5


              The Evolution of Societies
                   and World-Systems

                 Stephen K. Sanderson



INTRODUCTION

Evolutionary theories of human social life
continue to be much debated in modern social
science.  Although there are still many advo-
cates of these theories, especially among
anthropologists, we are currently in a period
in which such theories are unpopular among
sociologists.  This unpopularity stems from a
wide range of criticisms, but clearly one of
the most important is the belief that evolu-
tionary theories are unacceptably endogenist -
- that they view social evolution as a process
occurring fundamentally within the bounds of
reasonably well-defined societies (cf. Nisbet,
1969; Giddens, 1981, 1984). 
   As a result of this criticism, many histor-
ically inclined sociologists have turned away
from the analysis of individual societies and
in the direction of larger constellations of
societies.  Thus the creation by Immanuel
Wallerstein in the early 1970s of world-system
theory, a type of theory in which individual
societies are viewed, not as autonomous, but
as inserted into the operation of a larger
network.  It is this network -- the world--
system -- that is then said to be the only
proper unit of analysis, with the fate of
individual societies being determined princi-
pally by their involvement in the world-system
as a whole.
   Wallerstein's concern has been with the
modern capitalist world- economy that he
envisages as originating in Europe in the
sixteenth century and he has shown very little
interest in the precapitalist era.  However,
the great appeal of his theory has led other
social scientists to attempt to apply the
concept of a world-system to the entire pre-
capitalist era.  It is thus claimed that
Wallerstein's basic argument can be general-
ized backward in time: There were precapi-
talist world-systems, and the understanding of
world history must focus on the operation of
these systems rather than on individual soci-
eties.
   Many world-system enthusiasts see their
work as antievolutionary, or at least nonevol-
utionary, in nature.  Since they view evolu-
tionary theories as endogenist theories, they
see themselves as setting up an explicitly
exogenist (and thus nonevolutionary) alterna-
tive.  However, I hope to show that such a
notion is based on a false distinction and a
misunderstanding of the nature of social
evolutionism.  While evolutionary  theories
have historically given pride of place to
endogenous factors, such theories need not be
endogenist.  They can give equal attention to
endogenous and exogenous factors, or even be
highly exogenist.  Indeed, I shall argue that
Wallerstein's world-system theory is a quinte-
ssentially evolutionary theory. If I am right
-- if one can be a Wallersteinian and an
evolutionist at the same time -- then it is
quite possible to take an evolutionary ap-
proach to understanding precapitalist world-
systems.  To do so involves demonstrating two
fundamental things.  It must first be shown
that there really were precapitalist world-
systems in some meaningful sense of that term. 
And, if this can be done, one must then try to
identify the kind of "evolutionary logic"
these systems contained.  For, after all, this
is exactly what Wallerstein has done for his
capitalist world-system -- it is what makes
him a type of evolutionist -- and thus if we
are to apply his ideas successfully to the
precapitalist era it is incumbent upon us to
do the same.
   Unfortunately, I shall be forced to con-
clude that this effort to construct an evolu-
tionary analysis of precapitalist world-sys-
tems produces, at best, very mixed results. 
There are some types of precapitalist world-
systems, but they differ in some very impor-
tant respects from the modern capitalist
world-economy.  Moreover, much of the social
evolution that has occurred in the precapital-
ist era, as well as in the transition to the
capitalist era itself, suggests that the
proper unit of analysis is not some sort of
world-system, but rather something much more
akin to the individual society of more tradi-
tional evolutionary analyses.  Are world-
systems or individual societies the proper
unit of evolutionary analysis?  Which are more
important determinants of social evolution,
exogenous or endogenous factors?  As we shall
see, the answers to these questions depend
upon the historical period and the type of
social system with which we are dealing.


WHAT IS AN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY?

In order to establish the point that there is
no inherent antagonism between an evolutionary
and a world-system perspective, and that
Wallerstein's world-system theory is a type of
evolutionism, we first need a proper under-
standing of what an evolutionary theory actu-
ally is.  There is, in fact, much misunder-
standing on this count, a good deal of which I
have reviewed elsewhere (cf. Sanderson, 1990). 
Because of space limitations, I shall confine
myself here to a simple exposition of what I
take to be the best definition of an evolu-
tionary theory, that of Erik Olin Wright
(1983).  Wright suggests that for a theory to
be considered evolutionary it must have three
features: (1) It must propose a typology of
social forms with potential directionality. 
(2) It must order these social forms in the
way it does on the assumption that the proba-
bility of remaining at the same stage in the
typology is greater than the probability of
regressing.  (3) It must assert a probability
of  transition from one stage of the typology
to another.  It therefore claims the existence
of a tendency toward directionality, no matter
how weak, in social change.  It is also clear
that Wright demands the presence of a mecha-
nism that would explain such a directional
tendency.  However, this need not be a single
universal mechanism that would explain every
specific evolutionary transition.  He recog-
nizes that "the actual mechanisms which might
explain movement between adjacent forms on the
typology need not be the same at every stage
of the typology" (Wright, 1983:26-27).
   As Wright is at pains to point out, his way
of identifying an evolutionary theory makes no
claim that the typology of social forms repre-
sents a teleological unfolding of latent
potentialities, something many critics of
evolutionism falsely assume to be basic to an
evolutionary theory.  Nor does it claim that
such a typology represents a rigid sequence of
stages through which all societies must move. 
Wright does not even assume that all (or even
most) societies necessarily evolve. Regression
is entirely permitted, and it is fully ac-
knowledged that in most societies "long-term
steady states may be more likely than any
systematic tendency for movement" (Wright,
1983:26).


