Jim Blaut reminds me not to forget the SouthWest regional-system
in Sub-saharan Africa. Which seems to me to simply emphasize the degree
to which the "central" tag is a bit of a misnomer: the regional system
with the best argument to being "central" in the Axial Age would seem to
be the Indic regional-system.
BTW, the hyphen is on purpose: I've got a sneaking suspicion
(working hypothesis seems to be a bit strong right yet) that world-systems
as identified on the direct and indirect interaction test will normally be
bigger than a single coherent zone of politico-military activity, and the
latter seems like it should have a term of its own to forestall the
tendency to "shrink" a world-system to a coherent zone of
political-military activity.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au