Chiefdoms and Tribute

So far we have been discussing the nature of geopolitics in world-systems in which polities were relatively small in scale. The Pacific Northwest was unusual in the ex­tent to which rather small core polities were able to extract labor from non-core polities.

Classes and more centralized hierarchies (called chiefdoms) are known to have emerged in many different regions in which sedentism and horticulture had al­ready appeared.^[275] According to Gerhard Lenski,^[276] intense warfare and conquering other polities became economically profitable for the first time among advanced horticultural societies (those that employed metal, copper or bronze, not iron, tools for gardening). He contends that more technologically advanced and com­plex polities had a higher probability of engaging in systematic warfare. Using a cross-cultural sample, he found that among hunting and gathering polities none had perpetual warfare and only 27 percent had frequent warfare; among simple horticultural polities 5 percent had perpetual warfare and 55 percent had frequent warfare; among advanced horticultural polities 34 percent had perpetual warfare and 48 percent had frequent warfare.^[277]

Despite the fact that chiefdoms continued to rely on hierarchical forms of kin­ship (ranked lineages, conical clans, etc.), some paramount chiefs are ethnohis- torically known to have extracted tribute from neighbors over whom they held a military advantage.^[278] Chiefdoms experienced a rise and fall pattern that was somewhat similar in form to that of larger states and empires.^[279] Some of the rises were the result of conquest by semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, but others may have been the outcome of a demographic process somewhat similar to the “sec­ular cycles” described for state-based systems by Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov.^[280] Turchin and Nefedov formalized Jack Goldstone's^[281] model of the secular cycle, an approximately 200-year-long demographic cycle, in which population grows and then decreases.

Marshall Sahlins^[282] describes chiefs as “eating the land too much.” The size and wealth of the class of sacred chiefs is limited by the productivity of workers and the availability of resources. But chiefs are able to husband resources and to mobilize labor in projects that sometimes increase the availability of food. Chiefs also regu­late land use and invent forms of property that facilitate their continued ability to appropriate surplus product from commoners. Thus the functional theory of strati­fication works, except that overshoot is a common mistake and this leads to the dis­solution of the paramount chiefdom back into smaller and less centralized polities.

Chiefdoms also exhibit another pattern known from historical systems, the crea­tion of larger conquest-based polities by semiperipheral marcher chiefs who come from less favored ecological locations. Patrick Kirch^[283] notes this pattern on Pacific islands and archipelagos. Kirch also studied an instance when island- wide chiefdom formation repeatedly failed. The Marquesas Islands are steep, with narrow valleys that can only connect with one another by sea, but boat traffic is difficult because of the lack of good landing sites. Kirch^[284] shows that archaeological evidence shows a cycle of periods with intense warfare and cannibalism among the polities of the steep valleys, followed by periods of relatively less conflict as populations and pop­ulation pressures recover. This is the kind of demographic regulator referred to in the preceding.

In a situation of a relatively high population density, the frequency and inten­sity of warfare increases, and polities begin to devote resources to turning their boys into warriors. Men are the warriors among the sedentary hunter-gatherers of California described earlier, but the warrior identity is not more important than the hunter identity for the males in the California polities. On the Chesapeake Bay, warfare was more intense. Buffer zones or “no-mans-land” regions in which war­ring groups had abandoned territory so as not to run into one another were found by John Smith during his exploration of the bay. Boys were trained from a young age to withstand torture. Thus did the masculine identity become warriorized. This was a piece of the evolution of interpolity relations in which the selves within polities became specialized for the purposes of interpolity conflict. Ritual cannibalism and scalping were often part of this transition, demonstrating a form of respect for the powers of the enemy.^[285]

The phenomenon of rise and fall, which seems to exist in all world-systems with even a modicum of interpolity hierarchy, sheds important light on the controversies about when and where chiefdom formation and state formation first occurred. If a cycle of centralization and decentralization within a set of polities is the norm, it makes it hard to identify crucial cases that embody whatever distinctions we want to make between chiefdoms and states. In addition to scale and complexity, archaeologists Johnson and Earle^[286] define the difference between chiefdoms and states in terms of specialized institutions of regional control—bureaucracies and dedicated military organizations. This is a useful distinction that has implications for geopolitics. The existence of a dedicated military caste, as opposed to a tem­porary group of allies of the chief, means the emergence of a group of military specialists who are often closely linked to the king's household or his authority.

A long-lasting system of competing and allying city-states emerged in Mesopotamia, while in Egypt an empire joining Upper and Lower Egypt emerged rather quickly. The Mesopotamian system was more often a multicentric interna­tional system of competing states, while the Egyptian system was more frequently under the control of a single central state.

On the flood plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, the great productivity of large-scale, irrigated agriculture enabled the formation of Uruk, the worlds first city, and its state. Uruk was at first a theocracy that defined its priests and subjects as slaves of the city-god. The redistributive temple economy came to overlay the kin-based reciprocities of lineages within the city. The early Bronze Age Mesopotamian Uruk ex­pansion (studied by Guillermo Algaze)^[288] combined short-range tribute-taking with long-distance trade. It did so primarily by establishing Uruk quarters in the settlements of regions that were important sources of imports for the world's first city.^[289]

The emergence of competing city-states on the flood plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced a situation of hegemonic rise and fall. It caused cities to build walls and increased the power of their battle kings. Sumerian rulers imported labor from adjacent regions. Eventually a Semitic-speaking working class rebelled under the leadership of Sargon, a cupbearer to the king of Kish.