WORLD-SYSTEM THEORY AS SOCIAL EVOLUTIONISM

I believe that Wright has come closer than
anyone else to pinpointing the genuinely
irreducible features of an evolutionary theo-
ry.  Using his characterization of an evolu-
tionary theory, it can be shown that Waller-
stein's world-system theory is evolutionary in
a thoroughgoing way.  Of course, this approach
to historical change is scarcely thought of as
evolutionary, and in fact is often identified
as strongly antievolutionary.  The painstaking
detail with which Wallerstein has, in the
three volumes of The Modern World-System
(1974a, 1980, 1989), analyzed historical
events seems strikingly at odds with the works
of social evolutionists.  Moreover, Waller-
stein has frequently cited with approval the
basic arguments of Robert Nisbet's Social
Change and History (1969), no doubt the lead-
ing antievolutionary work written by a sociol-
ogist in the past quarter-century.  Surely
Wallerstein cannot be an evolutionist.
   In fact, though, he is, and very decidedly
so.  What has thrown people off the track
about Wallerstein involves his condemnation of
the sort of evolutionism that reigned supreme
in American social science in the 1950s and
1960s.  But Wallerstein is opposed only to
this particular type of evolutionism and to
other versions that share key features in
common with it.  He is only opposed to what he
has called the developmentalist perspective,
by which he means functionalist evolutionism
(and its modernization variant) and certain
rigidly unilinearist versions of Marxist
evolutionism.  As he has said, "What thus
distinguishes the developmentalist and the
world-system perspective is not liberalism
versus Marxism nor evolutionism  versus some-
thing else (since both are essentially evolu-
tionary)" (1979:54; emphasis added).
   Careful analysis of Wallerstein's works,
especially some of his theoretical essays,
clearly reveals that he means what he says
when he describes his world-system perspective
as a type of evolutionism.  Following Wright,
an evolutionary theory is minimally one that
defines some general directional trend in
history.  The history Wallerstein is interest-
ed in is that of capitalism since the six-
teenth century, and for him capitalism most
assuredly has an overall directionality to it. 
It is of course, a directionality of the
world-system as a single unit rather than
individual societies or nation-states.  These
latter evolve only as parts of the whole.
   Along what lines is the capitalist world-
economy evolving?  Wallerstein (1984a) tells
us that there are three main directional
trends involved: increasing mechanization of
production, increasing commodification of the
factors of production (which includes as a
very important element the increasing prole-
tarianization of the labor force), and in-
creasing contractualization of economic rela-
tionships.  These three trends are part and
parcel of a "deepening" of capitalist develop-
ment, a deepening that derives from the accum-
ulationist motivations of capitalist entrepre-
neurs.  It is this drive for the accumulation
of capital that constitutes the "evolutionary
logic" of modern capitalism -- the "motor"
that drives it from one stage to another.
   Furthermore, Wallerstein has not shied away
from the identification of specific stages in
the evolution of the capitalist world-system
(cf. Wallerstein, 1974b).  The first stage
(approximately 1450-1640) involves the emer-
gence of capitalism from the crisis of feudal-
ism and its initial expansion to cover signif-
icant portions of the globe.  The second stage
(roughly 1640-1750) is a stage of the "consol-
idation" of the world-system.  The third stage
(about 1750-1917) marks the eruption of indus-
trial capitalism.  It is a period of renewed
expansion of the world-system, which by the
end of this period covers virtually the entire
globe.  The fourth stage began with the Rus-
sian Revolution and is a stage of the "consol-
idation" of the industrial capitalist world-
economy.
   I also think it is very obvious that Wal-
lerstein has retained a great deal of what
might be called Marx's "evolutionary eschato-
logy."  Like Marx, Wallerstein is convinced
that capitalism is essentially evil, that it
is rife with contradictions that will tear it
apart in the end, and that when it collapses
it will lead to something more humane.  It is
just that all of this occurs on a world rather
than a national scale.  The gap between core
and periphery continues to widen, and this
spawns "antisystemic movements" that increas-
ingly threaten the continued viability of the
system.  Within the next 100-150 years capi-
talism will disintegrate and will be replaced
by, most likely, a socialist world-government. 
What will this world-government be like? 
Wallerstein describes it in terms that are
highly evocative of Marx (1984b:157):

   The idea is that on the basis of an ad-
   vanced technology, capable of providing
   a rate of global production adequate to
   meet the total needs of all the world's
   population, the rate and forms of pro-
   duction will be the result of collective
   decisions made in virtue of these needs.
   Furthermore, it is believed that the
   amount of new labor-time to maintain
   such a level of productivity will be
   sufficiently low as to permit each indi-
   vidual the time and resources to engage
   in activities aimed at fulfilling his
   potential.

   The global production required will be
   attained, not merely because of the
   technological base, but because the
   egalitarian collectivity will be inter-
   ested in realizing the full "potential
   surplus."  This being the case, the
   social motivations for collective ag-
   gressive behavior will have disappeared,
   even if, in the beginning phases, not
   all the psychological motivations will
   have done so.  Since collective deci-
   sions will be pursued in the common
   interest, then worldwide ecological
   balance will follow as an inherent ob-
   jective.

