offered enough hard empirical evidence to ground our assertion and analysis of a
SINGLE AFRO-EURASIAN SYSTEM stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific already 5 thousand
years ago. The development and transformation of this system as a whole then helped shape
and re-shape most of its parts, their relations with each other, and their relations with
the whole system itself. Therefore we contend that not only is it necessary to study the
whole that is more than the sum of its parts in order to understand the whole - then or
now - for that is obvious. But we contend further that it is equally necessary to study
the whole at any ONE TIME if we wish to get a minimally adequate understanding at any time
of any of its parts, be they China or Europe or North America or anywhere else. If this
holistic requirement held already thousands of years ago, all the more so must we examine
global developments in order to understand and make policy choices in and for any part
today.
In the time since we did this book a decade ago, there has been considerable progress In
research and writing along these lines of which we would like to inform the Chinese reader
as well. Therefore we requested colleagues to each write a paragraph summarizing their own
related work during the past decade. Here is what they wrote:
Robert Denemark in the USA informs about the publication of the proceedings of a
conference we held in Lund, Sweden. The book is WORLD SYSTEM HISTORY: THE SOCIAL SCIENCE
OF LONG-TERM CHANGE [Routledge 2000] and it was edited by Robert Denemark, Jonathan
Friedman, Barry K. Gills and George Modelski, and published by Routledge in 2000. This
book is designed as a fundamental starting point for the transdisciplinary study of
continuity and change in the global social, economic, and political system over the
longest of historical terms. It includes four chapters on the major perspectives of
students of world system history by Gunder Frank and Gills, Modelski, Wilkinson, and
Chase-Dunn and Hall. Five chapters on specific regions in long-term perspective, and five
chapters on global macro-historical processes including information, the environment,
productivity, war and world cities follow. Two final chapters offer comparisons,
cumulation and future directions in the study of world system history.
Kristian Kristiansen writes from Sweden: My main contribution in the world system field of
research is still my book EUROPE BEFORE HISTORY [Cambridge University Press 1998] . Here I
propose en cyclical change between center/periphery interaction at 3-400 year intervals
(Fig 226). Periods of international contact and the adoption of new technologies and value
systems change with periods without international contacts (some of them dark ages of
restructuring in the centers), characterized by migrations and social changes in the
European periphery. Right now I am working on the identification of the transmission of
new institutions from Mediterranean centers to Europe during the early Bronze Age, also
employing texts. I identify the institution of Divine twins and twin rulers as a dominant
religious political institution during this period from India to western Europe article
"Rulers and Warriors" Symbolic Transmission and Social Transformation in Bronze
Age Europe", which appeared in Jonathan Haas, (Ed) FROM LEADERS TO RULERS [ Kluwer
Academic/Plenum Publishers 2001].
David Wilkinson in California reports that since 1993 I have been engaged in mapping the
spatio-temporal boundaries of historic world systems (WS); locating small, short-lived and
overlooked WS in Africa; testing, and generally confirming, some of A.G. Frank's proposed
phase-timings against data; and time-mapping the polarity structures of the major world
systems, a long undertaking still in process. Among the world systems whose power
structures I have sequenced is the Far Eastern (at 25-year intervals, 1025 BC--AD 1850).
For that system, I have also reviewed the evidence for the reality and duration of its
systemic autonomy.
Sing Chew, also in California, writes that efforts were made to understand and periodize
long-term ecological changes and crisis as a consequence of five thousand years of
accumulation, urbanization, and climatological changes. Ecological changes and crisis have
been analyzed through an examination of the periodicity and nature of Dark Ages, and what
Dark Ages mean for long-term world system evolution. Dark Ages are ages of redistribution
(material and political)and ecological rejuvenation of the world system. These findings
have been reported in WORLD ECOLOGICAL DEGRADATION (3000BC - AD2000) Volume 1[Altamira
2001], and the forthcoming Volume 2, DARK AGES: ECOLOGICAL STRESS AND SOCIAL
TRANSFORMATION..
John McNeill in the US informs that in the forthcoming THE HUMAN WEB, he and William H.
McNeill organize the human experience over millennia into the story of networks of
interaction involving the exchange and flows of information, technologies, beliefs,
plants, animals, diseases and much else. While on one level all of humankind is connected,
more vigorous interaction historically took place within smaller webs of interaction. Over
time these tended to grow and to merge, often a brutal business, and in the past 500 years
became increasingly unified and global.
