Comparing World-Systems: Empire Upsweeps and Non-core marcher states Since the Bronze Age

Summary

This is an examination of one of the implications of the hypothesis of semiperipheral development: that major increases in the sizes of polities have been attained by the conquests of semiperipheral marcher states. We use the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective to frame our study of upsweeps of the largest polities in four regional world-systems and in the Central system since the Bronze Age. Each of the twenty-two identified upsweeps is examined whether it is an instance of a semiperipheral marcher state formation.

The hypothesis of semiperipheral development holds that polities in between the core and periphery have been fertile locations for the implementation of organizational and technological innovations that transform the scale and the developmental logic of world-systems. This is because semiperipheral polities have less investment in older institutional structures than do core polities and greater incentives to take risks on innovations.

In the marcher state formation, a recently founded sedentary polity on the edge of an older core region conquers the core and builds a core-wide empire that is significantly larger than earlier polities have been. We find that over half of the twenty-two empire upsweeps were likely to have been produced by the semiperiphery or periphery marcher states.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• People without Collapse: Peripheries as Active Participants in Cultural Transformations

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