   In short, the socialist mode of produc-
   tion seeks to fulfill the objective of
   the rational and free society which was
   the ideological mask of the capitalist
   world-economy.  In such a situation,
   repressive state machinery will have no
   function and will over time transform
   itself into routine administration.

Marx thus turns out in the end to be basically
right in his prediction of the evolutionary
demise of capitalism.  It is just that he had
his units of analysis mixed up, and so he
failed to gauge accurately the timing of the
transition from capitalism to socialism.
   It must be recognized that Wallerstein's
evolutionism is certainly of a complex sort. 
Mixed in with his evolutionism is a strong
emphasis on economic cycles (Kondratieff
waves).  But this does not vitiate my claim
that Wallerstein's basic framework is evolu-
tionary -- it only qualifies it.  There is no
incompatibility between an emphasis on cycli-
cal rhythms and an evolutionary perspective,
because the cycles occur within (and are basic
to) the overall directional trends of the
capitalist world-economy.





WERE THERE PRECAPITALIST WORLD-SYSTEMS?

The enormous success of Wallerstein's world-
system model quickly led some social scien-
tists to ask whether it might have more gener-
al applicability.  One of the first to do so
was Jane Schneider (chapter 2, this volume;
orig. 1977).  Schneider  claimed that one of
the main difficulties with Wallerstein's work
was that it "suffers from too narrow an appli-
cation of its own theory" (1977:20).  That is,
it sees the capitalist world-economy as having
no parallels during the precapitalist era. 
Schneider went on to argue that one of the
reasons for Wallerstein's stance on this
matter concerns his distinction between the
exchange of fundamental goods and the exchange
of preciosities, and his insistence that a
world-economy is based on the former rather
than the latter.  Indeed, for Wallerstein the
exchange of preciosities is something that is
nonsystemic, or that occurs between a world-
economy and its external arena. This leads him
to exclude precapitalist Europe from involve-
ment in a world-economy, since its exchanges
with other regions were exchanges of luxuries
rather than fundamental goods.
   Schneider objected to Wallerstein's diminu-
tion of the importance of trade in preciosi-
ties.  She claimed that such a trade is of
much greater significance than Wallerstein was
willing to grant, and that therefore it is
"possible to hypothesize a precapitalist
world-system, in which core areas accumulated
precious metals while exporting manufactures,
whereas peripheral areas gave up these metals
(and often slaves) against an inflow of fin-
ished goods" (1977:25).  She saw precapitalist
Europe as deeply involved in a larger world-
system in which it was peripheral to the
better established civilizations of the Levant
and Asia.  She also saw the existence of such
a Eurasian world-system as having significance
for the historical transition from feudalism
to capitalism in Europe, viewing the transi-
tion as a world-system event rather than an
endogenous evolution of feudal Europe.  Within
the Eurasian world-system, she claimed, Europe
shifted its position from periphery to core
over many centuries, eventually becoming
dominant over those areas to which it previ-
ously had been subordinated.
   Other scholars were soon to follow Schnei-
der's lead.  In a long essay, Jonathan Fried-
man and Michael Rowlands (1978) made the
notion of "external relations" central to
understanding the original rise of civiliza-
tion.  According to them (1978:271):

   The development of the early central
   civilizations clearly depended on the
   productive activity of very large areas,
   and in order to fully understand the
   evolutionary process it is necessary to
   take account of these larger systems of
   reproduction.  The transformation of
   societies does not occur in a vacuum and
   the relation between units in a larger
   system may determine the conditions of
   evolution of any one of them.