Sargon's revolt produced the upsurge of the Akkadian Empire. This was primarily an ethnic revolt, yet the non-core ties and characteristics of the Akkadians played an important role in the revolt and in the success of the subsequent conquest empire.^[290] Balance-of-power dynamics were operating, but not strongly enough to prevent the emergence of the first of the world's large empires.

The Ur polity was much smaller territorially, but the trade networks that had emerged under the aegis of the Akkadian Empire allowed the city of Ur to grow to a very large population size, constituting an urban upsweep.^[292] The Sumerian interpolity system also refined a distinction between civilization and savagery, as can been seen in the epic of Gilgamesh. A Sumerian description of the invading Guti as wild animals is a version of othering that strongly prefigures modern racism.

In all the world regions in which states had emerged (Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes) new technologies of power—such as professional soldiers and the expansion of trade networks—yielded empire upsweeps. As the battle king became the model of authority in tributary states and empires, the world's main form of imperialism focused on the conquest, subjugation, and exploitation of adjacent territories. This was classical imperialism. The main instrument of expansion was the army.

Next, in order to make empires work as machines for extracting resources from distant peoples, deeper techniques of power needed to be developed to incorporate more distant peoples into the larger structures of the empire. It was not enough to send a large army to defeat whatever resistance might be offered. Booty was good, but sustaining an empire meant developing institutions that facilitated a degree of consent. Thus did conquerors take advantage of the rise of world religions, in which membership in the larger “universal” moral community was increasingly delinked from kinship.

As empires layered their tributary mode of accumulation over older, kin-based, normative social regulation, they made larger cities possible by reducing the trans­action and protection costs of trade, which encouraged the formation of larger and denser trade networks.^[294] Empires meanwhile built specialized, imperial cities as the symbolic centers of their power.

These empires fell after expansion eventually reached a point of diminishing returns beyond which further expansion was too costly. At that point resource scarcities caused prices to change and swollen ranks of elites began to fight with each other over the remains. Then political weakness within the empire encouraged challengers from within and from outside.

Historians and political scientists who compare the interstate systems of the East and West have noticed a great divergence that occurred after the fall of the Han Empire and the Western Roman Empire.^[295] Though a new empire as large as the Han soon emerged in China, the fall of the Western Roman Empire did not soon yield an imperial recovery. Instead a number of smaller empires emerged in the space of Rome's imperium. This distinction is thought to reveal important differences that emerged between the East and the West. Both regions continued to experi­ence cycles of rise and fall, but the size difference among polities was greater in the East: unified China was much larger than the other large polities in East Asia, whereas the West contained a number of smaller polities and a less centralized and more competitive system of power.

International relations theorists often emphasize the importance of certain institutions that emerged in the competitive interstate system of the West. They see the invention of international agreements regulating diplomacy among the Italian city-states, and later the treaty of Westphalia, as important for preventing the emer­gence of a core-wide empire in the West.

George Modelski^[296] noted an important difference in the rules of the interstate system in South Asia and those that emerged in the European interstate system: namely, because the institutional nature of the European interstate system allowed for the existence of equal relations among states, it was more efficient in facilitating a balance of power, which prevented the emergence of the core-wide empire. On the other hand, Khautilyas Arthasastra, sage advice provided to the Chandragupta Maurya (who founded the first large empire in South Asia), set up a system of ver­tical relations among superior and inferior polities that did not allow, in principle, for the possibility of equal relations among polities. Modelski noted that this was also a feature of other early interstate systems. According to David Chandler’s^[297] study of diplomatic relations among the kingdoms of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand—all of which were influenced by the Chinese model^[298]—relations among states were described in terms of hierarchical kinship relations. Cambodia was cast as the child, while Vietnam was the mother and Thailand was the father. The hier­archical pronouns of the languages made it nearly impossible to describe relations between equal states.

Modelski contended that the institutional nature of the European interstate system, which allowed for the existence of equal relations, was more efficient in facilitating the balance of power and the prevention of the emergence of a core­wide empire. While this was probably not the most important way in which Europe was different, it may have played a role in the reproduction of a more multicentric and competitive interstate system in Europe.

Most of the literature on modern nationalism focuses on the comparison be­tween empires in which a dominant center sought to govern and extract resources from a culturally diverse periphery. Victor Lieberman's^[299] important study of the emergence of political and cultural integration in mainland Southeast Asia notes a process that he calls “politicized ethnicity” that emerged in waves in Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam, and somewhat less successfully in Cambodia and in is­land Southeast Asia (Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines). A process of the standardization of language and religion had been going on since the emergence of what Lieberman calls the “charter states” in the period from 800 to 1200 ce in the Southeast Asian mainland. Though there was nothing like the notion of pop­ular sovereignty, people out in the villages came to see themselves as members of a political collectivity with a distinct culture, language, historical heritage, and religious beliefs that was centered in the capital and embodied by the king. This was not multicultural empire, but neither was it what we think of as modern na­tionalism. According to Lieberman, this process meant that when the European colonial powers arrived and tried to promote national identities to facilitate their administrative control they had much more to work with on the mainland than they did in island Southeast Asia, where nationalism became a postcolonial pro­ject carried out by nation-building elites.

Because Lieberman's study focuses mainly on the formation of the charter states (Pagan, Angkor, Dai Viet, and Ahutya) and their efforts to break down the local cultures of the hill peoples, he only occasionally mentions how collective solidarities had also emerged on a smaller scale in the peripheral chiefdoms that preceded state formation in Southeast Asia. There was already an inter-chiefdom geopolitics going on before the emergence of the states, and “we-feeling” was already an important aspect of that process.