A POLITICAL - MILITARY NETWORK

A Political - Military Network

Abstract

Cities have long grown, flourished and declined in a larger context in which interactions with other cities have been important. Sometimes cities have co-evolved in networks of complementary interaction while in other cases cities competed and conflicted with one another such that the success of one meant the failure of others. We study the changing city-size hierarchy of the Central Political/Military Network in order to examine the causes and consequences of changes in the relative sizes of cities.

A Political - Military Network

Introduction

The comparative study of civilizations requires us to study cities and the networks of human interaction between city and countryside, one city and other cities, and the relationships between citified regions and regions in which people live in villages or are nomadic. one aspect of city systems long used by archaeologists to make inferences about the degree of centralization and hierarchy in a system is the city size hierarchy the relative distribution of the sizes of cities in a region. In this paper, we use data on the population sizes of cities to study the rate of urban growth and the city size distribution in Europe and the Near East since 300 to 50 BCE.

Recent phenomena in the modern world-system have caused specialists in urbanization to conceptualize the notion of "world cities” (e.g. Friedmann, 1986). However, the study of contemporary world cities needs to consider a comparative framework that spans both broad spatial expanses and deep temporal ones. In order to know what is new we need to know what is old: in order to interpret and explain contemporary trends we need to understand how and why change has occurred in the past.

The contemporary global political economy, with its core world cities and semi peripheral megacities, is only the most recent formation in which large cities have played central roles in the hierarchical and horizontal links among societies that are parts of larger world-systems. Earlier regional systems also had their world cities. These performed central economic and political/military roles for the systems of which they were a part. The role of villages, towns, cities and settlement systems in the evolution of world-systems has been outlined elsewhere (Chase-Dunn, 1992). When we use a telescope, we see different things than when we look with the naked eye or with a microscope. Here we focus our gaze on the last eight hundred years and on the intersocietal network that eventually became the global system in which we now live -- the Central Political/Military Network. This study replicates an earlier study using a somewhat different unit of regional analysis. Earlier work (Chase-Dunn, 1985) bounded the modern world-system following the principles and prescriptions of the Fernand Braudel Center at SUNY-Binghamton. In this paper, we will utilize a different principle for specifying the spatial boundaries of world-systems. This changes the focus of analysis to some extent, and those who have studied regional systems know that the way in which the subject is bounded ...