This idea has been substantially elaborated by
Friedman and Kajsa Ekholm (Ekholm and Fried-
man, 1982; Ekholm, 1981).  Ekholm and Friedman
see world-systems as very general historical
phenomena, and as the basic unit to which
evolutionary analyses should apply.  Ekholm
denies the relevance of focusing on individual
societies, claiming that "evolution occurs
only at  the level of the system as a whole"
(1981:245).  Like Schneider, Ekholm applies
this idea to understanding the European tran-
sition from feudalism to capitalism:  "Thus
the development of capitalism in Europe is not
the result of an evolution from feudalism as a
system, but the result of a shift in accumula-
tion from east to west in a single system"
(Ekholm, 1981:245).
   At the moment the scholar most vigorously
pursuing a world-system approach to the devel-
opment of Western capitalism is Janet Abu-
Lughod (1988, 1989).  Abu-Lughod claims that
by the middle of the thirteenth century there
existed a world-system centered around long-
distance trade that had a strongly capitalis-
tic character.  This system consisted of eight
subsystems, and the "kingpin of the entire
system lay at the land bridge between the
eastern Mediterranean and the outlets to the
Indian Ocean on the south and between the
Mediterranean and Central Asia" (1988:10).  At
this time Asia was at least on a par with, and
perhaps in a more favorable position than,
Europe.  What happened in the centuries ahead
to change all that? Abu-Lughod insists that to
answer this question we should not look, as
most Western scholars have, to the internal
features of Europe and Asia to see why the
former surpassed the latter. Rather, we should
focus on the interactions among the subsystems
of the entire world-system.  She argues that
the rise to economic dominance of northwest
Europe resulted from geopolitical shifts in
the relations among crucial subsystems (Abu-
Lughod, 1988:11):  "When the large system
tipped, it was because the Mediterranean
northwestern European links deepened and
diversified while the link between the eastern
Mediterranean and the Orient began to fray in
places and was rudely torn in others."
   The notion of precapitalist world-systems
has continued to find strong proponents.  In
1987 an important volume of conference procee-
dings was published on this topic (Rowlands,
Larsen, and Kristiansen, 1987).  The authors
of the individual essays tried to demonstrate
the existence of world-systemic networks in
ancient times in such places as the ancient
Near East, Scandinavia, and ancient Rome. 
Perhaps the strongest proponent of the idea of
precapitalist world-systems is Christopher
Chase-Dunn (1986), who has gone considerably
beyond previous work in attempting to develop
an elaborate typology of world-systems (see
also Chase-Dunn and Hall, chapter 1, this
volume).  Chase-Dunn suggests six basic types
of world-systems:  (1) stateless world-sys-
tems, in which bands, tribes, and chiefdoms
are engaged in various types of economic
exchange;  (2) primary world-economies, which
involve regional systems of core/periphery
specialization among the pristine states, but
without any imperial political structure;  (3)
primary world-empires, or the earliest forms
of core/periphery specialization to have
acquired an imperial political structure;  (4)
complex secondary world-systems, in which
primary world-empires were combined into
larger world-empires;  (5) commercializing
world-systems, or precapitalist world-systems
with an unusually high level of commercializa-
tion or "premodern  capitalism";  (6)  the
capitalist world-economy, which rose to domi-
nance via a shift of influence within the
larger "super world-system" that preceded it.
   This typology has much to recommend it,
especially in giving us food for thought in
dealing with questions of social evolution,
but some cautions seem in order.  First, the
whole notion of stateless world-systems ap-
pears questionable.  This is not to deny that
bands, tribes, and chiefdoms have engaged in
significant levels of economic exchange with
each other, nor is it to deny that these
exchanges may have influenced the evolutionary
trajectories of the individual societies.  The
problem is that, in order for us to use the
concept of world-system at all meaningfully,
there must be more than just a larger system
of economic exchanges in which individual
societies figure as elements.  At the very
least there must be some sort of core/periphe-
ry structure, and this structure must have a
hierarchical organization such that at least
some minimal degree of "development of under-
development" occurs.  This implies some sort
of dominance of the core and an exploitative
relationship between the core and the periphe-
ry.  It seems very dubious that the relations
among stateless societies can be characterized
in such a way, at least as a regular and
systematic feature.  What I think we are
dealing with here are what might be called
world-networks: loose exchange relationships
in which the parts of the whole maintain great
autonomy.
   When we turn to the other types of world-
systems Chase-Dunn proposes, I think we also
have to exercise caution.  I agree that there
were world- economies and world-empires throu-
ghout the precapitalist era after the rise of
civilization and the state, and I agree that
these world-systems may well have had a core/-
periphery kind of structure and at least
something that could be described as the
development of underdevelopment.  Yet I am
concerned about pushing this idea too far, for
the parallels between the modern capitalist
world-system and earlier world-systems may be
rather limited.  As Phil Kohl has remarked in
an attempt to apply a world-system model to
the Bronze Age Near East (1987:16):

   There is little reason to doubt that
   patterns of dependency or, perhaps bet-
   ter, interdependency were established as
   a result of intercultural exchange in
   the Bronze Age world-system. . . . De-
   pendency could lead to exploitation, and
   . . . the more powerful urban societies
   could dictate the terms of the exchange. 
   But the relations between ancient cores
   and peripheries were not structurally
   analogous to those which underdevelop-
   ment theorists postulate are character-
   istic of First-Third World relations
   today. Unless conquered (i.e., incorpo-
   rated into a larger polity), ancient
   peripheries could have followed one of
   several options ranging from with-drawal
   from the exchange network to substitu-
   tions of one core partner for another.
   Archaeological and historical evidence
   converge to suggest  that most intercul-
   tural exchange systems in antiquity were
   fragile, lasting at most a few genera-
   tions before collapsing.  This inherent
   instability is related to the relative
   weakness of the bonds of dependency that
   existed between core and peripheral
   partners.

Even in the case of world-empires, it remains
to be shown that dependency and the develop-
ment of underdevelopment closely corresponded
to what prevails in our modern world-system.



THE EVOLUTIONARY LOGICS OF WORLD-SYSTEMS

Although Chase-Dunn's work on world-systems is
at this point substantially typological, he
has not failed to ask about the dynamics of
these systems.  He has suggested that dif-
ferent types of world-systems have different
dynamics, or what might be called "evolutio-
nary logics," built into them.  We already
know what the evolutionary logic of the modern
capitalist world-economy is:  the ceaseless
drive for the accumulation of capital.  And we
know that this evolutionary logic was basical-
ly absent, or at least not well developed, in
precapitalist world-systems.  On what kind of
evolutionary logics, then, did the different
precapitalist world-systems depend?   In the
remainder of this paper I want to sketch the
beginnings of an answer to this question.  It
will become clear that, in the process of
doing so, I will be making some significant
modifications of Chase-Dunn's ideas.