Thomas D. Hall in the US has long been active in studying long-term social change. In
addition to his numerous articles and two books with Christopher Chase-Dunn [RISE AND
DEMISE: COMPARING WORLD SYSTEMS [ Westview 1997]; and CORE-PERIPHERY RELATIONS IN
PRECAPITALIST WORLDS [Westview 1991], now out of print but on-line at IROWS]. He is editor
of A WORLD-SYSTEMS READER: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER, URBANISM, CULTURES, INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES, AND ECOLOGY [Rowman & Littlefield 2000]. Along with Susan Manning they have
published Rise and Fall: East-West Synchronicity and Indic Exceptionalism Reexamined,
" SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY 24:4(Winter 2000). Most of Hall's work centers on indigenous
populations and state-nonstate relations globally. He has a strong interest in the role of
pastoral nomads in long-term change. He has also collaborated with Peter Turchin, a
biological ecologist on an article advocating the use of population ecology models to gain
additional insight into long term change [forthcoming in the electronic JOURNAL OF
WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH]. A full listing of his publications is available on his web page:
http://acad.depauw.edu/~thall/hp1.HTM.
Alf Hornborg in Sweden has argued in THE POWER OF THE MACHINE. GLOBAL INEQUALITIES OF
ECONOMY, TECHNOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT [Altamira Press 2001] that a new kind of systemic
logic is introduced when high-quality energy and "negative entropy" (i.e.
"order") is traded over long distances. Early examples include the Mediterranean
trade in cereals to feed Greek and Roman slaves, which augmented the buildup of
infrastructure (order) in Athens and Rome at the expense of ecological complexity in North
Africa. Britain's "industrial revolution" similarly occurred at the expense of
ecosystems and soils in Georgia, social structures in West Africa, mines and forests in
Scandinavia, etc. As it may well prove impracticable to quantify and empirically
demonstrate this logic in terms of thermodynamics - although thermodynamics are important
for analytically grasping it - Hornborg suggests that we think in terms of the unequal
exchange of (human) time and (natural) space. Technological infrastructure in the center
saves time (by increasing speed) and space (by intensifying land use) for a global
minority, but at the expense of (labor) time and (natural) space in the periphery.
Jonathan Friedman writes from Sweden: Friedman has worked in the analysis of the social
and economic relations in Ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies, in which
categories of redistributive and prestige relations hide a dynamic commercialized
economies organized in larger global systems with crucial accumulation of abstract wealth
similar in many ways to modern capitalism. These studies also stress the existence of
cycles of hegemonic expansion and contraction in relation to changing class and ethnic
relations and a number of processes that are remarkably similar to the modern world.
Kaisa Ekholm also in Sweden has finished a book manuscript on the Bronze Age from 2000 to
1200 BC, which traces the systemic relations between Greece, the Southwest Asia and Egypt.
It demonstrates how cyclical expansions/contractions finally lead to total collapse and
the end of the Bronze Age. This book is part of a project on the "future as history:
the comparative anthropological analysis of hegemonic decline" which includes other
sub-projects on the Hellenistic Period through the Roman Empire, and late 19th and early
20th century European world system. Ekholm and Friedman have also analyzed the historical
articulation between Central Africa on one hand and Pacific Islands, and European colonial
expansion, which shows how contemporary social and cultural formations emerged within that
global system.
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla in the US founded the Long-Range Analysis of War (LORANOW) Project
and now directs the new Center for Social Complexity (http://socialcomplexity.gmu.edu).
