On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, james m blaut wrote:
> TO: INTERNET:ROZOVnit.nsu.ru,INTERNET:ROZOVnit.nsu.ru
>
> Dear Nikolai:
> The Papal Bull in question was issued in 1493, as a consequence of the
> discoveries by Portuguese and Spaniards. Before 1492 there was no "project
> of world invasion."
And after 1492 it is important to recall that the American
conquistas were extremely entrepeneurial affairs, following a pattern
established in the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula. And important to
recall that the greater impact of the conquistas compared to the
reconquista was as much due to epidemiological factors as to
military-technological factors. The Spanish and Portuguese sovereigns
didn't spend a *whole* lot of money on reconquista or the conquistas,
rather they expected to generate income from granting royal recognition to
the activity.
> Intensive geographical studies in the late Middle Ages -- yes; exploration
> of the western Atlantic islands and finding out what the Arabs already
> knew -- not a great design for world conquest. Geographical societies date
> mainly from the 19th century.
And it is important to recall the persistant trend of
semi-peripheral "marcher" states conquering cores -- for the very reason
that they *were* semi-peripheral, and the core was more important to them
than they were to the core.
European expansion fits into this pattern as a two step process.
First, the normal peripheral ventures to improve access to the core
leading to the incursions into the New world and development into
semi-peripheral status -- the so-called "first period of European
dominance", which involved dominance over even less central areas as they
were being incorporated into the Western regional-system. Second, on the
basis of the newly gained semi-peripheral status, the development into the
European maritime marcher states and the conquest of Indic
regional-system, leading to a shift of the balance of power in the
world-system from the Eastern regional-system to the Western
regional-system.
> I'm afraid you have contracted the occupational disease of world-systems
> theorists: ignoring time and space in order to find parallels among Large
> Things. In fact: a very acute form of the disease: ignoring the fact that
> culture change is evolutionary, not random.
"Systems of Cities and World-Systems" by Christopher Chase-Dunn
and Alice Willard (Program in Comparative and International Development,
Dept. of Sociology, John Hopkins University) is very strong here. It
seems to me to make a start toward going from the system identification
question ("there are correlations between the Western and Eastern
regional-systems") to accounting for the correlation. That is (persisting
with this terminology that the paper has prompted me to coin), within the
Central world-system in the Axial Age can be perceived four
regional-systems. There is one at the Eastern end, sometimes called
Chinese, called "Far Eastern" in the (eurocentric) terminology of this
working paper, which I have been calling the "Eastern Regional-system"
here. There is one at the Western end, sometimes called the "central
world-system" following the model of the more peripheral world system
incorporating the more central world system, which I have been calling the
"Western Regional-system". There is one centered on the Indian
subcontinent which may be called the "Indic regional-system". And there
is a regional system in Central Asia (pastoral rather than agrarian) that
might be called the "Central Asian regional-system". To the extent that
either of the central regional-system are coherent as spheres of
politico-military activity, it is plausible that the state of the central
regional systems affected both the Western and Eastern regional systems,
and that the impacts of either the Western or Eastern regional systems on
the central regional systems had repercussions for the other. And the
working paper makes a start toward supporting a picture such as this.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au