Stateless World-Systems

Again, I want to emphasize that I do not
really accept the notion of a stateless world-
system.  That being the case, I want to argue
that the evolution of stateless societies --
bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, as they are
commonly known among anthropologists and
archaeologists -- is largely a process of
endogenous evolution.  Exchange relations
between stateless societies play only a secon-
dary, and perhaps very minor, role in the
evolutionary transformation of such systems. 
What, then, is the motor of evolution in such
societies?
   The answer, I believe, has to do with the
ecological adaptations of human communities. 
The two great evolutionary transformations in
the precapitalist era were the Neolithic
Revolution and the rise of civilization and
the state.  In recent years many archaeologis-
ts have implicated population pressure as a
cause of the shift from hunting and gathering
to agriculture as a mode of production.  This
variable has been given greatest prominence by
Mark Cohen (1977).  Cohen's position is that
ancient hunter-gatherers eventually outgrew
the capacity of their foraging technologies to
support them at an acceptable standard of
living.  Once this began to occur, they en-
countered a "food crisis" that could be effec-
tively solved only by the gradual replacement
of foraging by cultivation and  animal hus-
bandry.
   To my mind, the most persuasive theory of
the origin of the state is Robert Carneiro's
(1970, 1981, 1987) circumscription theory. 
This theory is too well known to need more
than brief summary here.  Carneiro holds that
the earliest states developed in environments
that were highly circumscribed or impacted.
These were areas of fertile soil that had
definite geographical limits to the expansion
of human populations.  As population density
rose within these regions, warfare was set off
as a response to declining land and resource
scarcity.  Groups conquered and incorporated
other groups.  Tribes consolidated into chief-
doms, and with further increases in population
pressure and warfare chiefdoms consolidated
into states.
   One of the interesting things about Carnei-
ro's theory from the point of view of this
paper is that it is neither a strictly endoge-
nist nor a strictly exogenist theory.  Popula-
tion pressure may be regarded as an endogenous
variable, but the warfare it leads to impli-
cates many different societies in each other's
fates.  Chiefdoms and states arise only as the
result of significant intersocietal contact. 
However, this contact is decidedly different
from the kind of contact (economic exchange)
that traditional world-system theory has
primarily been concerned with, and thus we are
not dealing with a world-system phenomenon in
any strict sense of that term.
   Marvin Harris (1977, 1979) has subsumed
these theories and others like them into a
general materialist theory of social evolu-
tion.  For Harris, the motor of social evolu-
tion is the need to advance technology against
the lowered living standards that inevitably
occur as a result of population pressure and
environmental degradation.  But technological
advance is only a temporary solution, for it
in turn ultimately exacerbates population
pressure and environmental degradation, thus
leading to the need for a new and more inten-
sive wave of technological change.  Social
evolution -- or at least precapitalist social
evolution -- is thus primarily a spiraling
process of environmental depletion and inten-
sification in which population growth plays a
vital role.
   For reasons that I have detailed elsewhere
(cf. Sanderson, 1988, 1990) and do not have
space to discuss here, I believe that Harris's
theory is probably our best general theory of
social evolution in stateless societies.  It
is obvious that it gives priority to the
productive forces rather than the relations of
production as the motor of change, thus putt-
ing it at a considerable remove from the
arguments that world-system enthusiasts are
advocating.  But while this may be a strength
of Harris's theory at the level of stateless
systems, it seems to be a significant weakness
when we move to the level of states and world-
systems.  At this level, the relations of
production deserve more consideration than
Harris usually gives them.


World-Empires

I shall have little to say about what Chase-
Dunn calls the primary world- economies,
simply because at this point I have not stud-
ied them sufficiently.  Basically, it seems
that Wallerstein's point that these tended
always to evolve into world-empires has little
to contradict it.  Let me then try to talk
about the evolutionary logic of world-empires.
   The conventional view of world-empires,
shared by Wallerstein, Weber, and many other
thinkers of different theoretical and politi-
cal persuasions, is that they contain strong
built-in obstacles to the movement toward some
qualitatively different kind of socioeconomic
system or mode of production.  It is during
the era of history dominated by world-empires
that we find that a cyclical, rather than an
evolutionary, theory of world history seems to
be most appropriate.  As Owen Lattimore has
said in describing the rise and fall of Chine-
se dynasties (1940:531):

   The brief chronicle of a Chinese dynasty
   is very simple: a Chinese general or a
   barbarian conqueror establishes a peace
   which is usually a peace of exhaustion. 
   There follows a period of gradually in-
   creasing prosperity as land is brought
   back under cultivation, and this passes
   into a period of apparently unchanging
   stability.  Gradually, however, weak
   administration and corrupt government
   choke the flow of trade and taxes. 
   Discontent and poverty spread.  The last
   emperor of the dynasty is often vicious
   and always weak -- as weak as the found-
   er of the dynasty was ruthless.  The
   great fight each other for power, and
   the poor turn against all government. 
   The dynasty ends, and after an interval
   another begins, exactly as the last
   began, and runs the same course.

The theme of the absence of any real "evolu-
tionary potential" to the historic world-
empires has been echoed by Jonathan Friedman. 
Friedman notes (1982:182; emphasis added)

   that while there is clearly an . . .
   evolutionary process of formation of
   states and civilizations, there is no
   obvious continuity of social evolution
   after the emergence of civilization.  It
   would appear that the regional systems
   of civilizations, with their commercial
   centers, peripheral chiefdoms and
   tribes, and marginal bands, have been
   stable organizations until the modern
   period.  While centers of accumulation
   have shifted, there has been no funda-
   mental change in form, only differences
   in dominant economic sectors -- state
   versus private -- and the form of ex-
   ploitation -- peasant, serf, slave, or
   wage labor -- that have been prevalent.

