Between Alexandria and Rome: World-Systems Analysis, Globalization, and Processes of Social Change in Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus

Summary

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2007, a children’s book about Cypriot history entitled “The Island that Everyone Wanted” was published. Despite being aimed at a juvenile audience, this title aptly encapsulates the history of Cyprus, i.e., as an island coveted by imperial polities from the Assyrians to the British. Throughout this nearly 3,000-year period, imperial states were drawn to Cyprus to extract and manipulate its longue durée values, especially its metallic and agricultural resources and/or its strategic location along trade routes and between Mediterranean and Near Eastern states. Because of Cyprus’s historical situation as a frequent imperial possession intertwined with large-scale macroeconomic and political networks, Wallerstein’s world-systems theory has proven to be an effective analytical framework to explore how local society changed during eras of premodern, “world-system”–level connectivity. Two eras particularly salient for such analyses are the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when two economically exploitive, yet politically diverse, imperial states (the Ptolemies and the Romans) manipulated Cyprus as a peripheral possession from the cores of Alexandria and Rome. Through a comparative archaeological analysis of coinage, sculpture, and architecture, this paper assesses the continued utility of world-systems and globalization approaches for understanding pre-modern processes of social change in Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38689.0