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Considers the question of whether democratic peace & civil society indicate the decline of major interstate war. Rosecrance's 1987 trading state theory is addressed & refined into a more straightforwardly evolutionary case for ongoing shifts in war/peace & trade/development. Next it is shown that if the democratic peace/civil society arguments are on target, major interstate war should disappear as soon as metamorphoses identified with democratization & civil society have fully emerged across all societies & political systems, & that these changes are irreversible. On the other hand, if the slightly altered trading state theory is correct, system type & social metamorphoses are bound up in a web of shifts occurring in military, political, & economic areas that do imply major war is ebbing for reasons other than changes in type of regime. But as long as such warfare remains possible, one must also recognize that while major interstate conflict has decreased in incidence, it has at the same time grown increasingly deadlier & more global in scope & scale. Tables, References. K. Coddon

Explores E.N. Chernykh's Great Migration (C-wave) model for explaining long-term changes in world-system behavior across seven periods of crisis/transformation that occurred between 3500 B.C. & 1300 A.D. to argue that he was wrong to claim there was only one pan-Eurasian crisis in the first millennium B.C. Two such crises are described. It is maintained that it is possible to connect actors widely separated in Eurasian space. However, evidence of indirect linkages between Mediterranean & Chinese security problems does not imply that all actors were involved in exactly the same processes at the same time. Attention is given to both the element of continuity that is found when first millennium crises are compared to last second millennium crises & the impact of the two crises of the first millennium B.C. on the later reorientation of trade patterns in the Near East. Although Chernykh's model is useful for analyzing the onset of Eurasian interdependence, his interpretation & crisis dating need to be revised. Tables, Figures, References. J. Lindroth

Explores E.N. Chernykh's Great Migration (C-wave) model for explaining long-term changes in world-system behavior across seven periods of crisis/transformation that occurred between 3500 B.C. & 1300 A.D. to argue that he was wrong to claim there was only one pan-Eurasian crisis in the first millennium B.C. Two such crises are described. It is maintained that it is possible to connect actors widely separated in Eurasian space. However, evidence of indirect linkages between Mediterranean & Chinese security problems does not imply that all actors were involved in exactly the same processes at the same time. Attention is given to both the element of continuity that is found when first millennium crises are compared to last second millennium crises & the impact of the two crises of the first millennium B.C. on the later reorientation of trade patterns in the Near East. Although Chernykh's model is useful for analyzing the onset of Eurasian interdependence, his interpretation & crisis dating need to be revised. Tables, Figures, References. J. Lindroth

Following up on an earlier paper demonstrating statistically significant relationships between measures of recurring political-economic crises (hinterland incursions, trade collapses, economic contractions, and regime transitions) and a measure of climate deterioration (the interaction of falling Tigris-Euphrates river levels and years of warming/ drying), the inter-relationships among these variables are examined more closely for the 3400–1000 bce period. Theoretically focused on a test of Tainter's diminishing marginal return theory of societal collapse, additional indicators are introduced encompassing population (urban population size, urban popula-tion growth rate) as a proxy for diminishing marginal returns, two measures of centralization/ fragmentation (including imperial size), and the indicators used for the climate interaction term in the earlier paper. The multivariate logit outcome for interactions among and between the 11 variables reinforces the earlier findings linking climate deterioration to political-economic crises, extends the climate deterioration linkage to fragmentation and population decline, and finds relatively strong support for the Tainter derived expectation that diminishing marginal returns and fragmentation are closely linked but that both are less closely linked to recurring political-economic crises than might otherwise have been anticipated.