   Michael Mann (1986) has characterized the
view represented by Lattimore and Friedman as
the negative view of empires, and suggests
that it is overdrawn.  "Although the  milita-
rism of imperial states certainly had its
negative side," he argues, "it could lead to
general economic development" (1986:148). 
Mann argues that the leading example of milit-
arism having a catalyzing effect on economic
development is the Roman Empire.  In this
case, militarism contributed to economic
development in a number of ways, but particul-
arly in terms of the consumption needs of the
army.  These needs greatly stimulated demand
and, hence, production (Mann refers to this as
a sort of "military Keynesianism").  In the
end, though, Mann is forced to admit that
militarism led more often to quite different
results, and that empires "contained no devel-
opment, no true dialectic" (1986:161).
   What has been said above about world-emp-
ires in general applies just as well, I think,
to what Chase-Dunn has called commercializing
world-systems.  These were systems that had an
unusual amount of mercantile activity in them. 
Chase-Dunn (1986) suggests that China in the
eighth century A.D. was such a system, and
that capitalism came close to becoming domi-
nant there at the time of the Sung dynasty. 
But was this really the case?  Was the situa-
tion here so different from what we find in
other world-empires?  Certainly the outcome
was basically no different for, as Chase-Dunn
himself notes, this nascent Chinese capitalism
was crushed by the state because the economic
interests of private entrepreneurs were a
significant threat to the state.
   Chase-Dunn also considers as an example --
undoubtedly the leading example -- of a com-
mercializing world-system the so-called Afro-
Eurasian super world-system.  He accepts the
argument of Schneider, Ekholm, and Abu-Lughod
that it was the character of this world-system
that led to the development of capitalism in
Western Europe in the sixteenth century.  I
would like to suggest, however, that there was
no such world-system -- there was at best only
a loose world-network of trade in which Europe
participated -- and that the transition from
feudalism to capitalism had much to do with
evolutionary forces that were endogenous to
Europe itself.  As we shall see, there was an
important exogenous dimension to the feudal-
ism-capitalism transition, but this transition
cannot be interpreted as a world-systemic
phenomenon in any strict sense of that term.
This suggests another important limitation to
the effort to apply a world-system model to
the precapitalist era.


THE EVOLUTIONARY LOGIC OF FEUDAL SYSTEMS

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in
Western Europe

Any intelligent analysis of the European
transition from feudalism to capitalism must
begin with the famous debate between Maurice
Dobb and Paul Sweezy that was conducted short-
ly after the end of the Second World War.  In
his classic Studies in the Development of
Capitalism (1963; first edition 1947), Dobb
set forth a Marxist theory of the transition
that  emphasized the internal contradictions
of feudalism as a mode of production.  What
led the feudal system into crisis and ultimat-
ely tore it apart, Dobb asserted, was the
growing class struggle between landlords and
peasants.  The intensified exploitation of the
peasantry by the landlord class provoked a
peasant flight from the land that was the
major cause of the crisis and the transition.
   Sweezy (1976; orig. 1950) questioned the
basic logic of this theory by asserting that
it improperly concentrated on endogenous
forces.  He argued that there were no endoge-
nous forces within feudalism strong enough to
transform it and proposed as an alternative a
basically exogenist theory.  It was the reviv-
al, from about the eleventh century, of long-
distance trade between Europe and other world
regions that he saw as the impetus for the
feudal crisis and the move toward capitalism.
The revival of this trade caused feudalism to
be increasingly involved in a market economy. 
As towns grew in size and importance, serfs
were increasingly attracted to them and they
fled the land in large numbers.  Moreover,
feudal lords themselves were increasingly
attracted by the possibilities inherent in the
market economy for the generation of large
fortunes.
   This exogenist interpretation of the rise
of capitalism bears considerable resemblance
to the recent theory of the capitalist transi-
tion being promoted by a number of world-
system enthusiasts (i.e., that the transition
was a matter of a geopolitical shift from east
to west within the Afro-Eurasian super world-
system).  By itself, it is a highly dubious
interpretation.  What strikes me most about
Sweezy's theory is its highly ethnocentric
character.  Sweezy seems to assume that the
mere existence of a system of production-for-
exchange is sufficient to pull feudal lords
away from their customary system of produc-
tion-for-use.  Again and again we see him
characterizing feudalism as a mode of produc-
tion inferior to capitalism, and he clearly
assumes that feudal lords would have seen it
that way too.
   I do not think that Sweezy's interpretation
is irrelevant to understanding the rise of
capitalism, but by itself it does not get us
very far.  As for Dobb's theory, I believe
that it is moving in the right direction by
focusing on the internal structure of feudal-
ism as a mode of production.  However, what is
wrong with this theory is Dobb's failure to
offer a convincing explanation for the flight
of serfs from the land. He attributes this to
increasing exploitation by the landlord class,
but he provides no plausible (to me at least)
reason why there should have been such an
increase in exploitation.
   There is, however, another interpretation
that can explain the things that Dobb's theory
cannot.  This theory, also an endogenist
theory, is the demographic argument put for-
ward by such scholars as Postan (1972), Wil-
kinson (1973), North and Thomas (1973), Le Roy
Ladurie (1974), and Perry Anderson  (1974a). 
The argument goes something like this.  From
about the eleventh until the end of the thir-
teenth century, feudalism was undergoing
significant demographic expansion.  As popula-
tion grew, new and more marginal lands were
increasingly brought under cultivation until
eventually Europe became "filled up." By 1300
a serious state of overpopulation had been
reached.  The crisis induced by this overpopu-
lation turns out in effect to have led to its
own "cure."  Increasing famine, malnourish-
ment, and other disease -- especially the
Black Death that first swept Europe in 1348-
50 -- led to a population decline that contin-
ued until around 1450.   This population
decline led to a severe labor shortage, which
caused a dramatic fall in the incomes of the
landlord class and shifted the balance of
class power in the direction of the peasantry. 
The landlord class reacted to their markedly
changed economic fortunes in a number of ways,
but especially by expropriating the peasantry
from the land and turning their estates over
to the raising of sheep in order to sell their
wool on the market.  Landlords were moving
more in the direction of becoming capitalist
farmers.  Moreover, many peasants stayed on
the land, but not as traditional serfs. They
became transformed into wageearning farmhands
who assisted their former landlords in running
a capitalist agricultural enterprise.  Some
peasants even became transformed into capital-
ists -- yeoman farmers -- themselves.
   While all of this was happening, the towns
were growing in importance.  The power and
significance of the merchants were increasing,
and the peasants who fled the land were becom-
ing a growing source of labor for the economic
activity of the towns. Now to explain all of
this I think we need to bring Sweezy's theory
back into the picture.  As Michael Mann (1986)
has asked, why did the demographic and econom-
ic crisis of feudalism get resolved in the way
it did?  Why did the landlord class react to
their declining economic fortunes by gradually
transforming themselves, and many of their
serfs, into capitalists?  Why did they not
respond to the growing power of the peasants
by intensifying their repression and exploita-
tion of the peasantry?  Mann offers a plausi-
ble answer to these questions (1986:411):

