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Thomas D. Hall
DePauw University I am approaching this topic from what are typically considered peripheral areas. Specifically between various sedentary states and systems and various pastoral nomads living in Central Asia, broadly construed and between “tribal,” or better nonstate societies and states. Of course pastoral nomads and nonstate societies are overlapping categories, but not coterminous. These often occur in frontier regions, but again not all frontiers are in peripheral areas. The boundaries for nonstate peoples often only exist in oral traditions and memory, hence they are not easily purloined. Because many of these are on the edges of world-systems, they render bounding world-systems especially nebulous. This fuzziness and permeability of boundaries makes comparisons world-system sizes especially problematic. I finish with some suggestions how we might approach these problems.
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