On Tue, 28 May 1996 16:24:05 GMT Mitch Allen
<mitch@altamira.sagepub.com> wrote:
> I'm somewhat doubtful of your claim of separate world system
[note that I of course spoke about world-system - A.K.] status for
> South Arabia, since it seems to have largely grown in response to trade
> demands from the Mediterranean and southern Mesopotamia. If anything, it
> seems to be peripheral to those states, particularly in light of the
> increaseing interest of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian kings in S.
> Arabian products over the 8th-6th centuries, the very centuries that showed
> considerable development in S. Arabian society. That coinage was borrowed
> from the north is a good indicator that this is not an indigenous development.
I would remind that in the AXIAL AGE WORLD SYSTEM
I maintained that:
> 0.1. I think, the data mentioned below could be reasonably
> interpreted in two ways (which do not exclude each
> other): South Arabia could be reasonably described
> either as "core-exploiting" periphery of the Long Axial
> Age Circum-Mediterranean world-system, or as a second
> (or third?)-order centre of the Long Axial Age World System.
> 0.2. The first interpretation could be possible if we
> consider a periphery not as a system element necessarily
> exploited by the system core, but rather as such an
> element whose evolution is influenced by the evolution
> of the core to a qualitatively greater extent than its
> own evolution influences the evolution of the core.
Hence, I do not see how Allen's "objections contradict
what I said". What I meant when I said that the Axial
Age South-Arabia-centered intersocietal network could
be also viewed as a (second - third order) world-system
(not world system) is as follows:
If one insists that the WS periphery cannot by definition
be "core-exploiting" "capital-accumilating", then the
above-mentioned entity could
be rather described as a second
(or third?)-order centre of the Long Axial Age World System.
hierarchy of centres?).
In some sense it appears also
possible to say that within the LAA World System the
South Arabians managed to create their own second (or third?)
order world-system due to the following additional reasons.
At the beginning the emerging South Arabian civilization
could be undoubtfully characterized as a peryphery of the Near
Eastern world-system (and the World System in general?). But
rather soon the South Arabian intersocietal network acquired
a considerable degree of autonomy and complexity. It began
resembling more and more a "normal" world-economy with
its own core, semiperiphery and periphery, hegemony cycles
&c. E.g., for most of the second half of the 1st mil.BC
one could describe the areas of Shabwah (the Hadrami
center), the Wadis Jawf (the Minaean centre) and Bayhan
(the Qatabanian center) as the tricentric core of the South
Arabian w-s, the Sabaean Kingdom and some adjacent areas
as its semi-periphery (sometimes struggling to move to the core),
whereas the incense-producing areas of the SW Highlands, Dhofar
and East Africa (as well as some areas of the Central and North
Arabia) could be regarded as its periphery.
Incidentally, this observation resembles very much what
Bruce R. McFarling" <ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au> wrote
on Fri, 31 May 1996 17:39:
> one could well see a fractal pattern, where 'the core'
> and 'the peripheral area', at a more global scale, turn out to be
> composed of their own cores and peripheries when you look at more
> local scale.
Andrey Korotayev, Senior Research Fellow
Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences
12 Rozhdestvenka, Moscow 103753, Russia
ANDREI@RSUH.RU