   If the feudal mode of production gave to
   the lords a monopoly of the means of
   physical violence, could they not re-
   spond with military force at times when
   relative product and factor values did
   not favor them? . . . This is not an
   idle question, for in many other times
   and places the response of lords to
   labor shortages has been to increase the
   dependency of their laborers. . . . The
   immediate answer to these questions is
   that the European lords did try repres-
   sion and they nominally succeeded, but
   to no avail.  Returning to the example
   of late-fourteenth-century labor short-
   ages, there was a wave of landlord reac-
   tion. The lords attempted with violence
   and legislation to tie the peasantry to
   the manor and to keep down wages (just
   as late Roman landlords had).  All
   across Europe the peasantry rose up in
   rebellion, and everywhere (except Swit-
   zerland) they were repressed.  But their
   lords' victory proved hollow.  The lords
   were compelled not by the peasants but 
   by the transformed capitalist market and
   by opportunities for profit, and threat
   of loss, within it.  The weak state
   could not implement legislation without
   the local cooperation of the lords; it
   was the lords.  And individual lords
   gave in, leased out their demesnes, and
   converted labor services into money
   rents. . . . The feudal mode of produc-
   tion was finally broken by the market.

   Now that would be a deeply unsatisfying
   sentence -- if we stopped the explana-
   tion there.  Neoclassical economists do
   leave it there, because they assume the
   existence of a market in the first
   place.  The "market variant" of Marxism
   (e.g., Sweezy 1976) also leaves it
   there.

   So, in other words, Sweezy's exogenist
theory has a contribution to make, but only in
the context of the endogenous evolution of
feudalism itself.  The revival of long-dis-
tance trade historically converged with this
endogenous evolution, but had it not been for
the internally generated crisis of feudalism,
the revival of trade and the market could not
have transformed feudal society.  Feudalism
would have changed somewhat, but it still
would have been feudalism.  Capitalism would
never have emerged.


The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in
Japan

Although I find the interpretation just ad-
vanced highly convincing, some will not.  For
them it may seem, at best, only one of several
plausible interpretations.  Let me therefore
suggest an additional line of evidence that
supports my argument for the great significan-
ce of endogenous forces in the feudalism-
capitalism transition: the approximately
parallel case of Japan.
   Perry Anderson (1974b) has argued that the
feudal mode of production (in the restrictive
sense in which he conceives of it) has existed
in only one civilization outside Europe.  From
approximately the fifteenth to the nineteenth
centuries a form of feudalism very similar to
European feudalism prevailed in Japan.  In
tracing the historical development of Japanese
feudalism, Anderson has shown that it under-
went a remarkable degree of commercialization
during its evolution.  More boldly, one might
say that Japanese society underwent its own
transition from feudalism to capitalism.  From
the point of view of the concerns of this
paper, the extraordinary thing about this
transition was that it was a completely endog-
enous process. Indeed, it had to be, because
Japan sealed itself off from the rest of the
world between 1638 and its "opening" in the
middle of the nineteenth century.  During this
time Japan was a highly autonomous society
that was not part of any world-system, or even
of any much looser world-network of societies. 
As Jacques Mutel has argued, in Japan "the
first accumulation of capital, as contrasted
with Europe, owed nothing to a distant over-
seas trade.  This is proof, if one were need-
ed, that one has  overestimated, if not the
place, at least the necessity of such trade in
the birth of modern society" (1988:142).
   According to the account given by Perry
Anderson, the Japanese feudal epoch was wit-
ness to a considerable commercialization of
agriculture.  In the eighteenth century there
had developed a considerable regional special-
ization, and many crops were being produced
directly for the market.  "By the end of the
[Tokugawa] Shogunate, it is clear that a
remarkably high proportion of total agricul-
tural output was commercialized" (Anderson,
1974b:448).  Mercantile activity was also
becoming much more vigorous, and many large
towns developed and grew in importance. 
Anderson even speaks of a "crisis of Japanese
feudalism" that he believes had become ap-
parent by the early nineteenth century.
   Jon Halliday (1975) tells much the same
story as Anderson. Halliday makes much of the
growing importance of urban merchants during
the Tokugawa epoch, and he also describes a
process of evolution in Japan that is strik-
ingly similar to what Wallerstein has describ-
ed for Europe: a feudal aristocracy gradually
becoming bourgeois.  One might conclude from
Anderson's and Halliday's analyses that, by
the time Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in
1853, Japan remained a society that was so-
cially and politically feudal, but within a
framework that was essentially capitalist. 
The economic order had changed dramatically
from the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate
in 1603.
   Now it must be recognized that there were
some importance differences between the Japa-
nese transition and the European one, and that
these differences were linked to Japanese
isolation.  As Anderson has commented (1974b:-
453-454):

