Suchergebnisse

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.

In introductory international relations courses, we were once
accustomed to contrast three alternative approaches: realism,
liberalism, and Marxism. The collapse of the Soviet Union
and the proclaimed triumph of liberal politicoeconomic ideas
has led to a deemphasis on the third paradigm or, in some
cases, its substitution by constructivism. But, contrary to
Fukuyama, history has not quite ended. Neo-Marxist inter-
pretations of international relations persist, and new and
interesting ones continue to emerge. The latest entry,
Boswell and Chase-Dunn's new book, is a case in point. As
long-time and leading contributors to world systems theory,
they employ their theoretical interpretation of modern his-
tory (the last 500 years) to explain what went wrong with
socialism and how the socialist strategy might still be salvaged
in a future world-system (with a hyphen).

The military superiority thesis contends that the key to the ascendancy of western
Europe as the world's predominant region was its edge in military technology. Thanks
to intensive regional warfare and a series of military revolutions, military superiority
enabled Europeans to subordinate the rest of the world between 1500 and 1900. At
best, this interpretation gives too much explanatory weight to military technology.
Other factors that were equally if not more important were the variable vulnerabilities
of Afro-Eurasian and American targets of expansion, the need for and availability of
allies, and the evolution of a global political economy in ways that favored increasing
European predominance. As explored in five cases, ranging from Mexico and Peru to
southeast Asia in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, none of these factors
worked entirely independently of the others. Rather, they interacted to promote the
ascendancy of some Europeans for a period of time. Military superiority, and especially
naval superiority, may have been most important for facilitating first the arrival and
then the survival of Portuguese, Dutch, and English forces along the maritime fringe of
Afro-Eurasia.