The LORANOW Project has expanded from its original focus on measuring and modeling the
long-term dynamics of warfare, to an enhanced focus on recording and modeling the origins
and long-term dynamics of polity systems and networks thereof. A Handbook of Ancient
Polities in four volumes (West Asia, East Asia, Andean Peru, and Mesoamerica) is in
preparation. Investigations continue through computational approaches (agent-based
simulations and computer-based cartography). The LORANOW archives are deposited at the
Harvard-MIT Data Center at http://vdc-prod.hmdc.harvard.edu/VDC/index.jsp
Last but not least, we would like to mention some recent work in China itself: A
revisionists view of Chinese ancient history is gaining currency contra the old notion of
a single center in the North- Yellow River Valley that developed first and then diffused
outward to other areas. Instead Chinese colleagues are now arguing that the archaeological
evidence shows that there were several important centers or even distinctive
'civilisations' in the area now known as China, which had mutual co-existence and
influence on each other for a long period. The south also seems to have hosted
civilisations as advanced as that of the north. For example there were 3 major jade using
cultures in the 4th millennium BCE: Liangzhu on the southeast coast; Hongshan in the north
and northeast (which produced cylindrical tubes of carved jade). Excavations of these
early sites in 4th and 3rd millenniums BCE have revealed organised settlements, each with
very distinctive arts and artifacts, including ritual jade (.carved)objects. Excavations
from the second millennium BCE have revealed unprecedented hoards of sophisticated jade
and bronze objects located in sites that are far from the traditionally acknowledged
center of power in the Yelow Rver Basin. [Jessica Rawson, 1996, ed. MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT
CHINA: NEW > DISCOVERIES FROM THE EARLY DYNASTIES, London: British Museum]
This has fueled the re-theorisation of ancient 'Chinese' history that the power and the
territory of China's early states and their ruling elites may not have been as centralised
as has been thought up to now. We welcome this revision, and offer that multi-centric
development in the world system is the normal pattern not only within China itself,
particularly at this early stage, but a pattern that reasserted itself many times in
China's long history. That is there were repeated periods when the centralized imperial
state broke down and a multi-state system prevailed. There have thus always been many
peoples and many states influencing the course of China's and East Asia's historical
development. Gills argued that already in 1993, in a book edited by Stephen Gill on
GRAMSCI, HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, [Cambridge University Press].
Finally, we may mention that we author / editors have also done some more work along these
lines, although during the past decade we have concentrated on more recent times. Barry
Gills can mention his " World system analysis, historical sociology and international
relations: the difference a hyphen makes,'' which discusses a historical dialectic between
'capital versus oikos' and 'free versus unfree labour' throughout world system history, in
Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson, eds, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
[Cambrige University Press, 2002]
Andre Gunder Frank returned to Chapter 5 of this book to extend and revise "Bronze
Age World System Cycles" back through the Third Millennium in CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
[August-October 1993]. A decade later he and William Thompson once again returned to this
theme with far more data to check, fortify and further revise " West Asian Bronze Age
Economic Expansion and Contraction Revisited." William Thompson has also prepared
several empirical studies of his own on related themes.
Most of Frank's work during the past decade was however devoted to the period AD 1400 to
1900. In particular Frank published ReORIENT [University of California Press 1998] those
title in the Chinese translation is SILVER EMPIRE [TRANSLATOR PLEASE REPLACE BY CHINESE]
[Foreign Translation and Compilation Press 2000]. The book explores the implications for
the early modern period of using the longer 5,000 year perspective in the present book.
The result is a complete reversal of Eurocentric historiography and social theory and a
global history in which Asia, and particularly China are predominant in the world into the
nineteenth century, which Frank is now trying also to Reorient. The Chinese edition of
ReORIENT has a new foreword by the author, which also explores its implications for the
present and near future, in which China and East Asia are again resurgent. Therefore we
are reluctant to repeat this same argument here again, other than to quote a couple of
general conclusions
"1] Since Asia and especially China was economically powerful in the world until
relatively recently, it is quite possible that it soon be so again. 2] Chinese and other
Asian economic success in the past was not based on Western ways; and much recent Asian
economic success was not based on the Western model". 10] It is noteworthy that these
economically most dynamic regions of China today also are still or again exactly the same
ones as in Qing and even Ming China, as also reflected in this book: They are Lingnan in
the South, still centered on the Hong Kong - Guangzhou corridor, and linked to the South
China Sea trade; Fujian, still centered on Amoy/Xiamen and focusing on the Taiwan straits
trade also in the South China Sea; the Yangtze Valley, centered on Shanghai that is
already taking the lead away again from the previously mentioned regions; and Northeast
China whose economy now, as also already over two hundred years ago, is tied into
quadrangular trade relations with Siberia, Korea, and Japan around and through the North
China Sea. And all of these in turn were and still or again increasingly are important
segments of world trade and of the global economy. " Frank's DEPENDENT ACCUMULATION
AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT [1978] was also published by Yilin Press in its Humanities and
Society Series in 1999].
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