   These sealed frontiers were henceforward
   a permanent noose on the development of
   merchant capital in Japan.  One of the
   fundamental preconditions of primitive
   accumulation in early modern Europe was
   the dramatic internationalization of
   commodity exchange and exploitation from
   the epoch of the Discoveries onwards. .
   . . The Shogunal policy of seclusion, in
   effect, precluded any possibility of a
   transition to the capitalist mode of
   production proper within the Tokugawa
   framework.  Deprived of foreign trade,
   commercial capital in Japan was con-
   stantly reined in and re-routed towards
   parasitic dependence on the feudal no-
   bility and its political systems.

   Yes, the isolation of Japan from interna-
tional economic exchanges certainly limited
its development, and thus it was only after
the opening of Japan to the West that it
really developed into, in Anderson's phraseol-
ogy, a "capitalist mode of production proper." 
But the fact that it had evolved so far in the
direction of that mode of production in such a
short time, and that it had done so in virtual
seclusion, suggests that there is something
about feudalism as a mode of production  that
gives it a fundamental, endogenous impetus to
breakdown and transformation toward a specifi-
cally capitalist system.  Most everyone agrees
that the highly decentralized character of
feudalism, a character that permits merchants
a freedom of economic maneuver that is gener-
ally denied in more centralized political
systems, is a crucial aspect of this impetus. 
In Europe, the demographic and ecological
limitations of feudalism also seemed to play a
vital role, as we have seen.  Was this also
the case in Japan?   Ester Boserup (1965) has
suggested that major demographic changes
occurred within Tokugawa Japan, but her argu-
ment is much disputed, and in any event our
knowledge of Japan in this area is much too
thin to give a definitive answer.
   But regardless of whether or not demograph-
ic change played a major role in the Japanese
transition from feudalism to capitalism, it
seems undeniable that this transition was a
fundamentally endogenous process in its early
phases.  If the full emergence of Japanese
capitalism was to require the participation of
Japan in the larger Europe-centered world-
economy, this only shows that exogenous fac-
tors played a significant role as well.  In
the end, then, the evolution of capitalism in
both Europe and Japan exemplifies what Hal-
liday has fittingly called "the dialectic of
the internal and the external."




CONCLUSIONS

This essay has been largely devoted to answer-
ing a fundamental question:  Is the basic unit
of social evolution the individual society or
some sort of world-system?  The answer, of
course, is that it is both.  But when it is
the one, and when the other, depends very much
on circumstances.  In the case of stateless
societies, most social evolution is internal
to societies themselves, the most important
stimuli to evolutionary change being popula-
tion pressure and environmental degradation. 
In the case of the two great feudal civiliza-
tions of world history, it would also seem
that societies rather than world-systems are
the appropriate unit.  After all, neither
feudal Europe nor feudal Japan constituted
world-systems, even in the form of world-econ-
omies.  In the case of feudal Europe there
existed one of the features that Wallerstein
has identified as basic to a world-system,
viz., a multiplicity of cultures.  But al-
though these cultures interacted, they did not
do so via the existence of the type of econom-
ic specialization -- a core/periphery hierar-
chy -- that is a crucial defining feature of a
world-system.
   That still leaves us with a fair amount of
room for the application of a world-system
perspective to social evolution. Much of what
went on in agrarian civilizations of the past
no doubt can -- and often must -- be analyzed
from the point of view of their involvement in
larger world-economies and world-empires
(although, again, the impetus to evolutionary 
transformation is very weak; disintegration,
or dynastic cycles, were the rule).  Then
there is our modern capitalist world-economy. 
Wallerstein and others have convincingly
demonstrated, that to my satisfaction at
least, the modern world-system is the basic
unit of analysis for understanding the evolu-
tion of the individual societies that are part
of it.  This does not mean that factors endog-
enous to individual societies play no role. 
It simply means that those factors can exert
their effects only within the context of the
constraints of the larger system.  As Waller-
stein (1985:35) has elegantly put it, "It is
not that there are no particularities of each
acting group. Quite the contrary.  It is that
the alternatives available for each unit are
constrained by the framework of the whole,
even while each actor opting for a given
alternative in fact alters the framework of
the whole." 



                         NOTES